Martigny studied these two reporters who, according to his British colleague, had been helpful to the British police. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week; the woman had a bruise down the side of her face that suggested she’d been recently hit. There was a tension between them that might have been professional, or emotional, or sexual.

Martigny shrugged such considerations aside. Chantal spoke fluent English and French, he went on; they could try questioning her in either language, and he was prepared to allow them twenty minutes. Time made no difference: if he gave them all day, they would not persuade this woman to talk.

He left them there; the woman officer remained by the door as the interview began. Rowland and Gini faced Chantal across a narrow table scarred with cigarette burns. She sat opposite them, chain-smoking, biting her nails, averting her gaze, yawning, tapping the tabletop with her thin fingers and occasionally darting in their direction small brown glances of derision and hate.

The scar on her face was one of the ugliest Gini had ever seen. It ran from the outer corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. It had healed badly, into a long curving cicatrix that had left the skin puckered and inflamed. It gave her a deeply disconcerting quality, as if two women, not one, faced them across the table. Once pretty, and still pretty when she turned her face aside, she seemed to accept this inflicted ugliness with defiance. Whenever she answered one of Rowland’s questions—he was speaking to her quietly, in excellent French—she turned her scarred side toward him, Gini noted. Her mounting nervousness and impatience were very apparent; Gini wondered if she needed a fix.

Gini felt very calm, curiously so, as if marooned on a flat sea, beyond the breath of any emotion at all. This had the effect of heightening her surroundings, so she saw the girl, and her reactions, with an intense precision. She felt that if she could just continue to do so, she need not remember or think about anything else.

Her silence—she had not spoken once since they entered—seemed to be irritating Chantal. At first the girl had ignored her, fixing her eyes on Rowland’s handsome face, and answering him rudely, but also boldly. Perhaps this was the way she addressed her johns, Gini thought, this odd mixture of flirtation and contempt. She seemed eager to place Rowland in the same category as the rest of the male sex—an importuner who might require only answers now, but who, given the chance, would make a more basic, and sexual request.

All of Rowland’s patient questions were being blocked. Chantal’s eyes flicked in Gini’s direction again. She yawned, lit another cigarette, then interrupted him suddenly, in English.

“So why’s she here?” She gestured at Gini. “She have a voice, or what?”

“We work together. I did explain,” Rowland replied in a level voice. The girl’s accent, speaking English, betrayed her hybrid origins: it was not Canadian, not American, or British or European, but somewhere between all four. Gini saw Rowland register this.