“I know what he must feel, Weena.”

“When it comes to family, he can’t see beyond. Are you sure you won’t have a sandwich? We could eat it in the garden. You still like gardens, don’t you?” she asked, as if that too might have ceased to be a certainty.

“Listen, Weena. I need a passport.”

“A passport?”

“It was in the bag, with your chocolates. Without a passport I can’t get to Abyla.”

“When are you expected?”

“There’s someone meeting me this afternoon.”

“Oh dear,” she said, and she had to prevent her heart going out to him. “Then it’s not Lawrence you need. It’s his deputy, Giles Hoyter.”

The Deputy Governor’s office in Convent Place was reached through a side entrance opposite a funeral parlour offering competitive terms for a repayment plan.

It was a grey building, in the Palladian style and newly fitted throughout in caramel linoleum. It had been used variously by the Board of Sanitary Commissioners, the city council and as a school administered by Loreto nuns.

Three flights up the staircase, behind a formica desk and beneath the gaze of his twenty-five-year-old sovereign, imperial, beneficent, velvet-robed and rather pretty, Giles Hoyter swivelled in the black plastic chair negotiated from a downstairs office and said, “Who the hell’s Wavery?”

He listened, running a hand behind his ears through a skirmish of ginger hair. “Can’t you deal – Oh, all right,” he said, “send him up, then.”

He had been occupied with the collision at sea. At four-twenty that morning, the Lloyd’s signal station had picked up the Admiral Grau’s distress call. The Spanish-registered container ship had swung to port into the Straits at the correct latitude, but at the wrong angle. She was sailing two degrees closer to the African coast than the captain was aware.

The captain must have seen the fishing boat at the last moment.

In the panic and confusion, he failed to notice what had happened to his cargo. One of the crates had stove a hole in the hull. Another had upset a crate of turpentine. At some point the liquid had caught fire.

Eight hours later the Grau was still burning. She had been holed above and beneath water line and had lost six thousand tons of fuel oil. Two crewmen were dead and four wounded. Royal Navy helicopters continued their search for survivors from the fishing boat. Meanwhile, the Merchant Marine office in Madrid had requested fire-fighting tugs to contain the slick. Hoyter was considering their request when the Governor’s wife interrupted him with the first of three hysterical telephone calls.

As he listened to Lady Edwina, the Deputy Governor looked ahead with longing to the occasion, four months from now, when he would assume his position as Number Two in Tegucigalpa. Were there apes in Honduras? Probably not, he decided eventually.

Hoyter was a Foreign Office appointment. While not in any way lacking the qualities demanded of officers from the E-stream, he was described in the report supplied by Personnel Department as not a high flyer. As the Governor’s deputy, he did not need to be. His work was methodical, with a particular reverence for the password. The report determined that he was not an unpleasant man, though he might give this impression. Women generally disliked him.