He went out into the smoky light – the sun was burning strongly through the mist now, the glare of it dazzling his eyes – and made for the taxi rank. There was no queue, which was just as well, since there was only one taxi. The driver sat with his arms folded, his head lolling on the back of the seat and his mouth open, asleep. Terry rapped a knuckle on the window, and the fellow woke up with a start, you’d think someone had fired off a pistol beside his ear. He scrambled out, grinning, and took Terry’s case and put it in the back seat and got back behind the wheel.

‘Okay, meester,’ he said, ‘where you want to go?’

It didn’t take Terry long to make him understand that he needed somewhere to stay.

‘Sure, meester, sure. I find you, no problem.’

They drove through the city in a suspiciously roundabout route – Terry guessed the driver was going in circles, to up the fare, but he hadn’t the energy to protest – and at last came to a shrieking stop in a narrow back street. There was a lot of noise, with people shouting and cars honking, and music from a wireless set or a gramophone blaring out of an open window somewhere above. Laundry was draped on first-floor balconies. On one of them a toddler in a dirty vest put his head over the metal rail and grinned down at him.

The hotel, so-called, was tall and narrow, driven like a wedge into the space between its neighbours on either side. In a dim and smelly hallway, a fat fellow with a scar sat on a very low chair behind a sort of counter. He needed a shave, and a big clump of glittery black chest hair stuck out of the vee at the unbuttoned top of his shirt. There were big round sweat stains under his armpits. He named a sum in Spanish money, had Terry sign his name in a ledger, handed over a key and a tiny, folded hand towel, and went back to the newspaper he had been reading.

Terry climbed the steep stairway, his suitcase bumping against his knees. When he got to the first landing a door opened and a couple appeared, a woman in her shift, and a fellow in a tight suit who turned his face away and sidled off down the stairs, while the woman leaned in the doorway, grinning after him. As Terry went past, she gave him the eye.

Later he told himself what a chump he was not to have realised straight off that it wasn’t a hotel he had checked himself in to, but a knocking shop. How Percy would have laughed! But Percy wouldn’t be doing any more laughing.