‘Yes. Then I can get onto my Facebook, because Facebook is chewing up the battery so fast my phone is basically a corpse now, it’s on life-support, but if I log in on yours, I can start hitting up his sister and his networks and things. I can work out who might know where he is and help.’

Emil blinked. He’d taken in enough of this to understand it, and it was hard to deny the logic. All the same, the actual act of taking his own phone out and passing it to this girl – who he hardly knew – was a vulnerable one; much more vulnerable than it had felt simply to let her call someone on it. There were things there which it would be best if she didn’t see. Which would not strengthen his case. Still. She wasn’t going to be rooting around in there, was she? She was hell-bent on finding Mr Suicidal – sexily hell-bent on it, he had to admit, but also inconveniently so. Fine. Maybe if he went into Facebook, she wouldn’t be looking around the rest of the stuff. He got his phone out of his pocket, opened the pale blue Facebook icon, signed himself out and put the phone on the table in front of her.

‘Passcode is 2510,’ he said, ‘it’s day of the Basque Country.’

‘Thank you,’ said Steffi, ‘and yes, another beer please, and I will pay you back when this is over, when we find him.’

When this is over and when we find him were not quite the same two ideas, Steffi admitted to herself, feeling once more the strangeness of another person’s phone. Of this object that had been, maybe, all round the world with him. It was almost as intimate as holding someone’s hand. She forced her brain back on to James. It was possible this was all too late. That somebody had found him, and it was bad news. But surely, they would know. The internet would be saying something about it. No, this was still at stake. And it didn’t matter how late it was, even though she would keep hinting at it to discourage Emil from getting ideas. The fact was, she quite obviously couldn’t go to sleep while all this was going on. And that thought was cheering in its own right. No point in going to sleep. Insomnia couldn’t touch her while she was handling this crisis. The night seemed so thick when you were trapped in it, but being up and busy reminded you of how brittle it was. Soon, there would be no night left.