Wavery read the words Plus Ultra.

“There is more beyond,” he told the old man.

6

Genia Ortiz, tame carp of Balnasharki, gaze full of Polish vodka, her bag bulging with a plastic-framed Murillo Virgin, walked left into Calle Zamora and left again up La Legion, rising fairly steadily towards the Plaza de los Reyes. At the corner of Fernandez Solis she searched in her bag to make certain it contained the keys to her apartment, crossed the road, stepped onto the pavement and – there! – caricoling up the street two yards ahead was that lynx, Dolores. Dressed in yapping colours, in a skirt too small for her, in Ernesto’s coat!

Her lower lip trembled. Her fingers tightened about the gold-topped baton as all at once the afternoon rushed back to her, that devastating afternoon when she had opened the library door and seen on the front desk the book reserved for her husband, his name on a tongue of red paper, and crossed the floor to collect it and heard the telephone ringing in the empty room and called out anxiously, “Dolores! Dolores!” and listened to the noise – ring! ring! ring! – until at last she picked up the receiver only to recognise at the other end in a voice she had never heard him use and before she could so much as say “Hello?”, Ernesto, her spouse of fifty-four years, undertaking to butter her little buns.

It was inevitable. Now she had broached the trunk beneath her bed, Genia Ortiz had rolled away the stone behind which she had successfully concealed the conductor. Deliberately she had left the photographs of him inside the trunk, but he had climbed out anyway. She felt his tap on her leg and she kicked out. For fifteen years he had been locked up with the hosts and hostesses of pre-revolutionary Kiev. Now he was avenging himself. Someone whistled in the street behind. Genia Ortiz revolved. The whistler dashed into a Fiat salesroom.

Dolores, without turning, trailed a hand down her long dark tresses. Perceptibly the librarian accentuated the motion of her walk.

“That itchy bitch would give herself to a tree,” thought Genia Ortiz. If she was fifty years younger she would have torn Ernesto’s coat from the hussy’s back.

Mercifully, at the top of the street Dolores took her tresses left, in the direction of her apartment in Calle Real. Puffing, Genia Ortiz turned right into the Plaza de los Reyes. Over the rooftops and between the houses she saw the mountains behind Abyla. Nothing could be more intimidating to her than those mountains, where Senator Zamora shot his pig and where Lieutenant Zamora had been found with onions in his eyesockets.

But if the letter in her sleeve spoke the truth, if Balnasharki had indeed been returned to her . . . The knowledge returned as powerfully as the sight of Santa Maria de Africa in floodlight: she could leave Abyla!

In that moment Genia Ortiz saw the Straits Tunnel as an unequivocal and glorious symbol. It was a link connecting her again to the Europe that had prospered for the first eleven years of her life. As soon as the tunnel was open, as soon as the Royal Visit was over, she would leave this roofless cell. Never again would she have to set eyes on the mountains of Africa. Never again would she have to see the dead woman’s face. Never again would she have to worry about what might be fomenting on the other side of the mountains, where duck-sized bats thrashed the darkness.