One afternoon at the end of February, Wavery’s housekeeper telephoned the Consulate. The gist of her call was enough for Wavery to return home at once.

“Señor, señor, they’ve gone!”

“Who have?”

“Pas de Problème and Plaisir des Yeux!”

At the bottom of the stairs Wavery collided with Silkleigh. The diver crouched over the metal postboxes. He held a large bunch of pale pink roses. When he saw Wavery, he hid the flowers behind his back.

“Ambasadoro! What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I work here. What are you doing?”

“I’m going to a party,” said Silkleigh.

“At two-thirty?”

“I’m early.”

Wavery hurried on and climbed into the Daimler. Already as he drove onto Calle Camoes the implications of Halima’s message were usurping in his mind the issue of whether or not, after their visit to the nesting site of the baldheaded ibis, the Queen and Prince Philip should be advised to attend the bullfight.

Halima waited for Wavery downstairs. Half an hour ago, she had heard a noise upstairs and the sound of running feet. When she investigated she found both workmen in the Royal Suite. They pushed past her. She asked where they were going, what was that noise, who was that other person and what was she going to tell Señor Wavery? But they ignored her.

Wavery made a rapid tour of the house. The desertion of his workmen compelled him to see the residence as Queesal must have seen it: the unpainted exterior, the hall still awaiting the glazed tiles which Pas de Problème claimed to have ordered from a factory near Tetuan; the colour with which his foreman had chosen to break the white of every room, including the Royal Suite where Plaisir des Yeux, tripping on a wire between the boards, had plunged his left foot through the floor.

An hour later, at three-forty, Captain Panteco arrived. Moodily, he took details, but he could not concentrate on Wavery’s problem. His mind remained on the beach below La Mujer Muerta, floppy with a shoal of grouper fish. The fish had been stunned by something. They had the dead-fish gaze of the Tercio’s addicts, the look of people who had seen everything, done everything.

It was the look on his chief’s face when Panteco showed him what he had found.

“The dope’s coming up from somewhere,”

“Very interesting,” said his boss. He returned the fish to Panteco by its stiff tail. But Madrid, as Panteco would recollect from their visit, were ambitious for arrests. “Don’t shit higher than your arse, Panteco,” he said, forbidding him to chase any more red herrings. If Panteco did not envisage a future camouflaging dog kennels, he might prefer next time to bring him El Callado, or one of El Callado’s men – or, failing that, Sandra the Rapist. He understood from the hospital that the chairman of the telephone exchange had spent a comfortable night.

The chief waved a piece of paper in Panteco’s fever-spotted face.

“Or even, Panteco, if you can’t manage Sandra, what about finding the Consul General’s workmen.”