Quick and competent! Jacob can live on that for almost twenty-four hours. There is hope. Everyone is busy right now, but his time will come when things calm down a little. Agneta has given him a couple of books about Lebanon, but he can hardly stay awake when he tries to read them. All he does is check his phone, waiting for Yassim’s call and avoiding Simon’s increasingly cold messages.

Yassim. The night in the garden won’t leave him alone, his frustration and anticipation and the electricity of it all, and that’s what he’s thinking about as he sits at his Scandinavian-style desk of blonde-coloured wood, beneath a filthy window that overlooks a dirty, trash-filled backyard.

He’s so absorbed by his daydreams and his indefinable longing that he doesn’t notice someone standing beside him until he sees a hand pluck up one of the unread books about Lebanon that sit on his desk.

‘The Tragedy of Lebanon,’ a soft, brisk voice reads aloud. ‘Still the only book you need to read on the civil war.’

In front of Jacob, flipping amusedly through the book, there stands a tall, fit man in his forties, dressed in a perfectly tailored, dark-blue suit. He’s wearing an expensive-looking light-blue tie that’s tied in an intentionally sloppy way. The man looks up from the book and stares at Jacob with piercing eyes. Jacob has never seen anyone who looks more like a diplomat than this man.

‘So,’ he says. ‘What do you think? Were the PLO trying to get Gemayel killed in the spring of 1975? Or was it some other militia? Maybe the Phalangists themselves?’

Jacob reddens immediately. Gemayel, Gemayel, Gemayel. Where has he heard that name? Why didn’t he read the book?

‘Gemayel?’ he says and his voice is so croaking, weak and uncertain that he wishes he’d just kept his mouth shut.

‘Yes,’ the man says. ‘Pierre Gemayel? The attack that led to the bus massacre on the afternoon of 13 April, which caused the whole bloody thing to explode? The PLO were suspected, but that always seemed a little too obvious. Don’t you think?’

‘Well…’ Jacob begins, searching feverishly through his memory for anything he might have learned over the summer, anything at all.

But his mind is completely blank.

‘It was a terrible war,’ Jacob says instead. ‘All those factions that…’

The man just looks at him as if completely indifferent to Jacob’s dodges. Jacob doesn’t know who Gemayel is, and now he’s worthless.

‘That what?’ the man says.

‘That were fighting,’ Jacob says.

He wants to die now, just sink into the ground and disappear. His career is going up in flames faced with a man whose name he doesn’t even know, but who is probably a diplomat and therefore influential, exactly the kind of person he needs to impress.