“You don’t want to go worrying about that business on the retreat, sir. That’s all forgotten now. No one even remembers the name of the place. It’s all forgotten. The war’s moved on, sir. No need for you to be uneasy. Same for the lady who’s here. Nothing for her to worry about.”

Emily’s finger began to shift to the right, away from the stairs. There was a tapping on the wood of the wall that even Lacroix heard, though Emily’s finger pointed eighteen inches further to the right from where he would have placed the sound.

He has looked in the window, thought Lacroix. He knows there is another room, a room unaccounted for. He has only to find the door.

“I’ve come a long way, sir. Had a weary old time of it, I have. Even lost my mucker on the road. My friend. No one to blame, sir, not really. Though I won’t pretend it has not made me sorry.”

More sounds. He was . . . dragging something. The ottoman? Lacroix edged half an inch closer to Emily. He settled his left hand on her shoulder, very lightly. Through her shoulder he could feel the pulsing of a heart but could not easily have said if it was his or hers. Her finger moved right, stopped, moved back, stopped, moved right again until she was pointing at the wall directly ahead of them. Could Calley see them? Was there some fine crack in the panelling he could see them through? Was his eye pressed to it even now? Her finger was steady as a compass needle. It was a truth of sorts. Lacroix reached out with the pistol, its barrel as close as he dared to the side of her hand. You will have one chance, said the master, one only. Hesitate and you are lost.

The trigger—he seemed to crush it in his fist. He saw the hammer go, saw sparks in a dance, but felt no strong push-back, no arm-shove. A misfire? If so, he was dead, they both were. Then a curl of blue smoke cleared from in front of his face, parted like blue yarn, and he realised he was looking through a jagged star of shattered wood into the big room, and through the width of that room to the window and out to the land beyond. He walked to the wall, looked through the hole, looked down. The ottoman was at right angles to the wall and pulled a short way back from it. A man’s leg—his boot—was lying on the silk, the rest of him in the deep shadows of the floor. He watched the leg on the ottoman for a while, how it seemed to be resting there. When he was satisfied he turned back to Emily. She was still pointing, her arm rigid. He touched her hand and very slowly lowered it.

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