Silkleigh said, “I can see your poor old mind going ooh-ah, ambasadoro. All I’ve been doing is standing around at second slip.”

He was speaking to an empty room. Hearing a bell, Wavery had looked at his watch and surged from the Consulate as if one of Don Ponciano’s champion bulls was after him.

7

The silver Daimler scattered the weeded gravel outside the Hotel Zamora and sped out of the Plaza de Africa towards the Moroccan border. Captain Panteco, standing on the red battlement of the fortress of San Felipe, did not see the car pass beneath. A part of his mind was on El Callado: he was on the brink of an arrest. He was concentrating, too, on the Arab who would fire the cannon. Too many times he had relied on Santa Maria’s bell.

Another minute.

Panteco waited for the sun to lower itself over the escarpments of La Mujer Muerta. The light that gilded the cactus and haloed the backs of the dust-coloured sheep burnished his face. It was time. It was the end of Ramadan.

“OK, Mohamed,” he said, and threw his cigarette lighter to the boy. The young Arab approached the loaded cannon. It hunched on a rotting wooden frame, one side more rotten than the other so that the massive bronze nose tilted at an angle between the ramparts. The barrel, corroded and green, was aimed at the sun. He rested a hand on the lifting handle, a dolphin with fins of acanthus, and applied Panteco’s cigarette lighter.

There was a loud boom! and the sun died and fireworks raced through the dusk above the roofs in El Hadu, twisting like sprats, frothing the night with red and gold and diverting the eyes of her children from the yard where Halima was slitting the throat of a lamb to feast the end of thirty days fasting, to feast a white spine of moon.

A horse shuddered at the firecrackers. Someone blew notes through a flute carved from a water pipe. A dog licked blood from the earth. The blood dripped from the suspended lamb, its carcass skinned and gleaming but for a small black head.

PART FOUR

Chapter Twelve

1

THREE DAYS LATER, on Monday evening, Wavery thrust himself through the tunnellers on Marina Española. It was the end of the afternoon shift and the yellow millipede was making its way home towards El Hadu. Among the ratas Wavery caught sight of Pas de Problème, who tried to hide his face.

Wavery pushed his way to the tail and walked in long strides beside the Playa Benitez, towards the mirador from where he hoped to watch the ferry carrying Catharine to Algeciras. Beyond the cemetery, the road rose steeply. The evening smelled of pine trees. The only movement was the smooth white drift of gulls against Monte Hacho. He reached the mirador, Abyla’s highest point. An old man smoked kif against the hermitage wall. On the wall above his turban, graffiti told of couples who had contemplated the same view of Europe. He saw Wavery and spat into the bushes. A grey mast rose from a flowerbed glittering with empty beer cans. There was a cement wreath and a slab impressed by two small footprints. The heels were General Franco’s, who, after praying to the Virgin of Africa, had directed his convoy across the Straits. This was the southern Pillar of Hercules.