“You can disagree all you like. This is not the cunt we’re looking for. And you know it. So stop pissing around.”

He dragged the canvas lower. The man’s hands had been arranged on his belly. One hand open, one closed. Calley turned the closed hand over and peeled back the fingers. Something bright slid from the palm and lodged itself between the man’s body and his arm. Calley, lowering himself a little further into the grave, rummaged in the folds of the man’s coat and came up holding a circle of bright metal, a polished brass case like the case of a small watch.

“What is it?” asked Medina.

Calley shook his head. He was working at the catch. Was there a lock? Then it opened and he stared at it, baffled at first, then grinning. He held it up for Medina though did not let him touch it. Medina squatted, one hand on the earth to steady himself. Inside the case, on what might be a piece of ivory, was a painting of an eye. It was clearly a woman’s eye, a single blue eye with a curl of blonde hair above it. At the eye’s inner crease, painted perhaps by a different hand, perhaps later, were two grey tears.

“His Lucy,” said Medina.

Calley nodded. “How do they make it so small?”

“A brush with two hairs,” said Medina. “One hair . . . ”

For almost a minute, under the raving of the birds who rode the currents at the cliff’s edge, they studied it, the woman’s eye staring back at them as though through a keyhole. Then Calley snapped the case shut, a small sound that somehow, in all that emptiness, held its own.

“You must give it back to him,” said Medina. “We are not tomb thieves.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” said Calley. “Tomb thieves! What the fuck!” He laughed, though not unkindly, and getting on to his belly again, he reached back down to the man’s hands. Closed one, left one open. Pulled up the canvas.

17

To reach the women’s ward you passed through the room where the boy with the tumorous neck had his bed, then through the corridor, past Rizzo’s consulting room, the steps to the theatre, and on to where a curtained doorway was guarded by a female doorkeeper, a type of nun perhaps, sitting on a stool. Lacroix said who he had come for. The woman stood, drew back the curtain and pointed.

It was the first bed on the left-hand side. Beyond it were ten or twelve more, the same on the other side where the morning light was slightly stronger. All the beds were occupied. Some of the women were sitting up in their gowns. One, whose bed was opposite Emily’s, dragged a brush through long red hair.