Returning to the hallway, she crouched down to address the child with the bear, who lingered near the front door. “Hello. I’m looking for my friend Paolo. Is he in one of those rooms?” She indicated the five closed doors.

The girl smiled and seemed about to speak.

“Leave her alone.” The boy came striding out, his chest all puffed up.

Genevieve straightened. “Well, if you won’t tell me—”

“You’re not wanted here. Go away.”

They were staring at her—the girl smiling, the boy still angry. The littlest child, on the rug, carried on playing with her piece of glass, oblivious.

“Look,” Genevieve began, aware of how ridiculous it was to feel intimidated by a boy in short trousers but intimidated nonetheless. Then she heard it. The coughing.

Deep, gut-wrenching, raging like a fire, and building, the way a house fire builds, consumes. A sound barely even human.

The child in the nightie covered her ears and shut her eyes tight. The girl on the rug did the same.

Before the boy could get in her way, Genevieve made straight for the door that seemed to be the source of the dreadful sound.

A giant-sized bed with a tapestried canopy sat at the center of the room, and in the center of the bed was Olga, thrown forward by the force of the appalling coughing. Her face was partly hidden by a white china bowl into which she hacked and spat, her hair, always so shiny in its neat chignon, a dangling mass of sweat-soaked rats’ tails. The bowl was held for her by a young man. It was that barman from the Ritz! He’d waved at Genevieve from a window only yesterday. The one who’d been serving Olga on the day she and Lulu had followed her. No wonder he’d refused to take Olga’s money. What nice boy would take money from his mother, after all?

The windows were wide open, but still the room reeked of sickness, sweet and rotten. A bowl of oranges sat on the bedside table.

The coughing fit began to loosen its grip, and finally it let Olga go. She slumped back against the pillows, her eyes closed, her cheeks the high pink that Genevieve had seen in the faces of other sufferers, most recently Norman Betterson. The boy at her side dabbed at her mouth with a flannel, then soaked a second cloth in a bowl of water and pressed it to her forehead.

Soothed, Olga opened her eyes, clear and glittering, and the trace of a smile appeared on her mouth. She muttered something to the boy in Russian, and he too looked up.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“She’s come to take Paolo away. Haven’t you?” A voice like dead grass in the wind.

“Don’t be silly, Mother.” The boy lifted the cloth from her forehead.