‘To where?’

‘Wherever.’

‘Short visit?’

‘The best kind.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.’

‘Where’s your luggage?’

‘I don’t have any.’

Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, ‘I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.’ She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.

‘It was only half wrong,’ I said. ‘The suicide part was right.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.’

‘Better than a false negative.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said again.

I asked, ‘Do we know who she was?’

‘Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?’

I said, ‘I have no idea.’

She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, ‘These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her headscarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.’

‘Good point,’ she said.

‘And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared.’

‘They kill themselves for raisins?’

‘I’d love to see their faces.’

‘Are you a linguist?’

‘I speak English,’ I said. ‘And French. And why would a woman bomber want virgins anyway? A lot of sacred texts are mistranslated. Especially where virgins are concerned. Even the New Testament, probably. Some people say Mary was a first-time mother, that’s all. From the Hebrew word. Not a virgin. The original writers would laugh, seeing what we made of it all.’