Wavery sat unyielding. “What happened to your party?”

Silkleigh, inspecting the toes of his boots, said, “I wish you wouldn’t go on about that.” There had been no party. A surprise visit, that was all. “Lust, pure and simple.” Cochabamba had rented the flat below the Consulate, but Silkleigh’s appearance had not thrilled her as he hoped. “She fell asleep on the sofa as I was telling her a story. When I said I’d better go she said ‘Yes’ and sprang to life.”

“You told me in her arms boys became old men.”

“She’s given me this to be going on with.” Silkleigh tapped the Rolex on his wrist. But if Wavery must know, Silkleigh’s expectations of the Bolivian race had so far outrun their performance. After a courtship lasting two months, Cochabamba’s ecstasy appeared to be measured in kisses alone.

“Put it this way, you’re invited to a grand house, but you’re not allowed in through the front door. You’re invited in through the kitchen. You smell all sorts of marvellous smells. You steady yourself. You roll up your sleeves – and then you’re offered two olives and a peanut. Can you believe it! I want to spend my life with that woman, but I shouldn’t think she’d let me share her taxi.”

To tell the truth, he had been in this state once before. Then he had been suffering from oxygen poisoning. He had been diving too deep, to below three hundred feet. He had fallen into catatonic shock and his system had gone nuts. Everything muscular had started working to its utmost ability. “I could crush a block of wood as if it were a matchbox. I could snap a bar.” Luckily, it had been only a mild case of poisoning. “If it had gone on longer,” he said, “my muscles would have been torn from the bone.”

And now this young woman from Bolivia was having the same effect. “She hurts my head, old soul.”

Wavery had set eyes on Cochabamba once, in the stairwell of the Consulate building. A dark-faced girl struggled backwards up the staircase, dragging an aluminium cylinder between long, thin legs. The cylinder had cracked two tiles on the lower steps. Both pretended not to notice. Wavery carried the cylinder to her door. Her eyes were moth’s wings, fluttering thanks. Installed in his office, he realised he had failed to notice the wrist which had first stoked Silkleigh’s imagination.

“She’s scandalously beautiful,” said Silkleigh with an expression so solemn he might really have been in pain. He had taken her diving off Monte Hacho, near the military beach. They hadn’t been allowed to land, of course, but they had swum near the shore. Cochabamba had never seen anything so lovely, so unspoiled. Not an advertisement. Nothing. As God had planned it.

He had shown her a monk seal and a puffer fish, the scosophilis intenis which swam up from the west coast of Africa and lived off coral heads and she had become almost as excited as Silkleigh at the prospect of finding Emilio’s boat.