While Charlotte was consumed with thoughts of escape, and revenge, she knew that her friend had long since given up.

Martha had said barely a word since they had been taken from the beach – the sight of her husband being gunned down in front of her eyes had clearly been too much for her – and all of Charlotte’s efforts to raise her spirits had come to nothing.

Charlotte looked over at her, in the glow from a single, low-wattage bulb in a cheap, bare table lamp which stood in the dust in one corner.

She was lying on a similar mattress twenty feet away on the other side of the room, her back turned and facing the wall.

She’d been like that almost permanently since they had been moved to this location a few days earlier.

Martha had slimmed down for the holiday – Charlotte remembered her complaining good-naturedly, on the flight out to Málaga, that it had taken her eight weeks to lose three kilograms – but now she looked a bag of bones.

Somewhere in her rational, detached, lawyer’s mind, Charlotte Morgan noted, to her surprise, that it was amazing how quickly you lost weight in the right circumstances.

And the weight was only part of it: Martha was a striking woman, but now her face was covered in lesions and cold sores, and her hair was thinning and full of flaking skin.

Charlotte hadn’t seen her own face in a mirror for many days, but she had to imagine that she herself looked no better.

And she was glad: there had been a time when the man with dark eyes, the man called Argun, had looked at her in a way which made her feel frightened.

But he’d never taken his opportunity, and now he no longer looked at her in the same way.

On the same side of the room as Martha were two guards.

The older of the two was leaning against the wall and losing the fight to stay awake; his head kept dropping and then coming back up, and each time his eyes opened wide, and a startled expression crossed his face.

The younger, the good-looking Eastern European in his early twenties who liked to frighten Charlotte with that horrible, fearful suicide vest, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, cleaning the stripped-down parts of an AK47 with an oily rag.

Every now and then, he looked up and over at Charlotte, and when he did that it sent a shudder through her: his eyes were merciless and cold and empty, like those of a shark.

To his left, lying in the far corner, was the vest.

Lately, perhaps because of the heat, or because of complacency, the young guard had not bothered to put it on whenever he came in to take over the watch.

But it was close enough at hand, and Charlotte could still see the detonator, and the wire.