Today the street was even noisier than it had been last evening. Everybody seemed to be outside. They never stopped, these people, swarming all over the place and jabbering at each other like parakeets. Moving among them, he felt he was being swept down a fast-flowing river between sheer, high cliffs.

Suddenly, to his relief, he came out at the river. His street map told him it was called the Urumea, unless that was just the Spanish or Basque word for river. It meandered all over the place, up and down and around, like the city’s gut.

He had to walk for a long time before he found a taxi rank. He showed the driver a crumpled betting slip on the back of which he had written down the name of the hospital in block letters. The taxi shot off from the kerb so suddenly that he was thrown right back against the seat. He swore. The driver must have understood the word, for he looked at him merrily in the driving mirror and laughed.

The hospital was on the side of a low hill. It had a black roof made in a series of domes, and terracotta walls, and, on the front wall, white pillars and white balconies. He walked up and down outside the gate for a while. He had thought he’d surely find a bar somewhere around here, but there didn’t seem to be any. There was a hotel, higher up the road, but it looked too posh. Places like that made him nervous.

He had no plan. He didn’t go in for plans. He was superstitious that way. Things always worked themselves out, somehow, or maybe it was that he had a golden touch. Yet he knew enough to know there was no luck, that it was just a word. If you believed in luck you would have to believe in all the things Pinkie believed in, God and the Virgin Mary and the saints and Hell and damnation and the rest of it. No, there was no such thing as luck, no coincidences, no golden touch, only willpower and determination. And you had to keep cool. Always you had to keep a cool head, and not get fussed. He had got fussed that night on the dockside with Percy, and look what had happened.

At a bend in a slope of the road he spied an old-fashioned wrought-iron bench, and sat down. The heat was making him tired. From here he had a clear view of the hospital gate. He didn’t really expect her to come walking out, just like that. And even if she did appear, he probably wouldn’t know it was her, at this distance.