That day was one of many firsts for me. I had been in a motor before, but never one so luxurious or fine. I had been close to wealthy patrons at the inn, but never this close: had never rested my head on legs covered with silk, never smelled perfume that didn’t reek or cloy, but soothed, like the gloved hand that stroked my forehead. I had never wanted so badly to disappear, or to plunge myself into a bath and emerge gleaming new, to match those people.

But there are some things that soap cannot wash away. I could scrub and scrub and still I would be different. Beneath my skin was the past, my bad blood: the inn, the Señor and the threat of the garrotte if I was caught. They – bright creatures – knew none of that. Scorn rose in me to war with admiration, mistrust of those gloved hands and amused faces. I had grown up watching their kind; I knew how their interest could disappear in a finger-snap. I had seen them drop people back into the dirt and drive away, leaving all the damage behind them. That’s what I would be to them, I thought as we drove, a temporary diversion, nothing more. In which case, I had to be smart. I had to get what I could.

Even so, it was all I could do to keep up my pretended groans as we entered the streets of Gibraltar. A different world to La Atunara, just across the border. Here were motorcars and gleaming shop fronts, fussily dressed matrons next to sailors and soldiers and beyond them all boats – so many boats, jostling white on the sea like gulls.

The hotel they took me to was set high on the rock, above the tangle of narrow streets. The Grand, it was called. I had never set foot anywhere like The Grand.

Where the inn was straw and stone and old wood tough as iron, The Grand was marble and white gravel and shining polish. I did not belong there, in my grimy suit. Even the doormen, who were paid not to notice, looked at me as if I were a bird dropping on a scrubbed step.

But the lady was helping me out of the car; she was insisting I put my arm about her shoulder. The man was calling for a chair. One was brought, a wicker thing on wheels, and I was taken through a lobby that smelled of flowers into an elevator – another first for me – and from there along a corridor with a patterned wooden floor, into a room.