‘Nothing in life is fair,’ Bannerman said, and she was stung by the bitterness in his voice. ‘Right now there are tens of thousands of children with swollen bellies who haven’t eaten in days, or even weeks. Arms and legs so thin they might break if you so much as looked at them. We’ve all seen those pictures in the papers. Staring, hopeless eyes. Some of them have days, maybe only hours left to live. There is no food for them. Only disease and despair. And we sit sipping our wine and warming our anger because two men have died and someone doesn’t want us to know why. Is that fair?’

She saw the intensity in his face as he paused to choke back his emotion.

‘A little girl was born with autism. She lost her mother to cancer and saw her father shot to death yesterday. Maybe she’d like to tell us how it was. Maybe she’d like to say, “I loved my Daddy.” But she can’t, because her autism won’t let her. Do you care? Do I care? Does anybody care? That doesn’t really seem very fair either, does it? You can’t go through life expecting it to treat you fairly. God, if He exists, either had an off-day when He put us on this planet, or else He’s playing some ether­eal game of chess where we’re all pawns, expendable in the greater scheme of things, whether we think it’s fair or not. You can talk about right and wrong, and even that is different for each of us . . . But nothing is fair.’

She listened in silence to his rancour. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘And, God knows, I should know about fairness, or the lack of it. But wouldn’t it be sad if we all thought the way you do?’

Bannerman looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Was it a man?’ he said.

‘Isn’t it always?’ She turned away.

‘No, not always.’ He turned her back to face him and cupped his hands either side of her face, tilting her head upwards. ‘It needn’t be,’ he said. And he bent to kiss her. She responded, soft lips, the smell of wine on her breath. She pulled her head away and pressed it into his shoulder.

‘It’s hard,’ she said, ‘not knowing if you can ever really trust anyone again.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ And she pushed away from him, turning again to the window.

He stood for a moment, then crossed to the coffee table and retrieved his glass. ‘I’d like to see Tania,’ he said, and drank what was left of his wine.

‘I’ll take you. Tomorrow?’

‘Evening. If it’s possible.’

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘You’ll be going to the funeral?’

‘When is it?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon, two-thirty at the Cimetière de Bruxelles.’