He is a vast, pear-shaped man, Wade Abello, the owner of a feed store in Mason, Wyoming, and clad, today, in a huge pair of khaki trousers with an elasticated waistband, a neatly pressed short-sleeved shirt of peppermint green cotton seersucker that might otherwise do duty as a slip-cover for a good-sized armchair.

He knows her name is Sibyl Hadley because he has read it upside-down in the maroon leather register at the front desk in the lobby.

‘Sibyl,’ he practises, feeling his heartbeat quicken.

Yesterday, at the church in Dives, he’d looked in through the leper’s hole and seen her at the altar, praying.

She didn’t kneel but her head was bowed and her eyes were closed and her hands were clasped together under her chin.

He’d stood there for a long time, holding his breath and wondering what it was that a woman like Sibyl Hadley might be praying for at her age; if, by any chance, it might possibly be the same thing that he is.

When the time had come for the minibus to leave the church and bring them back to the hotel, he’d considered asking her if he could sit next to her, but she was at the front and in the end he hadn’t been confident that he could fit into the narrow seat at her side without most of his body hanging out over the aisle, which would have meant that he’d have been blocking it when the young German family and the Italian newlyweds boarded the bus and wanted to get by. So he’d moved past her and sat down near the back and looked at the top of her head and now and then, when the sun went behind a cloud and the windows went dark, at the reflection of her face in the glass as they drove back along the coast.

It’s been a disappointment to Sibyl that even though it is not yet the end of August, the Hôtel Mercure is less than half-full.

Aside from herself, the only guests are a young German family and an Italian couple on their honeymoon, a fat American man in a luminous green shirt who looks at his feet whenever she smiles at him and has yet to address a single word in her direction.

It’s the weather, apparently, that’s keeping people away – the cold and the unseasonable wind. The days are quiet and the nights are empty, the only sounds things she wishes she didn’t have to hear: the noisy whooping of the wind outside her window, and the even noisier whooping of the Italian newlyweds in the room next to hers.