She said feverishly, ‘I did go back. I told Paddy I felt better, I . . .’

‘All in the space of five minutes? Or ten at the most? You were quickly ill and well, Leilie. Shall I tell you why you went back, shall I tell you the only circumstances in which you’d have dared go back? You didn’t want to lose your job but you were more afraid of what Paddy might do to the baby. If Paddy had been there the one thing you wouldn’t have done is go back. Because he wasn’t there you went back with a light heart. You believed he could only get in again when you were there to let him in. You didn’t know then that he had a key, the key he had taken from Julie Lang.’

She spoke at last the word he had been waiting for. ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, it’s true. If I’d known he had that key,’ she said, and she shivered, ‘I’d no more have gone and left that baby there than I’d have left it in the lion house at the zoo.’

‘We’ll be on our way,’ he said. ‘Come along, Constable Davies. See you in the morning, Leilie.’

Still holding Matthew, she came up to him just as he reached the door and laid a hand on his sleeve. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, Mr Wexford,’ she said, ‘and I don’t think I’d be able to pull anybody’s baby, any baby, out of that circle.’

Achilles Heel

THE WALLS OF the city afforded on one side a view of the blue Adriatic, on the other, massed roofs, tiled in weathered terracotta, and cataracts of stone streets descending to the cathedral and the Stradun Placa. It was very hot on the walls, the sun hard and the air dry and clear. Among the red-brown roofs and the complexities of ramparts and stairs, different colours shimmered, the purple of the bougainvillaea, the sky blue of the plumbago, and the flame flash of the orange trumpet flower.

‘Lovely,’ said Dora Wexford. ‘Breathtaking. Aren’t you glad now I made you come up here?’

‘It’s all right for you dark-skinned people,’ grumbled her husband. ‘My nose is beginning to feel like a fried egg.’

‘We’ll go down at the next lot of steps and you can administer some more sun cream over a glass of beer.’

It was noon, the date Saturday, i8 June. The full heat of the day had kept the Yugoslavs, but not the tourists, off the walls. Germans went by with cameras or stood murmuring, ‘Wunderschön!’ Vivacious Italians chattered, unaffected by the midsummer sun. But some of the snatches of talk which reached Wexford were in languages not only incomprehensible but unidentifiable. It was a surprise to hear English spoken.

‘Don’t keep on about it, Iris!’

At first they couldn’t see the speaker. But now, as they came out of the narrow defile and emerged on to one of the broad jutting courts made by a buttress top, they came face to face with the Englishman. A tall, fair young man, he was standing in the furthest angle of the court, and with him was a dark-haired girl. Her back was to the Wexfords. She was staring out to sea. From her clothes, she looked as if she would have been more at home in the South of France than on the walls of Dubrovnik. She wore a jade-green halter top that left her deeply tanned midriff bare, and a calf-length silk skirt in green and blue with parabolas on it of flamingo pink. Her sandals were pink, the strings criss-crossed up her legs, the wedge heels high. But perhaps the most striking thing about her was her hair. Raven black and very short, it was cut at the nape in three sharp Vs.