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Whatever had disturbed her was not repeated. The half-expected litany of despair had not yet begun. If Grant was having nightmares, he was keeping them to himself.
    But something prevented her resuming her interrupted sleep: an echo in her mind like a distant shriek, insubstantial as windsong but insistent, incapable of being ignored. Its very remoteness, its lack of identity, called to her like a lost child so that at last, grudgingly but without any real option, she pushed the quilt off her legs and went to investigate. She started with Grant, even though what she had almost heard had not sounded like him, because he was her charge.
    His light was on, a ribbon of brightness under his door. He must have heard it too, she reasoned, entering without a knock from force of habit alone.
    She saw Joel Grant sprawled on the floor, a jumble of bare arms and pyjama legs, his dark hair tumbled in his white face, and a big man in a raincoat bending over him.
    Danny Vanderbilt had not allowed for the baby alarm. It was a rogue card. He had had one enormous piece of luck tonight, finding the address he had acquired for Nathan Shola occupied not by that large, tough and sneaky warrior but by the altogether easier target he had intended Shola to lead him to—not voluntarily, Vanderbilt was an optimist but not a fool, but perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps there might have been old letters lying about the house—so it would be unreasonable of him to resent the unforeseeable reverse which had now brought him face to face with the other tenant of the house.
    He knew she was there, of course. He had established which rooms were in use before entering the building, and his first act on the inside was to find out who was using them. In the master bedroom the faint beam of his burglar’s torch picked out the girl, sleeping deeply and rhythmically, on her stomach with the quilt slipped down to her waist. Neither the creak of the door nor the glow of the torch disturbed her; she looked set to sleep until morning.
    In the other bedroom a man was sleeping, fitfully, the sheet tangled about his legs. Vanderbilt knew it was not Shola, even in the dark the skin was the wrong colour, but with his face half buried in the pillow Vanderbilt could not see who he was. He thought it did not matter: if Shola was not in the house the person he wanted to talk to was the girl. This was her place: her name was over the bell, her mail was on the hall table, her tights were drying over the bath. If Shola used it as a forwarding address, she would know where he was. Vanderbilt’s only interest in the man was to ensure that he did not interfere while she was telling him.
    He moved over to the bed, weighing up how to hit him efficiently from the awkward angle, and as he stood there the sleeping man moaned and twisted onto his back. A bar of moonlight admitted by the imperfectly drawn curtains fell across his face and diagonally down his body. His body was pocked with small marks Vanderbilt had seen before. Startled, he looked at the man’s face and he had seen that before too. A flash of the torch confirmed it.
    â€œWell, I’m damned,” murmured Vanderbilt.
    Joel Grant woke with a cry. It was instinct that woke him rather than Vanderbilt’s looming presence, his spying torch or his startled, whispered words: an instinct for danger whetted by three years in the bush and honed to a painful edge by two months under interrogation. The big man with the white moustache had sent for him often in the night but never once had he needed to be roused. The footsteps outside, the turn of the lock, had torn him bodily from sleep and left him waiting achingly in a corner with his legs drawn up to his chest, even when he could not stand from exhaustion. Those stretched seconds between hearing their feet and feeling their hands were almost the worst of the whole bad time; at least, so far as he could remember.
    Weeks in a Harare hospital had healed his