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watched a succession of bad films until they bored her to sleep.
    On Sunday, she spent three hours fiddling with the phone and the computer, and felt an absurd sense of triumph when the phone finally delivered the primary-colour letters of a search-engine logo on to the laptop’s screen. She tried to log in to her e-mail, and couldn’t remember the password. She read the news and forgot most of it straight away. She searched for stories about the attack at the villa and was surprised how few there were. Of those, only one gave more than the briefest facts, an article from the Montenegrin magazine Monitor . One line in particular stood out.
    Police have categorically refuted the hypothesis that a prominent criminal organisation may have been involved .
    Hypothesis? Whose hypothesis? Try as she might, it was the only reference she could find to it.
    That night, nightmares took her back to the villa. She was running down the colonnade, statues smashing and shattering around her. The gunman stood over her, pistol raised. She stared up into his cruel face – only suddenly it was Michael’s face, mouthing words she couldn’t hear.
    The gun went off. She woke in a cold sweat, the skin under her bandages itching so badly she wanted to tear them off, even if it meant she’d bleed to death. She snatched her new phone off the bedside table and stared at the clock, willing the minutes to pass.
    First thing Monday morning, she dialled the number on the card.
    ‘Hi, Mark, it’s Abby. From Kosovo.’
    ‘Right. How are you?’
    ‘Fine. Really well.’ Never let them pity you . Then, rushing it out: ‘Can I come and see you? At the office?’
    A pause. He doesn’t want to see me , Abby thought. All that concern, it’s just diplomacy. What he’s paid for .
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘When?’
    He must have heard the desperate edge sharpening her voice. ‘Come by this afternoon.’
    The sepulchral walls of the palace of Whitehall loomed large over King Charles Street. Modern buildings might rise many times higher, but they lacked the scale, the knack the Stuart architects had of dwarfing a visitor. Abby walked through the vast triple gate to the Foreign Office, submitted her bag for a search and gave her name at reception. A camera on the wall swivelled round and took her picture. A machine spat out a temporary pass. She locked her phone in a small locker and sat with the other supplicants and plaintiffs, waiting for Mark to come down and rescue her.
    ‘Sorry.’ He was always apologising, though he never seemed contrite. He led her up to the third floor, and left her in a glassed-in meeting room while he fetched tea. When he closed the door behind him, she heard the click of a latch; a red light came on on the panel next to it.
    She peered out between the frosted bars etched on the window. Her department had moved since she was last in London, and the new layout had no desk for her. One more thing taken away. She felt as if her whole life was a jigsaw, that someone was dismantling it piece by piece and throwing it in a box. She looked for her boss, but couldn’t find her.
    ‘Where’s Francesca?’ she asked Mark, when he returned with two cups of civil service-issue tea.
    ‘She’s at a conference in Bucharest. She told me to tell you whatever you need to know.’
    ‘When can I come back to work?’
    He pulled out his teabag and tossed it in the bin. ‘Sorry. Above my paygrade.’
    And what is your paygrade? His card said Office of Balkan Liaison, but she’d never heard of that.
    ‘I want to come back,’ she insisted. ‘The doctors said it’ll help my recovery.’
    He looked as if he believed her – or at least as if he wanted her to think so. ‘You’ve been on secondment for eighteen months. And before that, you didn’t have a London job for five years. They’ll find you something to do soon enough.’
    He gave a reassuring smile, which, eight years her junior, couldn’t help but patronise her. Abby gave a glassy