In the end, right in the middle of one of the old woman’s endless weird crooning speeches, Mina had known she was about to pass out, or be sick. Star showed her through to a bathroom in an irritable way, and she could sense that whatever the old woman was telling him was making him angry.

“Stupid fucking old bitch,” he said when they were back in the air, back in the street. “She doesn’t know if it’s tomorrow or last week. She’s fucking up my timing. Now I’ll have to drag all the way over here tomorrow.”

“Why, Star?” she asked before she could stop herself, but for once he answered.

“Because I was supposed to meet someone there,” he said. “A friend. She should have been there, and she wasn’t, because that fucking old bitch can’t tell Monday from Tuesday. Never mind. I have time.” He stopped. “You see that pharmacy there? Go in and get the hair dye. Here…” He pressed some money into her palm. “Hurry up. I can’t do it. A man buying hair dye, they’d remember that. You do it. Hurry up.”

Mina took the money. She wondered if there might be a telephone in there, but of course there was not. She found the package of dye and paid for it. She wondered if the friend Star was supposed to have been meeting was that woman she’d seen at the airport, the one he’d said was Maria Cazarès. When she’d been coming back from the bathroom in the old woman’s apartment, she’d seen into a bedroom, a bedroom like a shrine, with a big bed with a pink silk eiderdown and photographs of Maria Cazarès everywhere, hundreds of them, on tables, on chests, on the walls. Except no, she thought now: Maria Cazarès wasn’t Star’s friend, she was his enemy, he had said.

She was getting cold now. Star had been gone more than five minutes. She edged out of the doorway and crossed the narrow street, ready to dart back if need be. Smells of food grilling assaulted her, and she pressed closer to a restaurant window, realizing how hungry she was. Star never seemed to want to eat. It was hours since they had eaten. In a mirror to the side of the restaurant doors, she suddenly saw a girl, very close; the girl startled her and then she realized the girl was herself. She stared at her reflection. With a glance over her shoulder she eased back her blue scarf and then grimaced. Tears came to her eyes: Star had cut her hair himself. Then she had applied the dye. He’d let her look at herself in a hand mirror, just very quickly, when it was dry, and he had seemed so pleased, he’d kept saying how pretty she looked.

She didn’t look pretty, Mina thought. She looked ugly. The dye had not taken well, so her hair was now a crude rusty black. It stuck out in jagged tufts all around her face. She looked like a refugee, an outcast… She shrank away from the glass and darted back across the street. She replaced the scarf and tied it tight. What if she’d been seen? They’d been seen this afternoon, a few minutes after leaving that old woman’s house. Not by a policier—Star never walked near uniformed police, but cut away the second he spotted them. No, they had been seen by a man in an ordinary suit, in an ordinary unmarked Citroën. He stopped, picked up a mobile telephone, started speaking, then got out.