Damn, Tom thinks. Everyone is watching. Telling himself that he has the blessings of the police, he cautiously touches his lips to the roughly carved wood of the mouthpiece. Nikos drops a piece of the black, greasy stuff onto the charcoal. Tom puffs and his mouth fills with dry, hot smoke. For God’s sake, he thinks, feeling a dozen pairs of eyes watching his every move, and breathes in. The smoke burns its way down his windpipe. Only the fact that he has spent the last fortnight in a fog of cordite fumes stops him from coughing up his lungs. He holds it in, as he has seen the others do, and lets it out gently. It is better than cordite, but not much … No, it has a sweetish, piney taste. Salty as well … Perhaps it is an Oxo cube after all? In that case, why all the fuss? Surely it would be easy to …

‘Another?’ Niko’s voice slips him out of his reverie. Why not? he thinks. There’s no effect at all. The policeman is smiling at him indulgently. He takes another drag.

It seems to be quite a bit later. Tom has been following the music where it has been trying to lead him the whole time, if only he’d noticed: into a half dream full of people, each trailing a story that he can follow all the way back to places that look, perhaps, rather like Turkish cigarette packets – but what, honestly, is more beautiful than a packet of Turkish cigarettes? He has been following the stories east, across the sea, back to where he is from, back to glossy green valleys and huge yellow butterflies. And now, he is here in the Cordelio but also out under the night sky, where the moon is rising, round as a tambourine …

She is singing. The night is the deep, sonorous drone of the violin. The stars are the trickle of sound from the lute. The moon is Zoë Valavani. He opens his eyes and sees a policeman’s cap.

‘What the … ?’ he says, and Sólon the gendarme turns to him and pats his arm. ‘Oh! Hello,’ says Tom, politely. He blinks, and there is the night again, and the moon. He sails across another great expanse of time and place: a calm sea reflecting stars. Alone with the singer. The words mean nothing but he knows he is learning something unutterably sad: a terrible lesson given with such beauty, such love, alone with her in this dazzling moonlight.

He opens his eyes. The gendarme is helping himself to one of his ration cigarettes. ‘Please go ahead,’ Tom says, and takes one himself. His fingers feel like sausages wrapped in velvet. The cigarette traces a slow parabola towards his mouth, like a shell travelling across the firing range at Larkhill. ‘Thanks,’ he says, as the gendarme’s lighter goes poff and he leans towards the flame. ‘I dropped off,’ he adds. ‘Sorry.’