“Emeeeeleeeeoooo . . . ”

Passing a line of concrete apartment blocks, Wavery understood why it was the average visitor took care not to prolong his visit beyond three hours. He thought, “I could have said No.” He could have told Cullis, “I’ll take early retirement.” But for Penny’s sake it was kinder he had gone away. Abyla was as adequate an out-of-the-way place as any. It was a place where he knew nobody and no one knew him. He was going to be by himself for the rest of his life. Why not start here?

He had said No to something more important. “That’s it,” he had promised himself and Catharine. In making the promise he was depriving himself of the one thing he loved. Making it, he discovered the person he had been was shattered into someone impossibly different. It would be months before this person learned to touch and speak intimately with anyone. He had no idea if the ability would come back, whether he would welcome it if it came. But if Catharine was not to join him, he would have to refashion his life. One thing alone would keep him sane in the weeks ahead, until he worked out who he intended to be: the exercise of those muscles which had made him a diplomat in the first place.

On his first day at the Consulate, Wavery had worked late, throwing himself into his duties as Consul General. He waited for the tunnel workers to leave their site before locking the office in Calle Camoes. The streets were deserted. The day-trippers had sailed, the workmen had returned to their compound, the only sounds were the cries from the shore.

The esplanade lay in darkness, except for the beacon of a telephone kiosk three blocks away and opposite the kiosk, the lamps of a café. Wavery had nearly reached the café when a large black dog trotted past him. A lead trailed some feet behind, grazing the tesselated pavement. Before Wavery could alter his step he had trodden on the lead. The dog yelped, twisting. Wavery stepped forward to soothe him but the dog bounded from his reach, padding on strangely webbed feet towards the kiosk light. Inside the kiosk a telephone was ringing.

The dog pressed his nose to the glass, before crossing the road and disappearing into the café.

Wavery’s residence was on the corner beyond the café, between a block of flats and the road up the hill to Plaza de los Reyes. The three-storeyed building had been a sweet shop and the words Tejidos y confecciones could be read through the scaffolding.

How quickly a corner became familiar.

On the first floor, the room designated as the Royal Suite opened onto a green wrought-iron balcony with a fine view over. the Straits. To the right could be seen the bosky gullies of Monte Hacho and the military fortress on its peak. To the left, the harbour, the palms along the Marina Española and, above the roofs of El Hadu, La Mujer Muerta, the dead woman, from whose limestone cliffs every evening the sun rolled into the sea.