Miles went home to the supper the cook had left for him. His meat was dry and the milk warm, with the first hint of spoiling. He threw the food away and began calling numbers of people in London who might know where Christopher was. After the sixth call, he got Christopher on the line. The voice sounded like youth and health, and made him furious. He wanted to say something about the watch, the hand, but couldn’t risk Christopher hanging up.

“I miss you,” he said. “It isn’t good here.”

After a long silence, Christopher said, “Well, come back to England, then.”

It wasn’t an invitation, and Miles heard his own reply as if he spoke from the bottom of a hole: “I have to stay for the girl.”

“She’s a killer,” Christopher said. “Let the killers kill her.”

“She’s a sad girl.”

“The world is full of sad girls,” Christopher said. “You lucky sod—you’re not responsible for a single one of them.”

“I feel responsible for this one.”

“Did you get my package? Is Angelo still working there?”

“Yes,” Miles said. He spread his fingers flat on the marble counter, feeling the cool pressure of the stone. “Yes.”

“How can you stand it?”

“I can’t fire him,” Miles said.

“Aren’t you going to say anything about the watch? About what I did?”

“Oh, Christopher,” Miles said. “What do you want me to say?”

Christopher hung up.

The string of appeals the Saudi court had been half humoring ran out, and the English girl was beheaded in private, as a diplomatic courtesy. The family declined to nominate an executioner, and Miles was allowed to pay the professional the extra, to be sure the blade was sharp and the blow clean. There was a brief flurry of news on the BBC and CNN, and the girl’s body went back to her family in Newcastle, and then the story seemed to be over.

Miles went to bed. He told them at work he had a fever, and then he did have a fever, a bad one. He cried wretchedly, as he hadn’t done since he was a child, over losing the English girl, her sun gone bugger-up. He cried over losing Christopher, and he cried over what Christopher had done, until his nose began to bleed and he stanched it with handfuls of tissues. When he stopped crying and bleeding, he flipped the pillow to the dry side and slept, and when he wasn’t sleeping he listened to Angelo and the cook moving quietly outside his door.