She hesitated. ‘Safer not. I don’t want my husband learning anything, he’s worried about me as it is.’

‘A week, then. But we must make some arrangements then, one way or another. We will be into November soon.’

‘Yes, I know.’ As she spoke she thought, this doesn’t leave time for me to write again. What if I asked Harry for a loan? She knew he had money. But he was a diplomat, it would be dangerous for him—

She forced her mind back to the present. ‘The plan,’ she asked Luis. ‘It is still the same? Agustín helps him escape and I pick him up in Cuenca?’

‘Yes. There may be some way that we can get him civilian clothes, so he will not be so conspicuous. Agustín is looking into that. Then it would be up to you, señora, to get him away and to the embassy.’

‘That might not be so easy. I’ve walked past there, there are civiles outside.’

‘You must resolve that one, señora,’ Luis said with a little smile. He seemed to have lost interest now, it wouldn’t be his problem once Barbara picked Bernie up.

‘I’ll pay you some when we have a firm plan in place, and the rest when it’s all done,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s in all our interests the whole thing goes through.’

He looked at her. ‘You will make sure of that, I know.’

Barbara thought of Harry again. If she could bring Bernie into Madrid, hide him somewhere. She sighed. She became aware of Luis looking at her curiously.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Forgive me asking, señora, but will this matter not have consequences for you and your husband? If Señor Piper reaches the embassy the matter is likely to become public knowledge, surely. At the least, representations will be made to our government. And your husband works with the government, does he not? You said so at our first meeting.’

‘Yes, Luis,’ she said quietly. ‘There may be consequences. I shall have to deal with them.’

He looked at her seriously. ‘You are a brave woman, to put your future at risk.’

She studied him. His face was tired and strained. He wasn’t much more than a boy really, made to deal with awful things too young, like half the men in the world today. ‘What will you and your brother do, Luis, when this is done and your brother gets out of the army?’

He smiled sadly. ‘I have a dream of us fetching my mother from Sevilla, getting somewhere to live in the country near Madrid, and perhaps growing vegetables. I have always liked growing things, and a big city needs vegetables, does it not? And we will all be together again, as a family.’ His face darkened. ‘Family is important to Spaniards, the war split up so many – you who come from England cannot know the pain of it. It is because of that I must do whatever I have to do to bring us together again. Can you understand that, señora?’

‘Yes. I hope you are able to do that.’

‘So do I.’ He bowed his head a moment, closing his eyes, then looked up with a smile. ‘Until next week, señora.’

‘I’ll have the money. One way or another.’

THAT EVENING over dinner Sandy told her he had booked a table at the Ritz for their anniversary the following night.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asked. He still hadn’t forgiven her for forgetting. ‘It’s the most expensive hotel in Madrid.’

‘I know, Sandy. Only, it’s always so full of the Germans and their Italian pals. You know I hate seeing them.’

He smiled. ‘Chance to show the flag.’ She wondered if he had chosen the Ritz deliberately to upset her. She looked at him, remembering his tenderness to her when they first met. Where had it gone? It was her discontent he didn’t like, she realized, her discontent with the life he had chosen for her that had been growing for a long time but had only really emerged since that dinner with Markby.

‘Do you remember that first Christmas after we met?’ he asked her, a hard mocking expression in his eyes.

‘Yes. When you went away on business, and couldn’t come back till after Christmas.’

‘That’s right.’

He smiled. ‘Only I could have. We finalized the deal before Christmas, I could have come back. But I knew that if I stayed away you’d realize how much you needed me. And I was right.’

She stared at him, she felt shocked and then furiously angry. ‘So you manipulated me,’ she said quietly. ‘Manipulated my feelings.’

He looked at her across the table, seriously now. ‘I know what people want, Barbara, I can sense it. It’s a gift, very useful in business. I see below the surface. Sometimes it’s easy. The Jews, for instance, they just want survival, they tremble and shake in their desperation to survive. The people I work with, what they want is usually money, though occasionally it’s something else. Whatever it is I try to help oblige them. You wanted me and you wanted security, only you couldn’t quite bring yourself to see it. I just helped bring that to the surface.’ He inclined his head, raised his glass.

‘And what about you, Sandy? What do you want?’

He smiled. ‘Success, money. Knowing I can cut the mustard, make people give me what I want.’

‘You’re a shit sometimes, Sandy,’ she said. ‘You know that?’

She had never spoken to him like that before and he looked taken aback for a moment. Then his face set.

‘You’ve been letting your appearance go lately, you know. You look a mess. I hope working at that orphanage will help you pull yourself together.’

She felt the words like a blow even as she realized he had chosen them because they would hit her where she was weakest. Something cold and hard came into her mind and she thought, don’t react, the facade needs to be kept up for now. She got up, laying her napkin carefully on the table, and left the room. Her legs were shaking.

THE PSYCHIATRIST was a tall thin man with spectacles and silver hair. He wore a grey pinstripe suit. Bernie hadn’t seen anyone wearing a suit for three and a half years, only the prisoners’ boiler suits and the functional guards’ uniforms, both a drab olive-green.

The doctor had been installed in the room under the comandante’s hut, behind a scratched table brought from the offices above. Bernie guessed he hadn’t been told what the room was used for. It was just like Aranda’s macabre sense of humour to put him here.

Agustín, one of the guards, had been waiting for Bernie when his work detail returned from the quarry, with orders to take him to the comandante. ‘It is nothing to worry about, not trouble,’ he whispered as they crossed the square. Bernie had nodded his thanks. Agustín was one of the better ones, an untidy young man who liked a quiet life. The sun was low and a cold wind blew down from the mountains. Bernie kept track of the days and knew this was the first of November; winter was almost here. The shepherds were starting to bring their flocks down from the high pastures. Working on the quarry detail was hard but at least you got some sense of the rhythms of the outside world. He shivered, envying Agustín the heavy poncho he wore over his uniform.

Comandante Aranda sat behind his desk. He stared up at Bernie with his hard eyes, a humorous expression on his long handsome face with its luxuriant black moustache.

‘Ah, Piper,’ he said. ‘I have a visitor for you.’

‘¿Señor?’ Bernie stood rigidly to attention, the way Aranda expected. A spasm of pain went through his arm; his old wound hurt after a day moving rocks.

‘Do you remember in San Pedro de Cardena, you were evaluated by a psychiatrist?’

‘Si, señor.’ It had been a bizarre interlude, a joke in hell. San Pedro was an abandoned medieval monastery outside Burgos. Thousands of Republican prisoners had been crammed in there after the Jarama battle. One day they had been given thick questionnaires to fill in. They were told it was for a project about the psychology of Marxist fanaticism. Two hundred questions, varying from his reaction to certain colours to his degree of patriotism.