“Did Max even know?” Markov cried on a rhetorical note. “Did Charlotte know? My impression is not. Lindsay’s secretive. She doesn’t open her heart to many people. Virtually no one in fact.”

“—And then, Lindsay herself gave me a rather different impression. This would have been back in January. She very kindly cooked dinner for me then, at my house. And I could have sworn she mentioned—”

“Other men?” Markov cut in fast. “A succession of other men? Oh, she does that. It’s a cover-up, of course. I can’t believe that took you in. You can’t be that slow, surely?”

“Maybe it’s that insensitivity of mine,” McGuire said politely with a half-smile. “It blinded me, I suppose. How stupid of me. Well, well, well.”

He followed Markov into the garden. Markov decided silence was now the best response. He was sweating with the effort of those fast final lies, and something in McGuire’s tone confused him. The man’s self-possession faintly irritated him, and also faintly alarmed him.

“Look,” he said as they approached the house. “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut? Maybe this is a bad idea of mine. But I mean, how many single men are there to ask…”

“Very few. We’re a vanishing breed.”

“I can’t ask Max. He hasn’t the time. He’s got a wife. Kids. It had to be someone Lindsay knows, and trusts.”

“Not at all.” McGuire laid one large strong hand briefly on Markov’s shoulder. He gave him a warm smile. “It will be an honor to be your understudy.”

“You won’t say anything to Lindsay? I mean, if she knew I’d spoken to you, she’d have cardiac arrest…”

“You can rely on me,” Rowland replied. “I shall perform my role to the very best of my abilities. Until you come back, that is.”

Markov sighed. This, of course, was not the scenario he intended. But there was nothing more he could do. From now on it was up to Lindsay. Allowing Rowland to precede him into the house, Markov looked up at the brilliant sky and the whirling blossoms. His lips moved. He could on occasion be superstitious, even pagan: since it was now in their laps, he was offering up a little prayer to the gods.

Pascal had been dreaming about loss. These dreams had first begun in the early years, when he first covered wars. They had recurred, in various forms, ever since. Sometimes the dreams were replays of actual events he had witnessed but thought forgotten. He would see a tiny child crouched over the dead body of a parent, or a mother prostrate over the grave of her soldier son, and waking, he would recall the exact place where he had witnessed that incident—in Mozambique, or Bosnia, or Afghanistan. His unconscious mind had selected one random image out of millions, and he would think, on waking—why that particular grief?

At other times, and this made him more uneasy, the dream of searching and losing was a vague, shadowy thing. It would lead him through some remembered war zone, into the streets near his home; frantic, he would be searching for his daughter one moment, for Gini the next, and sometimes for a phantom presence that he would suspect, on waking, was himself. The search was always accompanied by acute anxiety and mounting fear. He woke, always, startled, dry-mouthed, and drenched in sweat.