She disliked begonias, but Marie Amaral could never throw flowers away. She would give them away, to the Café Ulises, to the asylum on Calle Silvestre or to old ladies passing through the Plaza de los Reyes, although not to Genia Ortiz who took offence. “That’s very kind of you, Marie Amaral, but I only like white.”

If there was no one passing through the square, she would leave the flowers in a bucket by the fountain. As an offering. By the time she unlocked her stall in the morning they were always gone.

“Who do you think takes them?” Senator Zamora’s grandson, Pablo, would want to know.

“The spirits of the square.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Marie Amaral scanned the shelves. No empty pots. She opened the cupboard beneath the till. She curved her hand behind her scissors, her envelopes for messages, her sulphur dust, searching for a spare pot, and her fingers met a hard object on its side.

She drew out a teapot by the spout. David’s!

And here I am, not wanting to think of you.

She opened the silver lid. Why not? she thought. She put in the begonia, packing the earth not too firmly about the stem. She pricked the surface and sprinkled it with hydrated lime. Come now, she told herself, brushing her eyes with the back of a hand. Good eyes are not afraid of smoke.

According to El Faro it was “a smoke from which there was no escape, not even if you dived to the bottom of the sea”. Hardly anyone in Abyla escaped it, but one of these was the driver at the shaft head of the Straits Tunnel. Not until the following shift, four hours later, was he to learn how the ship carrying replacement blades for his boring-machine had collided with a fishing boat off Punta Benzú.

Chapter Two

1

FOURTEEN MILES ACROSS the Straits, a senior British diplomat on his way to lunch paused before a telescope. His name was Thomas Wavery. He was a tall, silver-haired man, in his late fifties. An intelligent man, distinguished even, you would have thought, meeting him on the road to the belvedere – a contented don, or a financier to be trusted. And had he stood perfectly still, you might have added, observing his clothes and the way he held himself, a successful man. But when he walked, his shoulders and the cast of his face betrayed him.

He had flown into Gibraltar an hour before. He had taken the cable car to the summit from where he walked north down Middle Hill. The road inclined steeply towards the bay and was scattered with gravel. When a military Land-Rover overtook him, he slipped, but kept his balance by pressing his hand into a bank beside the road. He noticed Aaron’s rod and Rock crocus and sawfly orchids, all flowers he had planned to plant with Penny in his retirement garden.

A drop of sweat salted his eye. He removed his overcoat and afterwards his jacket, folding it into his yellow duty-free bag. The bag contained his wallet, his passport and a box of chocolates for his sister-in-law, the Governor’s wife.