She turned and began walking quickly away. At the corner she looked back once. Gini was now standing with her back against the wall, her head bent. Rowland was directly in front of her, his arms either side of her body, his palms pressed against the wall. He was speaking with force.

As Lindsay looked back, he stopped speaking, and Gini slowly raised her head to meet his eyes. Lindsay did not wish to be a spy, or to see any more. She turned the corner, fought her way through the crowd still spilling out from Cazarès, passed for a second time through that babel of tongues, and made her escape fast. She knew what her next task was: she had to eradicate this pain, an actual pain as discernible as a headache, that seemed to have lodged itself around her heart.

How long was it since Lindsay had left them, Gini thought, ten minutes, fifteen? It could have been longer. It could have been much less. Time was refusing to obey its ordinary rules. She turned back to look at Rowland, who was now standing beside her, his face averted, his back against the wall.

He was breathing fast, as if he had been running. She could sense his anger and his agitation in the air.

“I just want to work, Rowland,” she said, turning to him and touching his hand. “Please. I may not be capable of anything else—but I am capable of that. I just want to fix my mind on this story. I want to pull the pieces together, and I want to find Mina, above all. You agreed, Rowland, you agreed that we could do that—”

“I know.”

He hesitated, then turned to look at her. Her pale face was upturned to his; he could not bear to look at the bruise. Her lovely eyes were wide with an expression of entreaty. When she looked at him in this way, Rowland felt he could refuse her nothing; he wondered if she realized that. He felt he must be utterly transparent to her: she must know.

“Please, Rowland,” she went on. “I can’t talk to you about this. It wouldn’t be right. You don’t need to be involved. I have to deal with it, come to terms with it in my time and my way. I don’t think I even could talk about it. Too much has happened too fast. So—I just want to fix on something relatively simple, relatively clear. A series of steps: this interview, then that one. Please help me do that, Rowland. I ought to be able to do it on my own—but I can’t. Not today. Not now.”

Rowland would have said she was a woman who would never admit weakness; he was immeasurably touched by that confession of weakness now. At that moment he wanted nothing so much as to take her in his arms, but he could see that would be wrong, possibly unfair—and that she was trying to tell him this indirectly.