He nodded. A tattoo of mulberry bruises was starting to show along the length of Alice’s right forearm, but there were no marks on her head.

‘You sit with her,’ said Kirsty. ‘I’ll clean up outside.’

‘Ella?’ he asked.

‘Asleep.’

‘Good’

‘You were talking to her,’ said Kirsty. ‘To Alice.’

‘Yeah. Though I don’t suppose she could hear any of it.’

‘It’s better to think that she can.’

‘Yes.’

‘Baby? Talk to me some time. Will you do that? Talk to me some time.’

She left him and went on to the landing. ‘God, you frightened me,’ she said. Alec was kneeling on the top step of the stairs, his hands in the pink rubber gloves Mrs Samson used, a scrubbing brush in one hand, a blue J-cloth in the other. He didn’t have his glasses now and in the white light of the overhead bulb he looked about sixteen. He held up a brightly coloured plastic bottle of disinfectant spray that he had found under the sink in the kitchen and asked if she thought it was the right thing, or whether it would bleach the colour out of the carpet.

‘I can do that,’ she said, soothingly, but he ignored her, and after watching him work for a few moments, she shivered and slipped past him and went down the stairs.

14

On Monday afternoon, just as László was convincing himself of the mission’s failure, that he would have to go back to Paris with the bag and find some way of returning it to Emil, they contacted him.

He was walking in the shade on Révay utca, a few metres from the entrance to the hotel on his way back from lunch, when a child – a boy of eight or nine – crossed from the sunlit side and held out an envelope.

‘For me?’ asked László.

The boy thrust it into his hand and sprinted away in the direction of the Basilica. László looked to the end of the street, and thought he saw a man step hurriedly out of sight, but the light there was too dazzling to see things clearly.

At the steps to the hotel the doorman asked: ‘Did the kid want money?’

‘No,’ said László.

‘They try it on with the foreigners sometimes.’

László read the note in his room, then used the box of complimentary matches to burn it in an ashtray. There were only two lines to remember: a place – Statue Park – and a time – 3 p.m., Tuesday. He had heard of the park but had never been there. He asked the woman at reception. She said that it was in the XXII district on the other side of the river. Did he want to go there? They would book a car for him.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Lâszlô. ‘And I’ll need my bag. The black bag.’