‘I think it was a Chittagong accent,’ Hessa said. ‘They speak Chittagonian further south. It’s a dialect, I suppose. Closer to the Rohingya language.’

‘Would your mother know for sure?’ Casey asked.

‘Yes,’ said Hessa. ‘She likes working out stuff like that.’

‘Like her daughter,’ Miranda grinned. ‘I wonder if this man dropped his mobile somehow, out in the building, wherever they keep the women.’

‘Something like that,’ said Casey. ‘And now he’s got it back. Which means that Romida won’t be able to call her mother ever again.’

10

10

It was beautiful, the house of Sir William Cavendish. There was a perfect symmetry to the old stone front, the shutters faded to the softest blue. Jasmine sprawled around the front door, reaching up to the cracked pink tiles of the roof. Around the house, the overgrown olive trees drifted like ancient green ghosts.

The house was on the west side of Paxos, above grey cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to the sea. Nothing for a hundred miles, all the way to Italy.

The old man sat there as if he was waiting for them, under a threadbare violet parasol. He watched them picking their way up the ruined limestone steps, past the fallen stone posts that would once have held a gate. He got to his feet as they drew near, steadying himself on the slab of the table. Only just over seventy, Casey knew, but he looked older, with the habit of secrets in his eyes.

‘Good morning,’ he said, with a nod of his head. He was so polite, raising his tattered straw hat, that Casey hesitated.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she said.

‘It’s always glorious on Paxos.’ It was as if he were talking to someone else, a half-smile on his face. ‘I’ve lived in so many places, all over the world, but this has always been my favourite.’

For a moment, it was the polite conversation of a hundred receptions, and a thousand cocktail parties, and maybe something else.

Cairo, Delhi, Beirut, Jeddah, Casey thought. A lifetime of service, before, finally, Dhaka.

‘We found this house together, my wife and I,’ Cavendish went on. ‘On holiday. A few decades ago, now. We walked all the way along the paths, through the lavender and the bees, and one day we found it, just waiting for us around a corner. We loved it from the first moment we saw it.’

Lady Cavendish died a few years ago in Sri Lanka, Luke had told them. Not long before Sir William had meant to retire. She just didn’t wake up, one morning. Nothing to be done. An Englishwoman, buried thousands of miles from home. Cavendish had stayed on with the Foreign Office, after that. Gone to Dhaka, alone.

Casey looked around at the old house, and the dream it had once been.