She pushed herself up from the sofa. As she bent to pick up the mail she felt a breeze touch her cheek. Those smells again. Jasmine and coffee. She left the mail where it lay and turned and walked down the hall to the little kitchen. A broken jar of Java beans lay on the quarry-tiled floor. Behind the sink a window was half open. In the garden outside the white flowers of the jasmine tumbled down a wooden trellis.

Silva looked at the beans and the window. Somebody had forced the catch and knocked the beans onto the floor as they’d climbed in. She tensed and for a moment she thought of Fairchild and the ‘dark forces’ he’d talked of. Wondered about the black BMW with the tinted windows. She turned and looked back down the hall to where the narrow stairs led upwards. Was the intruder still here?

She moved along the hall to the stairs and stood and listened. Nothing. She went up slowly, easing her feet from step to step, trying not to make a sound. On the landing she peeked into her mother’s bedroom. A jewellery box lay upturned on the bed and clothes had been pulled from a chest of drawers. The doors to a full-length cupboard stood open and several dresses lay on the floor. She moved across the landing to her mother’s office. A bed, a Coldplay poster and a shelf full of shooting trophies testified to the fact this had once been Silva’s room, but those were the only concessions to the past. A monitor sat on a table by the window while to one side several shelving units held an array of box files. Next to Chris Martin and his bandmates hung a huge map of the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. She reached down for the switch on the computer cabinet beneath the desk. After a few seconds a message flashed on the monitor screen.

Disc error. The internal volume is corrupted or missing. Boot from external drive? Y/N

Puzzled, she stepped back, feeling something beneath the sole of her foot. She moved her foot, bent down and picked up a tiny screw. She reached for the computer cabinet and dragged it from beneath the desk. At the back the rear panel was secured with five screws and there was a hole where the sixth should have been.

She looked at the screen again. The machine was an old one and Silva remembered her mother had used a laptop while she was in Tunisia. But where was it? All the personal possessions her mother had with her in Tunis had been sent to Silva’s father; there’d been no laptop. Perhaps the device had gone to the agency her mother worked for.