He smiled at her. Even the whores, he thought, are exact, practical. She wanted to know where he was from and he told her. He asked her (for he was longing to ask someone) if she had ever heard of a city called Cordoba, and when she said she could name all the principal towns of Hampshire and Devon and knew the names of three or four cities in India but had never heard of Cordoba, he told her about walled gardens with fountains, the scent of jasmine, about roofs where you lay all the summer night an arm’s reach under the stars. He wanted to build a city in her head. After all, she knew what a wall was, a fountain, had seen stars even in Portsmouth, and that was all imagination required, but the day was progressing and the woman had other things on her mind.

“Are we going for a walk,” she said, “or what?”

Sharing the sea wall with them were two hawkers, one with a basket of yellow flowers, one with a wooden bucket of small flat fish that bubbled and squirmed over each other’s bodies. He asked her which she preferred, and after examining both flowers and fish and putting a finger sweetly to her chin, she chose the fish. He bought her a half-dozen. The hawker wrapped them in newspaper. He handed the parcel to Medina who presented it to the woman.

“You will remember Cordoba?” he called as he backed away. She nodded but he had already lost her. Another man was standing in his place on the wall looking out to sea, and the woman, her parcel of fish held like a posy, was slowly approaching him . . .

At the boarding house (he had hoped that finding it again would be difficult, might even be impossible) he went up the bare steps to the room, then paused at the door, five, six seconds, listening to sounds he could make no sense of. Going in he saw that Calley had shifted the table from its place under the slope of the roof to a new position, directly under the window. He was leaning over it.

“Thought you’d fucked off back to Spain,” said Calley, without looking round.

“I considered it,” said Medina. He edged closer until he could see what Calley was up to. In one hand he had a small saw; the other hand held down a gun, a carbine, pressing it to the table. He was cutting through the shoulder stock.

“You’re in my light,” said Calley, though the light, what there was of it, came from the other side of the table.