‘They’ll be in bed, I hope.’ She pulled the blanket around her shoulders with her free hand. ‘But they’ll be able to hear Paris outside – the cars, the pigeons on the rooftops. The music from the clubs.’ She hummed a line from Imagination, quietly.

I tilted my face upwards. ‘Funny to think that we’re all under the same sky,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t feel as if they’re too far away.’

‘The world’s getting smaller all the time,’ she said, knocking back her wine. ‘Some day we’ll be able to get from London to Nairobi in one afternoon.’

‘Probably.’

She dropped my hand and started walking back towards the terrace. ‘Then how will we pretend we’re all so different?’

I started to follow her before I saw Noel at the window of her bedroom, beckoning to me.

‘I’ll be in in a minute,’ I called. Sylvie lifted her arm in a wave without looking back.

I waited until she’d gone in before crossing the lawn to Noel. She opened her window a fraction.

‘Can she hear us?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘I have to show you something.’ She turned away from the window and rummaged around in the drawers of her dressing table. When she turned back her face had lost its colour underneath the sunburn.

‘I found it under her pillow,’ she said.

I looked down at the shiny black object in her hand.

‘When?’

‘The other day, when I was making up her bed. I don’t know if she’s noticed it’s gone.’

The two of us peered down at it.

‘It looks so small,’ she said, then cleared her throat gently. ‘Should I put it back?’

‘No.’ I knew it could be for burglars, or leopards, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her sitting in her hospital bed, promising me she’d taken too many pills by accident. ‘I’ll keep it safe.’

Noel held out the gun and I wrapped it in my handkerchief. ‘No one else knows?’

‘No.’

I bit my lip. I hated the thought that she was suffering enough to—

‘Well.’ Noel looked around. ‘I feel better with it out of here.’

‘Me too,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘See you soon.’

‘You too.’ She closed her window and pulled her curtains shut.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I was woken by a gentle tapping on the door. I fumbled for the cord on the bedside lamp and snapped it on. The small golden pool lit up the contents of the bedside table: a half-drunk glass of water, a blunt pencil, an unread book of poetry and my alarm clock, showing three in the morning. The rest of the room was a fuzzy black.

The tapping came again. I threw off my sheet and hurried to the door. One of the porters was waiting outside with a letter on a silver tray.

‘For Bwana,’ he said.