Paloma stopped outside a set of black panelled double doors – they were vast, at least ten feet high – and Marina listened as she gave a series of knocks in sequence, like a code.

A moment later the door opened and a young woman peered out. ‘Oh good, you’re back. We lost sight of you in the crowd.’

‘Hey,’ Paloma said, pulling off her cap and tossing it onto a table in the entrance hall, before striding through into another room. Hesitantly, Marina followed after her, seeing how the girl simply stared. Marina nodded cautiously but the girl said nothing, as though it wasn’t her place to pass comment.

They walked. Marina heard the door close behind her, the girl’s footsteps just behind her own, her gaze raking over Marina’s jagged, jaded appearance. It had been nine days since she had last bathed and she hadn’t slept or even sat on a soft surface in all that time either, unless the mail sack on the train counted. Her food pack had had to suffice for a pillow for the first few days – lumpy though it had been – but once she had finished her supplies, it had been as comfortable to sleep on as a napkin.

But tired as she was, she felt wired right now, her body on high alert as she took in every detail of the deceptively lavish apartment – the deeply architraved doorways two men wide, the cornice details on the high ceilings, the Versailles panelled floors. Wasn’t this everything she had just run from? Escaped?

She turned into the drawing room, or rather, what had been the drawing room, for only a solitary crystal chandelier still remained. Hanging low from the ceiling – albeit its glittering light long since diminished by thick layers of dust – it stood as a token of the belle époque world that had once gently beat within these walls. Several dead plants stood skeletal in their pots; the walls were rimmed with the outlines of Old Masters now removed to new pastures. Marina had grown up in rooms exactly such as this. She didn’t even need to close her eyes to envisage the parties that had been held here – christenings and Christmases and birthdays, women in beautiful dresses that skimmed the parquet floors. She knew these rooms. She knew this one.

Now, though, it wasn’t so much a haven as a hive, some sort of headquarters with long industrial tables set up with papers and, on the back wall, a giant map of Spain. Several smaller desks were set by the windows, ugly filing cabinets pressed against the shutters.

A middle-aged woman was sitting at a typewriter, typing fast, the tat-tat- tat of the keys punctuating the low murmur of intense conversation: two men poring over something in a folder and arguing amongst themselves as they jabbed at a photograph.

‘Hey.’ Paloma’s voice was assertive, and Marina understood she was a leader here – although of what, she didn’t yet know.