‘Drop your weapon!’ she hissed, and there was such danger in her voice that I immediately leaned down and placed my pistol on the floor, then kicked it towards her.

She picked it up and pocketed it, then backed away from me to the window. Thin bars of sunlight glowed through the shutters but much of the room was in darkness and it took my eyes a moment to decipher some of the objects. A mop and bucket leaned against one corner, a duffel bag on the floor nearby. On the window sill, a tripod had been mounted. It wasn’t until she started placing the rifle onto this that I got a good look at her.

She had changed. There was still the dark soulfulness in her eyes, the wide jaw, the wave of hair swept back. But the mouth that had been full and sensual was now thin and hard, and her skin was also somehow different: still bronzed, but now a little leathery. Perhaps Pritchard hadn’t been lying about her having lived in Tunisia. She turned to look at me then, and it was almost as if her skin tautened under my gaze, until, like the surface of a painting being scratched away, the ghost portrait that had been hiding beneath was revealed.

It was her. Nearly twenty-five years after I had last seen her, here she was again, still in a nurse’s uniform, and this time she was clutching a sniper rifle. I looked back at the duffel bag and saw the small white cap with a red cross on it peeking out of the top. It was just like the one I’d seen at the Afrospot. Or close enough: I noticed that the thread was slightly the wrong shade, and guessed she had taken the outfit from one of the Nigerian clinics and adapted it.

‘Hello, Paul,’ she said, and then she turned from me and lowered herself into position, crouching down on one knee and screwing her eye into the rifle sight.

I closed my eyes and swallowed the vomit that had risen in the back of my throat.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.

‘You were wrong.’

I laughed involuntarily, though it came out more as a whimper. ‘I was . . . Is that . . .’ My breathing failed again and my legs nearly gave out from under me. Come on, get the words out! ‘Is that the best you can come up with?’ I said. ‘I was wrong?’

‘We can discuss this later. Did you see Henry?’

I didn’t say anything, mainly because my right thigh was jerking and I was trying to keep it under control with my arms, but she misinterpreted the silence.

‘Did you see him, Paul?’