‘I think he’s aiming for the police building next door, but we can’t take the risk, sir. Not with all the brass around.’ The MP salutes and leaves Tom inside the lobby, which is full of military personnel milling around: staff officers, orderlies, a senior Air Force officer, all of them trying to look indispensable. Tom wonders how much a cup of tea is going to cost him among all this marble and cut glass. He decides to have a drink instead, and wanders about until he finds an elegant panelled bar. A curved sign proclaims FORTRESS BAR in not very neat black paint. He orders a bottle of Egyptian Stella beer, because that is apparently all that is on offer this afternoon, and finds a place at the end of the bar. His plan has been to find a small hotel in some quiet district like Kolonaki, but the Greek barman tells him there are no quiet districts at the moment. So he reluctantly takes a room upstairs, which is small, clean and has a narrow view of Mount Lycabettus. He throws his rucksack onto the bed, washes his face in the tepid, rusty water in the bathroom sink, takes his map case painting kit and goes out.

The sniper has given up or been dispatched. Tom walks through the line of armoured cars and into Syntagma Square. He can’t help but notice that the pavement is dappled thickly with large black stains. The blunt snout of a Vickers machine gun juts menacingly from a sandbagged position at the top of the steps leading to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Paratroopers are manning other positions in the corners of the square, watched by Greek policemen in black uniforms, looking shifty. There are garlands of decaying flowers propped against some of the trees, and a few civilians are standing around, looking lost in their own city. When they see him coming some nod and smile politely but others turn their backs. I’m sorry, he wants to say. This is nothing to do with me.

But it is. The fighting started here, two weeks ago. He stops in front of a bloodstain, a faintly human shape bruising the marble pavement. A black-booted policeman watches him idly from across the road. So much blood, over the past three years. He has become utterly used to it. But now, as he lights another cigarette, he finds that the defences he has put up to deal with the carnage to which his profession demands he bears witness are no longer enough. Because there is a chance, however small, however improbable, that one of these blurry outlines might be the imprint … Impossible. She wouldn’t have been here. But as he watches the smoke from his cigarette drift up into the green fluting of the cypress, he knows that isn’t true at all. There are countless ways in which Zoë Valavani might have died.