Five cranes obscured the view ahead. They rose from the tunnel site. Every day, from seven in the morning until sunset, the houses along the Marina Española were deafened by machinery pecking away at a black hole in the earth.

It was Wavery’s experience that the spirit of a place could be caught in the first week, after which your impressions dulled until the moment arrived when you noticed nothing new and then, as sometimes happened, it required the blast of a bomb for you to notice anything at all. Wavery felt he had netted the spirit of Abyla by the time he turned up for work that morning.

He had a clear sense of his isolation after a weekend in the residence. Every room spoke back to him of his disgrace and loneliness. Unable to face their vacancy he had locked the two spare bedrooms sharing his floor. Their keys at least worked. Had there been children, the floors would have been messy with toys. He could not imagine Penny arriving. Was there anyone else he might invite? He made a rapid inventory of his friends in the Foreign Office, but it was in the nature of Foreign Office life that the few friends he had made were in posts thousands of miles away. Who was in Algiers? he wondered. Or Rabat? He knew who was in Gibraltar.

On Saturday he had escaped his prison to buy milk in the grocery behind the house. He had drunk both cartons in the fridge and his mouth was dry. It tasted of smoke from the Grau and tunnel dust.

“So far, not a thing,” said Don Ramon. The grocer was talking to an elderly and petite woman who tapped the counter with a conductor’s white baton. “Patience,” she told him. Didn’t Don Ramon remember the British ship sinking off Cap Spartel in nineteen twenty something? Abdel Akbar and his Moros were in the hills. Don Ramon did not. But his mother, she might have done. “Sixty pesetas,” he said, finding the price on the Stallion tea. He removed the pencil from behind his ear.

“Let me see, there was the Duke and Duchess of Fife, the Princess Marie Louise and the Princess Helena.” Saved, thank God! Not so their luggage. For several years men strangely caparisoned were seen on the slopes of La Mujer Muerta.

“Berbers,” said the woman, her voice lowering. “With diamante buttons!”

“Not possible!” said Don Ramon.

“True. It’s true,” said Genia Ortiz. She paid for her tea and turned from the counter – only to discover the person with whom she had been sharing the queue. So this was her neighbour! The Consul General de Gran Bretaña! Her eyes played over Wavery, hoping to hook some indication that he might have found her attractive as a younger woman. Because of her squint, it was a moment before Wavery realised her attention was directed at him, not the woman behind him.

She introduced herself. “Possibly you don’t know who I am . . . ” Hers was the balcony which overlooked his terrace.