Then she could question him no more and the words on her lips died away. Down below, directly at the bottom of the stone steps leading up to the caves, a man lay spread-eagled, pinioned by his arms and legs, his shirt stripped from his back.

Only for a second did Skye have to look at that bronze-tinted skin before she knew who lay there.

There was no need to see his face, no need to ask why she had been brought here to look down on him.

Then, as the breath seemed to be squeezed from her body at the sight below, El Diablo made a gesture with the riding whip he carried in one hand and the silver on it flashed in the rays of the setting sun.

As he moved, another whip was raised, a whip with a long flat thong, held in the hand of a man standing beside the pinioned Indian.

It whistled through the air and fell with a sickening sound against the smooth flesh. The Indian screamed and the whip fell again and again. Twenty strokes, each one of them seeming like a pistol shot in the silence.

There was a crowd watching, a great crowd of men, women and children.

None of them moved, none of them spoke.

Only the whip cut through the hazy golden air to leave a long crimson weal on a defenceless back.

Then it was over.

A sudden sound, half a groan, half a grunt, seemed to come from the crowd. The Indian was silent, the screams had died before the last stroke and Skye knew that he was unconscious.

And she knew that she too could bear no more.

She put up her hands to her face and, finding her way by instinct, ran from the terrace back through the sitting room and into her own bedroom.

Only as she reached the dressing table, to stand trembling beside it, did she see in the mirror that El Diablo had followed her.

Slowly he came across the room and she did not dare to look at his face and see again the fury in it.

He stopped beside her and drew from the pocket of his coat first her letter, then the American dollars and lastly her watch.

“A good man deliberately tempted into disloyalty and treachery,” he said, his tone raw with anger.

He flung her things down on the wooden surface of the table and then turned towards her.

Skye was too numbed and stupefied by what she had seen to have the slightest anticipation of what he might be about to do. In a daze, she saw the flash of his rebenque as he raised it high in the air.

She fell against the bed and felt a pain that seemed to sear its way like a dagger across her shoulders.

The whip fell on her again and yet again.