My arm was getting numb but I didn't move. I wanted her to go on sleeping for as long as she could, dreaming of God knew what. The worst wasn't over yet, I knew that.

The next time she woke up she began shaking all over and I held her more tightly, telling her it was all right, though of course it wasn't. Then the sobbing came and she tried to stop it, burying her face against me while her whole body shook and the tears began falling onto my hand.

'Let it come,' I said, 'don't hold it in.'

It helped, I think; she was making more noise now. A stewardess came over with a box of Kleenex and I pulled out a handful.

'Is there anything she needs?'

I shook my head, and held the tissues against Corrine's hand so she could feel them.

'Oh, Christ,' she kept moaning.

We'd reached our ceiling and levelled off; the jets were quieter now. One of the people across the aisle was looking back, glancing across us with his eyes deliberately blank, wasn't even seeing us, just looking at the view. No one else was taking any notice; London had booked us first class for the sake of more privacy; decent of someone, or perhaps it had to do with guilt.

'All I want to know…' Corrine was saying now, a lot of it muffled, 'All I want to know is whether he'd been sleeping with her…'

I tried to understand why it mattered.

'No,' I told her at once, lying, or probably lying. 'She was just someone in his courier line, that was all.'

That was all, but sex too, probably; he'd been moving in to the end-phase and it was going to be dangerous. 'He didn't,' Holmes had told me over the phone yesterday, 'fancy his chances.' And when we don't fancy our chances, my friend, we look for the good graces of a woman, any woman, to help take the edge off and allow us to go in relaxed, less tense, less vulnerable. But no, that's a lie too — lies come easily to us in this trade. The truth is that we want it on the principle of just-one-more-time, if that's all there's going to be.