2

Miami

Magdalena Torrente crossed Calle Ocho, the main street of Little Havana. She looked up once at the sky, which was clouding toward darkness and heavy with the possibility of warm October rain, then she headed west. She passed Eduardo’s furniture store, a bright island of art deco sofas and lamps, an expensive anomaly in this neighbourhood of farmacias and little cafés selling café cubano in paper cups. She ignored the approving comments and whistles of men who stood outside the cafés and took time out from their constant preoccupation – how to assassinate that barbudo hijo de puta, Fidel Castro – to register and appreciate the beautiful, mature woman passing quickly in the humid twilight.

She made her way through traffic at an intersection where the air smelled of coffee and fried foods, and then turned right, entering a narrow street darker than Calle Ocho. Here windows were boarded and barred and small houses had the appearance of undergoing a siege; in this city of easy death and abundant drugs and murderous addicts who thought burglary every doper’s birthright, it was a very real impression. She’d parked her car several blocks away at the Malaga Restaurant, thinking it best to move on foot in case her licence plate was noticed and remembered by one of the spies Fernando Garrido was always lecturing her about. Now, given the hazards of the district, she wondered if she’d made the right decision. The car would have been some kind of protection. Without it she felt vulnerable, despite the gun she carried in the pocket of her leather jacket.

From an open upstairs window a man shouted down at her “Hey, hey bebe,” and then laughed in a fractured drunken way – “ka ha ka ha,” a sound that dissolved in a cough like a baby’s rattle. Latin music, fast, tropical, overheated, played from a radio in an open doorway where several shadowy figures, lost in the ether of drugs, stared out at her. She hurried now, pausing only when she reached the Casa de la Media Noche, a restaurant that specialised in Cuban food. It was said to serve the best langosta enchiladas in all Miami. Through the window she could see a crowd of diners, waiters bustling back and forth, busboys hurrying with carafes of ice water. Festive Cuban music was playing loudly on a jukebox.

Magdalena Torrente stepped into the alley that ran behind the restaurant. She knocked on the back door, which was opened by a tall man of about seventy. He wore a panama hat and a crisp white suit of the kind called a dril ciel, made from an Irish linen so special that only one mill in the Republic of Ireland still supplied it. Fernando Garrido took her hand and kissed it, a brushing of lips on flesh, a simple courtesy in a world grown weary of good manners and civilised behaviour. Then he led her toward a box-like room without windows, where cans of tomatoes and bags of beans formed pyramids in the middle of the floor.

“There’s no place for you to sit, Magdalena,” Garrido said. He spoke Cuban Spanish, with its generous vowel sounds.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

He shrugged, and she thought there was some small despair in the gesture, that of a man disappointed by the directions of his life. Once, in another world, Fernando Garrido had been the mayor of Santiago, the second largest city in Cuba. He’d had political ambitions. He’d dreamed vibrant dreams of replacing the sequence of malignant dictatorships, those dreadful reefs on which Cuba had foundered and rotted, with democracy and social justice. And then his notions had been overtaken by Castro’s revolution, which he’d supported at first in a wary manner, more out of relief at the end of the dictatorship of Batista than any great faith in the stated ideals of Fidel, whom he’d never trusted and personally didn’t like.

In July 1960, one year after the Revolution – which had accomplished nothing except to trade one set of gangsters for another – Fernando Garrido had been arrested by Castro’s security forces. He was charged with the sort of “crime” so common in Communist societies, undefined and unfounded, absurd and yet sinister. It was a “crime” devised by dull Marxist imaginations and framed in such a vague way that it could never be grasped by its “perpetrator”. This kind of nebulous offence was often called “counter-revolutionary”, a term that had any meaning the regime attached to it. So far as Garrido could tell, his only misdemeanour was to have been a politician during the reign of the dictator Batista. Guilt by association – and for that he’d been imprisoned for seven long years on the Isle of Pines, severely beaten, given electric shocks, then released and expelled from the country without explanation! The experience had left him with a tremor in his hands, a recurring nightmare of violence, and a hatred of Castro that was acute and constant, like shrapnel in his heart.

Garrido moved to the centre of the room, where a lightbulb hung from a old cord. To Magdalena Torrente he looked like a plantation owner in an old sepia picture, benign yet strict, generous but careful with his kindness. He took off his hat. His hair, dyed an incongruous brown and brilliantined, an old man’s vanity, glistened under the light like a waxy skullcap. He had lived for almost thirty years in exile and the weight of that expulsion showed on his face. But his dreams, which would not lie still and let him savour in peace the fruits of his thriving business, were still powerful. He wanted the one thing all exiles crave and few achieve – a triumphant return to the motherland, a vindication.

“This neighbourhood,” he said. He appeared to lose his train of thought a moment. “It gets worse every day. Drugs. Violence. I remember when it was a good place to have a business. Now it gets too dangerous.”

Magdalena didn’t want to listen to Garrido’s regular complaints about how the massive influx of Cubans from Mariel in 1980 had altered the fabric of life in Miami for the worse. She already knew how Castro had shipped out all his undesirables, his criminals and addicts, his deranged and schizophrenic, and unloaded them upon an angry Florida. She already knew how drugs and murder had poisoned the Cuban community. She wanted to pick up what she’d come for and leave, but something about Fernando Garrido always made her linger. She knew what it was: he was a link to her father, the last one left to her. The thought made her feel lonely for a moment.

Garrido lit a small cigar and blew a stream of smoke up at the lightbulb. “Did anyone follow you here?”

It was his regular question. She shook her head. Her long black hair was thick and fibrous. “Nobody followed me.”

“You’re a beautiful woman and very noticeable, Magdalena. You can never be sure. Castro’s agents infiltrate very well. They’re good at anything underhand. Never underestimate them.”

She said she didn’t. She told him firmly that she didn’t take chances. He smoked quietly, surveying her face, watching her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. She knew from his expression what he was going to say, and she was anxious to avoid the long, flowery comparisons with her dead mother. Garrido would reminisce about the old life in Cuba when they’d all been very young, himself and Humberto Torrente and the lovely Oliva, oh, they’d been a great threesome, an inseparable trio going everywhere together, aieee, beaches and restaurants and nightclubs. Garrido’s Latin sentimentality, his ornate phrases, irritated Magdalena because the past wasn’t what mattered to her any more. Then Garrido would always say the same thing half-jokingly: Your mother’s only fault was she married the wrong man in Humberto. Honourable as Humberto was, Oliva should have listened more closely to my entreaties. And he’d smile and kiss Magdalena’s brow, and sometimes there would be tears in his dark brown eyes.

She looked at her watch. She had hours before she was due at the airport but she wanted to give an impression of haste. There was laughter from the restaurant; the music grew louder.

“You’re anxious to leave,” he said.

She nodded her head, glanced again at her watch. The small room was stifling. She watched him walk in the direction of some bare metal shelves where two pistols lay side by side. He removed a section of shelf in a very deliberate way, then set it on the floor.

“My secret place,” he said.

The wall had a concealed panel built into it. Garrido slid it aside, reached into the black space and took out a briefcase. “Before I give you this, I must ask a question you may find unpardonable,” he said. “Do you really trust him? After all, our association with him goes back four years. One might be pardoned for expecting results very soon.”

A tiny night moth fluttered against Magdalena’s lips and she brushed it gently aside. “The question’s perfectly understandable, Fernando, and the answer’s simple. I trust him.” How could she not? she wondered. If you loved, you had to trust: one was a basic corollary of the other. A fact of life. “Besides, something this intricate takes time.”

Garrido tapped his fingernails on his front dentures, a click click click that indicated thought. “Do I detect something else? Something a little more than trust? If so, I caution you to go carefully.”

“I’m always careful.” She raised a hand to her hair. His insight surprised her. Was she that obvious? Did she wear her feelings like a necklace? She was a little embarrassed. She’d always imagined she knew how to conceal herself from the world. But Fernando had been familiar with her since childhood; he’d become accustomed to reading her expressions. Defensively she said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but my private life isn’t really any of your business, Fernando.”

“You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t try to counsel you. If you trust him, that’s good enough for me.” Garrido stepped closer to her. He pressed the handle of the case into the palm of her hand. Even though there was nobody else present in the room, the gesture was surreptitious. It was force of habit. Garrido had spent years living in fear of Castro’s spies in Miami, years raising funds for nocturnal raids and acts of sabotage inside Cuba, blowing up power stations and electric pylons, dynamiting naval installations and airfields, or spraying beach-front tourist resorts with guns fired from sea-going craft. He’d participated personally in many of these manoeuvres until his nerve had gone. It was a game for the young and valiant.

Garrido inclined his face in a rather formal way, pressing his lips upon her cheek, an avuncular kiss. She smelled mint and tobacco and something else, something alcoholic, on his breath. She held the briefcase casually, as if it contained nothing of any importance. Then she stepped toward the door, but Garrido caught her by the wrist. His skin was damp.

“We have enemies,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“Even among our friends. Remember that.”

Garrido dropped his hand and backed away from her, smiling for the first time now. His dentures, the colour of his suit, gleamed. “But I don’t need to tell you anything, do I? You’re not a child any more. I have to keep reminding myself you’re not Humberto’s little girl.”

Humberto’s little girl. Garrido had a good heart, a heart as big as Cuba itself, but he could never overcome his old-fashioned patronising manner. Wouldn’t he ever grasp the fact that she was thirty-nine years old, for God’s sake? That she was dedicated to the same cause as himself and had an important voice in it? That the role she played in the political schemes of the exile community here in Miami was just as important as his own?

“I haven’t fit that description for a very long time, Fernando.”

Garrido was very apologetic. “The trouble with growing old is that you don’t want things to change. You want everybody to stay the same age because it means you don’t grow old yourself. It’s a nice folly. Forgive me for it.”

Magdalena reached the door. Well-mannered as ever, Garrido opened it for her. In the dark hallway a massive figure emerged from the shadows. Carlos, a taciturn giant from Las Tunas Province, Garrido’s watchdog. He wore a shoulder-holster beneath his dark jacket. He moved slowly and quietly, his musculature evident under his clothes; a powerful man, sleek and silent. Magdalena thought there was something a little spooky about Carlos. He had the look of a man who has been involved in more than a few premature deaths.

“Where did you park, Magdalena?” Garrido asked.

“At the Malaga Restaurant.”

“Carlos will escort you there.”

She was about to say she had a gun, she didn’t need protection, but she didn’t utter a word. Carlos would follow her anyway. Garrido wasn’t going to allow anybody to carry that briefcase through the streets of Little Havana without an armed escort.

She smiled her best smile, which dazzled Garrido, then she raised a hand as she left. Garrido, seemingly frozen in the doorway of the small square room, stood without moving for a long time. He listened to the silences that followed Magdalena’s departure. Then he took a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and lit it.

Garrido, once known in politics as El Ganador, the winner, closed his eyes. He sucked smoke into the back of his throat and remembered how it had felt to be that man of victory. The man who controlled Santiago de Cuba in the early 1950s, the young reformer – ah, the golden naïvety of those years – who wanted to change a festering system. All that sweet energy, that devotion to his calling. How remote it all seemed to him suddenly, and Cuba so very far away; and yet, as if affected by some untreatable malaria of the heart, he could still shiver when he thought of going back to his homeland.

He shut the door of the room. He thought about Magdalena out there in the darkness, the long trip in front of her. Jesus! The way she trusted! He hadn’t trusted anything in that uncluttered way for years! Nor would he do so now. Especially now. He would do precisely what had to be done, what should have been done a long time ago; and Magdalena might never need to know.

He listened to the music that played on the jukebox and prayed Magdalena would take the same kind of care with her heart that she would with the contents of the case.

Magdalena Torrente drove her grey BMW from Calle Ocho to the Rickenbacker Causeway and then Key Biscayne. Here, on the shores of Biscayne Bay, were opulent houses protected by elaborate security systems and regular patrols which echoed the same state of siege that existed in the poorer neighbourhoods of Miami. It was as if the siege had simply risen several notches on the social scale, and the differences between Key Biscayne and areas like Little Havana were finally only cosmetic.

At eight-thirty she parked in the drive of the house she’d inherited from Humberto Torrente. Surrounded by lush palm and bougainvillaea and rubber trees, it was located some yards inland from the shore, where a motorboat was tied to a wooden slip. Magdalena unlocked the front door, went inside, crossed the tiled entrance hall, passed under a large skylight filled with stars. Across the living-room, an enormous bay window framed dark water. There was an unobstructed view of Miami, lights and neon, approaching aircraft, traffic on the silvery causeway: a glittering city trapped under a canopy of humidity.

She climbed the stairs. Her bedroom was plain. She had no taste for the bright shades, such as the gold curtains and red rugs, you often found in Hispanic homes; nor were there any of the customary religious artifacts, the gory Christs, the saints with their cartoon placidity, the prim Virgins, the whole panoply of blood and pain, chastity and redemption.

The only decoration in the bedroom was a black and white picture depicting Humberto Torrente in the uniform of a Colonel in the Cuban Air Force, taken in 1956 at some social function at the Havana Yacht Club. At his side stood his wife Oliva, dark-haired and exquisite, in a white cocktail dress. They looked prosperous, healthy, in love, and yet there seemed to be a glaze across their smiles, a sadness half-hidden, as if they knew that within six years of the snapshot both of them would be dead.

Magdalena gazed at the photograph for a time – 1956: she’d been five years old then. She was ten when her parents died their separate deaths. For her whole adolescence she was fated to a life of guardians, some of them nuns in boarding-schools, others widowed aunts in Miami Beach. She’d spent her fifteenth year in Garrido’s custody at his big house in Coral Gables. Time and again he had explained his view of Cuban history, one of endless struggle, endless betrayal. He insisted that Humberto’s death captured in miniature the tragedy of Cuba. Hadn’t Humberto struggled for liberty with all his passion? And hadn’t he been betrayed in the end?

Magdalena didn’t buy all the way into Garrido’s melodrama. Where Cuban politics were concerned, she tried to temper her passion with a certain objectivity. But it was the passion, inherited from Humberto, which had led her restlessly during her twenties and early thirties from one exiled group to another – to those with arsenals stashed in the Everglades and others who had bomb factories in South Miami and others still with safe houses in the Keys where semi-automatic weapons were converted to the real thing. She’d enjoyed the feel of guns in her hands and the idea of belonging to a secret army – the elaborate security precautions and the passwords and the intensity of the young men who trained with the kind of total concentration that made them good soldiers though poor lovers. She’d made love to many of them, and couldn’t differentiate one from another now, those quick, silent boys, all of whom put the death of Castro above complete enjoyment of life. It was as if they were destined to live every day of their lives with a shadow of their own making across the face of the sun. So long as Fidel lived, there would always be this eclipse.

After ten years of association with one exile movement or another, Magdalena Torrente’s experience of direct, anti-Castro action had consisted of an effort to dynamite crates of Soviet weapons in the heavily guarded Havana harbour (there were no weapons, only boxes of agricultural machinery; intelligence had been wrong), and the delivery of explosives to underground members in Pinar del Rio. She had flown the twin-engine Piper herself, a skill she’d learned from exiled pilots, while her three companions dropped the supplies by parachute to men and women waiting in darkened tobacco fields below.

Both sorties into Cuba had been thrilling, both heavy with the clammy menace of capture and death. Both had brought Magdalena closer to an understanding of what the cause meant. It was no mere abstraction, no games played in bomb factories, no simple rhetoric of freedom. It was life and death, and in particular her own life and death, that the cause demanded. And yet these adventures lacked something. She had the feeling of futility that might have dogged a person attacking an elephant with a can of mosquito repellent. One could sting Castro with nocturnal assaults, but they were never fatal.

In her middle thirties she’d realised that to be a soldier was not enough in itself. You had to be closer to the centre, to the place where strategic decisions were made. You had to be near the power. To fire weapons in the Everglades or assemble guns in the Keys (from where, frustratingly, you could practically smell Havana on the wind) was useful; but useful wasn’t enough. The ability to fire a gun or fly surreptitiously into Cuba were not going to keep a dream alive. So she had entered the political world of Fernando Garrido and his cronies. It was a tiresome group at times, one that squabbled endlessly in the Cuban way, but influential and rich and committed without question to the destruction of Fidel.

Magdalena had won a reputation in these political circles as an energetic voice, somebody to be listened to, someone whose role was less illusory, and perhaps more practical, than knowing the parts of an M-16 rifle. Here, too, she came to realise she had deeper ambitions than to scurry in and out of Cuba under cover of the dark. And so she attended committee meetings, and she whispered in the ears of powerful figures in the exile community, and she listened to the pulses that beat in the darkness and smelled the breezes that blew through Miami and tracked their direction – and she detected in herself an immeasurable impatience. She wanted things to change in Cuba quickly. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Now.

When Castro finally fell …

She touched the photograph of her parents, fingertips on glass, tentative, loving. She remembered her father as a serious man whose rare displays of levity were all the more precious for their scarcity. Sombre, hard-working, Humberto Torrente had been dedicated to a patriotic ideal. He’d chosen the wrong way to realise it, that was all. His mistake was to place all his hopes on American military assistance and he’d died for that false expectation in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, the B-26 he piloted shot down by Castro’s artillery over San Blas in Cuba. What Humberto failed to realise was that outside forces alone could never have unseated Castro at that time. The Americans, led by a vacillating Kennedy, had chickened out at the Bay of Pigs, withholding air support and naval artillery, leaving Cuban freedom fighters stranded on beaches. No, outside assaults could be useful up to a point, but the successful overthrow of Castro could come only from within Cuba, from men who hated the whole suffocating regime and who had the means and the courage to replace it with a free society.

Magdalena’s mother, Oliva, hadn’t been interested in Humberto’s goals. Her own world was limited, constructed as it was around husband, home and child. The way Magdalena had turned out would have shocked her. What good was a woman who hadn’t borne children? who didn’t know how to cook? who didn’t have a man to keep house for? What good was this kind of woman?

Shortly before Christmas 1961, Oliva Torrente, unhinged by her husband’s death, swallowed an overdose of barbiturates. As if to emphasise how little she cared for a world without Humberto, she’d elected the sin of suicide over the burden of living a widow’s life.

Magdalena considered the past an irrelevant encumbrance. Only the future mattered, only the task ahead. She turned away from the photograph. She took the gun from her pocket, removed the leather jacket, locked the weapon in her bedside table. She put Garrido’s briefcase on the bed, opened a closet, removed a full-length suede coat. She placed the chocolate-coloured coat beside the case, then opened the case. The money was tightly bundled. There were stacks of hundred dollar bills. Under these were other stacks in one thousand dollar denominations.

The total was close to a million dollars, collected throughout the Cuban community from donations made by respectable doctors and lawyers and bank officials, cash skimmed from the bolito games and jai-alai betting and gathered quietly in Cuban bars, illicit money from drug dealers whose astronomical profits had endowed them with an indiscriminating sense of charity. It came from all manner of sources and was amassed, as it had been for the last four years, in the Casa de la Media Noche by Fernando Garrido, head of the group that called itself the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Cuba, an organisation whose wealthy members preferred anonymity to public notoriety.

In a sense the cash was dream money, the money of ancient pains and grievances, dollars thrown up by the need for vengeance against a system that had broken families and plundered property, capital dampened by the blood of those who’d already been martyred in a cause growing old and impatient. The cash was destined for Cuba, there to be used by the democratic underground movement for its operating expenses, which included illegal radio transmitters, pamphlets and newspapers. It bought food and guns for those obliged to hide in the mountains. It clothed and fed the children of these fugitives. It also purchased explosives used in acts of internal sabotage. Counter-revolution was an expensive business.

Magdalena undid the buttons of the coat. The lining, specially prepared for her by a seamstress in Hialeah, was divided into a series of pockets, each of which would hold a large number of bank-notes. It was skilful tailoring. There was no way a casual observer could tell the coat contained anything other than the body of the person who wore it; a smuggler’s garment, designed for one purpose only.

Magdalena transferred notes from the briefcase to the lining of the suede coat. It took her twenty minutes to empty the case. She tried the coat on: weighty but tolerable. She looked at herself in a mirror. She didn’t appear in any way different, no artificial plumpness, no unseemly bulges. She would be nothing more than a beautiful black-haired woman travelling alone on a long flight. Her looks – the way her thick hair fell mysteriously on her shoulders and how the lean line of her jaw emphasised a delightful mouth, the eyes that were knowingly dark and secretive, like those of a torch-singer – would draw attention as they always did. But the coat wouldn’t cause anybody a second glance, which was all that mattered.

From the closet she removed a small suitcase she’d packed that morning. She went down the stairs, turned off the lights. Outside, the night was heavy with moisture. Over the Rickenbacker Causeway silver lightning flashed, then thunder crackled as if the sky were a vast radio receiver picking up static. Magdalena stepped inside her car, backed it out of the drive.

Across the street, Carlos sat in a black Pontiac parked under a twisted rubber tree. When she drove past she gave him a thumbs up sign, then for amusement tried to lose him in traffic, but Carlos, with his watchful black eyes and unsmiling features, was an expert at bird-dogging. Slipping coolly through traffic, he managed to stay directly behind her all the way to Miami International Airport.

Norfolk, England

It was dawn, and cold, when the girl rode the chestnut mare to the top of the rise. The ground was hard with frost and the horse’s hoofs thumped solidly. The animal’s breath hung on the chill air, tiny clouds turned red by the first touch of sunlight. The girl rode with all the confidence of someone who has been mounting horses since early childhood. This particular mare was a special favourite, a big mellow horse that loved to be ridden.

The girl reined the animal at the top of the rise and looked out across the countryside. This corner of England, more than a hundred miles from London, was almost exclusively flat, fields stretching toward a horizon that seemed very far away. Here and there isolated antique villages of the kind so adored by tourists interrupted the monotony of the furrows; occasionally a marsh or pond seeped up through meadowland and created a watery diversion. The girl, whose name was Stephanie Brough, had lived all her fourteen years in this vicinity. The nearest cities were Norwich to the north and Ipswich to the south, and in between, as she sometimes phrased it, was sheer bloody boring nothing.

She dismounted in a stand of thin birch trees. The rise sloped down to bare fields that would become muddy as soon as the frost melted. She liked all this – riding in the early dawn, avoiding the awful breakfasts with her parents and that twit of a brother Tim (who sometimes flicked pellets of soggy Corn Flakes at her when he thought nobody was looking; Timmy Twit, she thought. Everybody expected him to go up to Oxford in two years! He couldn’t find his way to the bloody loo without a map! And her parents doted on him in such a sickening way: Tim’s so clever, oooh, fawn and scrape). She liked the huge secrecy, the feeling that the world belonged only to her at this time of morning before school.

A casual onlooker would have seen a slim, pretty girl, trim in her blue jeans and white cotton sweater, her small breasts barely evident, her yellow hair cut very close to her scalp in a fashion that was almost boyish. But nobody was watching Stephanie Brough, not at this hour of the morning.

She gazed down the slope. She had a clear view of the place she’d come to see. About three hundred yards from where she stood was the whitewashed farmhouse that belonged to a family called Yardley. Old Man Yardley had died last year and his sons, delighted they didn’t have to work the land for the old tyrant, had upped and left for London. (Such smart buggers, she thought.) Ever since then the place had been empty. Steffie had supposed it would always remain that way – who’d want to rent or buy that old dump with the black fields surrounding it? It was isolated and rundown and the willow trees that drooped around it made it look creepy.

Yesterday, though, to her great surprise, something was different. During her morning ride she’d seen a dark-blue Range Rover outside the house. Intrigued by the possibility of some new happening in a part of the world where fresh occurrences were rare, she’d come back to see if the vehicle was still there, or perhaps even catch sight of the new occupant. In this rustic environment information was a prize, something to be seized then passed along to the next person, like a great favour. Oh, by the way, there’s some new people at the old Yardley place. You didn’t know?

The vehicle was parked where it had been the day before. But the house still looked disappointingly empty, the windows dark and bare. A crow was scratching around in the soil. Leaves, fallen from the willows, had become piled against the east wall of the property. It was all rather desolate. Steffie enjoyed little mysteries, and, in her mind, the dead appearance of the old house was exactly that – something to be solved. Why was there a Range Rover and no sign of life? Why was there no smoke from the chimney, no dog in the yard? Everybody had dogs around here.

She wanted a closer look. She left the mare chewing on a clump of grass, then moved down the incline a little way. She stopped after a few yards, uneasy at the idea of trespassing on other people’s property. Divided between her natural curiosity and her sense of intrusion, she wasn’t sure if she should go any further. But really, what harm could it possibly do to pop down there and just sniff around? If anybody discovered her she’d just tell them she lived on her father’s horse-breeding farm three miles away, and then introduce herself as the next-door neighbour – practically.

She was halfway down when she heard the noise – a penetrating crack. Her first startled reaction was that a jet from an airbase nearby had shattered the sound barrier, a common occurrence round here. But then she realised the noise was closer than that and more focused: it had come from the house. The raven, cawing harshly, rose in the clear air.

If it hadn’t been a supersonic plane –

She suddenly realised what had caused the sound. She turned back up the rise, moving quickly, her heartbeat rapid. The noise had faded but she could still hear it perfectly inside her head. Crack. Just like that. When she reached the top of the slope she glanced one last time down at the house.

The building was as lifeless as it had been before, the windows opaque in the chill dawn.

But somebody had to be inside. Somebody had to have fired the gun. Guns did not go off by themselves. Unless there were spirits, and Steffie was too sophisticated to believe in anything like that.

She rode the mare hard between the birches, intrigued more than ever, and afraid in a way that was quite new to her and strangely interesting.

Crack.

She’d come back tomorrow. She couldn’t leave the mystery alone.