She sensed a movement on the shore. Her heart pounded against the eggs protected by her mossy, imperfect carapace. She jerked her head above the little ridge she had built for herself.

Nothing. The shushing of the waves. The call of a gull in the cliff. The calm-again sea.

Suddenly. A beat on the sand, not her heart. A pair of legs, two arms, a hand.

The hand grasped her shell at its bitten edge, turning her upside down, twisting her neck, so that all she could see was the sky and a face as vacant as the sky.

The scuffle on the shore had frightened the ibis. The birds cowered on their ledge, lifting their long red bills and shaking their wings. The noise woke the chick. He straightened into the wind and tottered on his little webbed feet towards his parents. In the gloom the elder birds saw a goshawk eating something on the sand and for a moment they relaxed. But now they heard another, louder, noise. They tensed in their nests, feathers erect and quivering on their hind-ruffs, their necks stretched out, immobile.

Below them, Ghanem the Mute stiffened too. He pressed his stomach to the sand beside the olive carcass, his sack of eggs. He watched the shoreline, alert. On the beach there stood a man, possibly a sentry.

Wavery had come to a low barbed-wire fence. He climbed over it, catching his trousers on the wire. He inspected the tear, and sat down on the sand, cursing. The sand on this side was scored with the tiny white tracks of crab shells where the night herons had regurgitated their pellets. It was otherwise crisp and clean and unpitted by footprints.

Wavery peered tipsily at the sea. The drink had created in his mind a Chauen bazaar of images. As the last of the sun’s rays died away to the left beyond La Mujer Muerta, he experienced a curious sensation. It seemed to Wavery that from the moment he had stepped over the wire he had come to inhabit one of Penny’s paintings. She had picked an orange blob-buoy from a tree outside the Consulate and rolled it between the folds of Zamora’s newest cardigan. But she didn’t know what to call it. She didn’t know how to go on. It’s one of those paintings she turns upside down, he thought, as he took off his shoes, then his socks.

He rolled up the torn trouser legs and pushed himself to his feet. In the Straits there was the pulse of a fisherman’s carbide lamp. Beyond were the embers of Gibraltar. A large cruise ship was sailing towards the harbour, its lights pricking the bay at neat intervals.

Europe, thought Wavery. Where Catharine was. Catharine, who had had to give up the one thing that might have redeemed her life.

The herring gulls called her name. “Catharine, Catharine.”

He thought, She has been liberated by her cries in the night. Now they are out, in the fresh air, she is free. But where do I go?