At last he left. It was with relief she found Rosita sleeping.

“They killed the wrong man,” she told Wavery. “They raped the wrong woman. When they found out what they had done, they were too ashamed to confront me. So they used Silkleigh. They used him to buy me off . . . ”

“But what on earth was Silkleigh . . . ?”

There was a movement on the adjoining balcony. Genia Ortiz was opening her windows. “I think it might be better if we went inside,” said Wavery.

Later he walked her home. She lived near the Tercio Museum on Paseo Colon. He held her arm and she talked as if she had no power to stop.

She didn’t know what had happened to Major Merimée. Pardoned, perhaps. Running a pharmacy somewhere in Périgord, where he chucked the chins of village children. Or guillotined at Barberousse after living for a fortnight on sardines and spaghetti. She didn’t know and she didn’t care.

But it was a relief to speak about it. Abylans didn’t have the faintest clue. You didn’t know where to begin. And why upset people? Once she had visited a psychologist. She had wanted to discuss her son. All she could face talking about were indigenous trees.

“I didn’t want him. I tried to abort him. Normally you want your child to be like you, to repeat something in you. But not with Periclito.”

They had arrived at the entrance of her apartment.

“Will you come in?” she asked.

“I have to finish packing,” said Wavery. “Tomorrow I’m going to Africa. But promise me, Marie, you will come back whenever you like, as often as you like.”

She opened the glass door into the block. “I am safe here, aren’t I, señor? They won’t find out, they won’t deport me?”

“They won’t find out.”

Wavery waited until the lift cage protected her. Once more someone had read too much into his silence, mistaking it for authority. Once more someone had told him their life’s sorrows. Privately, was she upset he hadn’t come in? He knew enough about human nature to know you didn’t necessarily embrace the first weeping French widow you met. Yet after what Marie Amaral had said about Silkleigh, what did he know about human nature? He had been so certain he knew the kind of man Silkleigh was, and he had been proved wrong. What further misconceptions was he capable of?

But it wasn’t the time to be thinking of that. Not now. Tomorrow, after an abyss of nine months, he was meeting Catharine Riding.

6

At three-thirty on the following day Britain’s Consul General to Abyla prepared to leave the Consulate for the short walk to the Hotel Zamora. He had reserved a hotel in Chauen for his weekend and was not planning to return to Abyla until Monday.

He had worked through the lunch hour.

In the morning he had telexed his acting Head of Department, informing him that bar the installation of a flagpole, expected any day from Gibraltar, the redecoration of the Abyla residence was complete. He had also drafted, and then, by God, sent a telegram of pure vitriol to his brother-in-law who had written about certain rumours to reach him concerning the state of readiness at the Abyla end. Wavery had taken the sincerest pleasure in instructing Air Vice-Marshal Sir Lawrence Tredwell to mind his own business.