She knew what the problem was: it was herself. She could not stop shaking or crying. The man called Rowland was kind: she could see he was trying to calm her and trying to understand, but all the information she had to give him was tangled up in her head.

The manager man seemed less angry now and sent for some water. The Englishman helped her into a chair and took her hand in his.

“Sip the water slowly,” he said. “Take your time, Mina…”

“There is no time—” She sprang to her feet. “We have to be quick. It’s today. It’s this morning. He has the gun, and the ammunition. Look, look…”

That was the moment, she thought later, when the Englishman began to understand; when she pulled out the gun catalogue which she had taken when Star was washing the previous night.

She pulled it out, unrolled it, flourished it in his face. Her hands were trembling and her voice was unsteady, but he was beginning to understand: she watched the realization dawn in his eyes:

“This is what he’s going to use…” She stabbed her fingers at the picture of a gun. “He’ll wait—until this Lazare man takes his bow—that’s what he said. Then he’s—He won’t really do it, I’m sure he won’t. It’s just that he’s sick. He says he’ll move down the aisle from the back, and—He doesn’t hate them, Maria and Jean Lazare. He says he does, but he wept when she died. It was the night she died that he bought this…”

Rowland looked down at the gun she was indicating to him. Seconds slipped by as he reshaped the confusion of her sentences, and the details of Star’s scenario finally slipped into place. The Cazarès collection was due to begin in under half an hour. The gun concerned was a black Beretta 93R, firing fifteen 9mm rounds per magazine. The ammunition to which she was pointing was a blue GECO hollow bullet. It contained a plastic core, which displaced when fired, so that as the bullet hit its target, it commenced a tumbling trajectory specifically designed to cause maximum tissue damage. With this ammunition, even a poor marksman could effect certain death.

“Mina,” he said quietly. “These gun magazines. How many of them did Star buy? Just one—or more than that?”

“Five.” She did not understand the importance of the question, Rowland could see. Her answer was little more than a whisper. “Five. He showed me how they slot in the handle. He laid them out for me, all five of them on the bed.”

Rowland turned to look at the assistant manager. His face was now ashen. His eyes flicked to the clock on the wall: its second hand ticked. Less than half an hour, Rowland thought; an auditorium filled with the rich and famous, with television cameras, with the assembled world press. Star: why had he not understood the implications of that chosen name?

Reaching in his pocket, pulling out a card, he thought: an automatic weapon, five magazines each containing fifteen rounds, seventy-five bullets in total… He had a brief grim vision of possible carnage. He pressed the card into the manager’s trembling hands.