Then he saw, beyond her, standing in the side aisle just at the edge of the wash of window light, the figure of a man. It was Rizzo. He had come in person. He was holding a furled umbrella to his chest, the umbrella black like his coat. Each man made a small gesture of recognition. Lacroix touched Emily’s hand. She opened her eyes, read in his own what she needed to, and turned towards Rizzo. The surgeon made a bow. She stood, shuffled sideways along the pew. Lacroix was still sitting. He watched them exchange a few whispered words. He felt entirely unable to move. As in Morales. As in Morales. Then both of them glanced at him, smiled, and set off for the choir screen. He twisted round in time to see her take the surgeon’s arm. Then they passed through the door to the nave—sank through it, it seemed—and he was alone.

FOUR

16

The plan was to pose as engineers though it seemed they must be close to the time they would not need to pose as anyone but themselves. Calley asked Medina to draw up a list of the islands. Asked him, told him. Medina wrote the list by candlelight in the room he shared with the stranger in Glasgow, the inn a place he himself had chosen when they came back from Dumbarton, for if he was still taking the corporal’s orders he was also, of late, experimenting with insistence and finding it sometimes worked.

On the list—ink, pen and paper supplied by the management (that’s what you get in a decent place)—he wrote down, as best he could, the names of islands as he had learned them from the various men and women he had entered into conversation with. He included, of course, the names Calley had been given by the sea captain, or that he reported being given, for he had gone alone into the house while he, Medina, stood watch in the street, the moon flickering behind clouds, a black cat observing him from a wall and seeming to hear from inside the house things he could not hear. Gracias a Dios.

Then, the list being somewhat short still, or simply because he had the pen in his hand and had not written anything for weeks, he added the names of his parents, the name of a girl from Cerro Muriano he had once been insanely in love with, and the name of his horse, from that time when Spanish cavalry still enjoyed the use of horses.

In the morning he showed the list to Calley.

“We’ll be busy,” said Calley, who could count if he could not read.

“Unless he is on the first,” said Medina.

“First what?”

“First island.”

“Some fucking chance of that,” said Calley.