‘Sending a detective to Spain.’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him that – the detective.’

Of course, Paul was right – it was mad, all of it, she did see that. Yet she would not give in.

Paul ate the last square of ham, pushed his plate aside, wiped his mouth on a paper napkin, and lit a cigarette.

‘This detective,’ he said, ‘who is he?’

‘His name is Strafford.’

‘What age is he?’

She shrugged.

‘Ancient. Thin as a rake, in a three-piece tweed suit. Oh, and he wears a fob watch.’

‘What? What is this, a fob watch?’

‘You know, on a chain.’ She traced a loop across her midriff. ‘And he’s a Protestant, I think. He has that accent.’

Still he fixed her with his mesmerist’s unblinking stare.

‘And when will he travel to Spain?’

‘Same day as me.’

‘What? And on the same flight?’

‘I imagine so.’

She rose from the table and gathered up their plates and turned with them to the sink.

‘I really do not like the sound of any of this,’ Paul said.

‘It’s just for a few days,’ she answered, annoyed at herself for seeming to apologise. What had she to apologise for?

She turned on the hot tap. Despite herself, she was excited. It was as if she had suddenly come smack up against a large, intricate and perilously delicate object, something like a grandfather clock, or that thing people keep on the wall that predicts the weather, which the slightest move on her part would bring crashing down in a glorious jangle of springs and broken sprockets and splintering glass.

‘Let me understand this correctly,’ Paul said behind her, in that ominously calm tone he adopted when he was trying not to be angry. ‘You and this Stafford—’

‘Strafford. With an “r”.’

‘—you and this person are flying off to Spain together, you to identify a woman who may or may not be your dead friend, while he is to investigate what, exactly?’

She bit her lip. She was in the grip of a kind of mad hilarity. She must not laugh, really she mustn’t – and what was there to laugh at, anyway? – for if she did, everything, somehow, really would fall asunder, beyond fixing.

‘I don’t know what he’s going to investigate, exactly,’ she said.

She turned to face him, bracing her hands on the edge of the sink behind her. He expelled a stream of cigarette smoke and smiled thinly.

‘Perhaps you can be his assistant,’ he said, ‘his – what do you call that character? – his Doctor Watson.’

‘Very humorous.’

A wrinkle developed above his left eyebrow. She could see that humour was the last thing he had intended. Paul doled out his jokes like banknotes.

‘Perhaps I should go also,’ he said. ‘To Spain, that is. I have some leave that I haven’t taken.’