He couldn’t get his head around the Cross being in his bag at all. How had it got there? He remembered getting the medals out one morning, just to feel what it was like to hold them; but he could have sworn – would have sworn, if he’d been asked to, in a court of law – that he’d put them all back. Could it be that it had been Georgie who’d been asked to pack his things, and that she’d slipped the medal into the bottom of the duffel bag, knowing it would give him a reason to return? Or Cass: might she have done it? And yet Nick had given him the impression that the girls hadn’t known he was being sent away. It had still been fairly early in the morning when Nick came to collect him from the hospital and take him to the station: surely the girls would still have been sleeping, exhausted by the ordeal? He couldn’t recall what Nick had told him on the way to the station. It had all been such a shock. Nor could he imagine either Nick or Celia deliberately inserting the Cross into his bag – why would they do that? Which left the possibility that he had not, in fact, put the medal back, but had somehow forgotten it, left it on the bedroom chair with his clothes. And that whoever had packed his bag had simply caught it up, unseen, with his T-shirts and socks. It didn’t weigh much and it didn’t glint in the light or anything. It could’ve been bundled into a piece of clothing without anyone noticing it was there.

Stephen didn’t feel too good. He felt light-headed and kind of disembodied: floaty, but not in a pleasant way. The sense of dread had come back. He was hoping that spending time with another person might jolt him out of it. This guy Glen from the hostel didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, but then he barely knew him. He chatted as the Tube carried them from Earls Court to Embankment. Glen’d been to Italy, Rome and Florence, looking at the art. What they had in these European museums, it was mind-blowing. A girl carved out of marble who was turning into a tree, right there in front of your eyes, as if it was a special effect in a film. Women looking straight at you, holding on to their own nipples; or coming up out of the sea in a huge shell. He’d seen one painting of a woman getting raped by a sodding great bull. Glen didn’t know the stories behind them, but the images were amazing, violent and sexy and strange. You didn’t get a lot of that sort of thing back home in Brisbane.

‘Where you from, mate? Melbourne, is it?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Stephen.

‘Caught a lot of the museums here?’