“When did you hear about Maria Cazarès?”

“For certain? About five minutes after we spoke. I first heard the rumor about an hour before from a journalist friend here. He phoned back to confirm just after I hung up on you. Confirmation came through on the wires about five minutes after that.”

“So you’d heard a rumor she might be dead before we spoke?”

“Yes. I had. Plus I’d had two very difficult conversations with my source in Amsterdam. That was the timing. It isn’t an excuse.”

There was a silence. Gini could sense an emotion that was at variance with the calm precision of his speech. She hesitated.

“What made you want to apologize?”

“I realized how badly I’d behaved.”

He paused, his face suddenly troubled. Gini, who had known the instant she asked the question that it would have been safer unvoiced, prayed he would not answer it more fully. She was about to interrupt him, when he spoke.

“I want you to know,” he went on in a deliberate way, “I am ashamed of what I said. Not only because I was wrong—on two counts. Also, because I lost my temper and I said things there’s no reason you should forgive.” He hesitated, and she could sense his struggle. “Despite what people say about me, I very rarely lose control to that degree. I now see, of course, why I did.”

Gini admired him then. His gaze did not waver as he made this admission—and no woman could have misunderstood what he meant. His meaning was absolutely clear in his expression and tone. It might be an understated declaration, but a declaration it was. It was characteristic of him, she suspected, to phrase it in such a way, so she could ignore this revelation, or, with equal directness to his, respond.

She stared at him, unable to break his gaze. She knew that if he spoke again, if he tried to make his statement more explicit, she would be free. She could walk past him then, go out that door. She waited; he did not speak—but the silence in the room did.

She could feel the danger acutely now, the threat of the next, the threat of the unforeseen, the possibility just around the corner of her as-yet-unmade response. She could feel time picking up speed. The second or two it took her to make her reply was freight-train fast, freight-train loud. She had a brief and confused sensation that she, and he, were passengers here. One wrong word, one wrong gesture, and they’d both be getting on a train there was no getting off.

“It wasn’t true, what you said,” she said. “About the Antica. About Pascal…”

And she thought, for an instant, she was safe. She had bypassed his declaration, and she saw his mouth tighten as he registered that. She had used Pascal’s name, which should, under these circumstances, have made her entirely secure; instead, the use of his name had a very opposite effect. Rather than carrying a charmed strength, it was suddenly weak: with it came a tide of uncertainties and unhappiness, all those months of loneliness and misery, of waking alone, and sleeping alone, and walking alone through London streets. It was no protection at all from this acute and unexpected sexual awareness, an awareness that sent a charge through every nerve in her body so she could scarcely think for a need to be touched.