Claire describes him, how old he would be now, how he used to work at the bar at Hotel Oceanis. The woman looks disbelieving. She pulls out her mobile phone. Its screen shows a man with a lopsided smile, his hairy arm thrown around the woman, and the woman’s daughter, younger then, perched on his lap. ‘Is that him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Claire says, and she doesn’t. It could be him. How would she tell? Who remembers the soldiers? ‘It’s such a long time ago,’ she says. ‘I’d need to ask him about it.’

The woman sighs. ‘He’s on the mainland. Oh, it’s such a shame. I want to know now. Did you two have a thing?’ She is unworried, even amused, which adds to Claire’s misgivings. Kostas’s daughter, if that is who she is, watches from the door of the taverna with solemn curiosity.

‘My friend had a crush on him,’ Claire says. ‘But I don’t think anything happened.’

*

They didn’t do it in her room – they took her to the olive grove instead. That much Claire was allowed. Jane made her tend to the wounds on her back, bright red scratches and deeper cuts, something adult and official about it, like the proof of a ritual punishment. Claire washed them as gently as she could in the bath, then picked out the splinters with a pair of silver tweezers and applied the closest thing she could find to antiseptic, which was a cream she had brought for her spots. She helped Jane find something suitable to wear. But she couldn’t persuade her to tell. ‘No,’ Jane said, her whole body rigid, and Claire didn’t ask her again.

*

With the taste of retsina sour in her mouth, she lies down in the dark but cannot sleep. The bed tilts. She crosses the room and puts the lamp back on. Its glow picks out the gold in the portrait of the saint. A male saint, this one, a young military man, dressed in fish-scale armour, with a red cloak tied around his collarbones. His face is small and fierce, his hair moulded curls, and he carries a thin spear across his body that points to the gold expanse of the sky. Had it been a woman, she might have considered offering some kind of a prayer.

‘How was it?’ asks Demetra. She has driven straight to Piraeus from work; she looks strange in her neat blue shirt. Claire shrugs, and she laughs, not unkindly. ‘I told you,’ she says. ‘That place is a rock. Athens you will love.’

That night, back in Demetra’s sister’s bedroom, Claire unfolds the laptop and searches for Saint Sofia. She finds herself on Wikipedia again, but there is only a small amount of information, and little that she did not already know: a date, a town, a prayer.