Beatrix looked at the pictures: she was smiling, but it was to her daughter that her eye was drawn. Isabella had her arm around Beatrix’s waist and her head was angled slightly against her mother’s shoulder, her smile big and natural, easy. There was love in her eyes.

Beatrix felt her determination, freshly reinforced, waver yet again.

She touched the photographs, folded the strip nearly down the middle and slipped it into her pocket.

She steeled herself.

These were hard choices.

There was no right and no wrong.

It had to be done.

Chapter Seven

She had two appointments that afternoon. The first was with Johnny, the tattoo artist she had used for the two roses that had adorned the skin of her left arm. He was waiting for her in the salon not too far from the Jemma el Fnaa square.

“You ready for the next one?” he asked as she climbed the steps down into the basement.

“I am.”

She took off her shirt and flexed her arm so that she could see the work that he had already done.

The first rose was for Oliver Spenser.

The second was for Joshua Joyce.

They had both been in her house when, nearly ten years ago, her husband Lucas had been shot and Isabella had been stolen away from her. The eight black ink bars that she had tattooed down her ribcage on the left-hand side of her chest recorded the years that she had been separated from her daughter.

The roses were beautiful: blood-red petals and twisting stems that prickled with thorns. She had explained to Johnny what she’d wanted done, and he had come up with a design that matched her intentions perfectly.

She said she wanted a design that would accommodate six roses. There would be blooms on her shoulder, on her bicep, others on the inside and outside of her wrist. When she was done, there would be a whole sleeve of them.

Halfway there.

Lydia Chisholm would be the third.

Bryan Duffy would be the fourth.

Johnny swabbed her arm and inspected the two roses that were already there. “These have healed nicely,” he said. “Look good, too. You pleased with them?”

“Very pleased,” she said.

She sat down on the couch as he finished sterilising her skin. He sat on his chair and kicked away from her, rolling on its castors across the room to his laptop. He pressed play, and “The Ecstasy of Gold” by Ennio Morricone started to play out through the speakers.

“You like Westerns?” he asked her.

“I’m not much into films.”

“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Fucking brilliant, man. Tell me you’ve seen it?”

“Never have.”

“You gotta.”

She closed her eyes as the music faded out to be replaced by the brutal riffs of Metallica’s “Creeping Death.”

Johnny Ink fired up his tattoo guns and went to work.

The second appointment was with her doctor. Abdeslam Lévy had his surgery in the exclusive Palmeraie district of the city. One of the benefits of paying his eye-wateringly high fees was the ability to see him on short notice. She sat in the waiting room and stared blankly at the abstract art on the wood-panelled walls. The morning with Isabella had been wonderful, but now that she had dropped the girl back in the medina, the pain had crept back into her bones.