“Keep that under your hat,” he added, looking at Asunción over his spectacles. “Is that it?”

“There’s a letter marked personal.”

Wavery accepted the envelope, addressed in Penny’s handwriting. It contained a photograph of a house and an invitation to the private view of her exhibition. A message on the back said, “I know you can’t come.” But she was crossing her fingers for the Royal Visit.

The photograph was of a modest house of autumnal stone, a single oak twisting above the gabled roof. Penny stood on the chequer-mown lawn with her wind-cheatered back to Wavery.

He turned over the house. “Hornbeams, near Poole”. His hands pushed themselves under his spectacles.

Asunción stood up. She addressed the magnified knuckles. “I’ve asked for the wine to be delivered tomorrow.”

The hands fell away.

“I think I might go home now.”

3

It was Halima’s afternoon off. Wavery walked his body up the stairs, into the kitchen where Silkleigh sat on the table, boots on chair.

“How was Africa?”

“Fine,” said Wavery. “Just fine.”

Silkleigh tugged at his right eye. “True love,” he said. “Dangerous ground. Not to be occupied by a novice.” But he wasn’t interested in Wavery’s weekend in Africa. He was high on himself, so pleased with his achievement of the day before that he had forgotten all about his autobiography, about Rosita, about the undeniable advantages of the international language by means of which the world would become one great family circle. Emilio’s boat had been found. “And you’ll never guess who I discovered inside!”

Silkleigh rattled on ceaselessly and Wavery was content to listen.

He had been diving with Cochabamba between La Mujer Muerta and Punta Benzú when he saw the familiar shape of a ballast stone on the discoloured sand. He saw another stone beyond, and beyond that another, where Emilio had ripped out the bottom of his boat as he beat the sinking craft to windward. Silkleigh followed the trail to an ochre hull which lay on a reef among the wrecks of a Spanish wine-carrier and a seventy-four-gun English frigate, sunk in 1796.

“The sea proves whatever it does, it repeats,” Silkleigh told Cochabamba.

A skeleton floated upright in the engine room. The body had been prevented from getting away by the palangre line. The rope entangled his ankles and was orange with blob buoys.

“Cochabamba knew who it was, sure enough. Even without his face.” El Callado had been on Emilio’s boat that day, having boarded at Las Palmas with his cargo. The cocaine was in the blob buoys. “It wasn’t all fish that came to Emilio’s net,” observed Silkleigh. But that’s how the fisherman had paid for his boat. El Callado was preparing to drop the palangre line when the Grau carved through the fog.

“There was one thing Cochabamba didn’t know,” went on Silkleigh, half addressing himself. He was exultant. “She didn’t know that I knew all along.”

The girl was the first assignment in years to excite him. He had been here a lifetime, doing odd jobs for the British, Interpol – but not the French. They asked him once but he said no, not after Algeria.