He glanced at his watch. Just before midnight. Time for a hot bath and something to eat. He stretched lazily, a conscious pleasure seeping through him. The woman had really been quite something. Certainly a diverting way of spending his last evening.

HE WAS WALLOWING UP TO HIS CHIN IN HOT water, the small bathroom half full of steam when the door opened and she came in, yawning as she tied the belt of his silk dressing gown.

“Come back to bed, caro,” she said plaintively.

For the life of him he couldn’t remember her name and he grinned. “Another time, angel. I must get moving. Scrambled eggs and coffee like a good girl. I’ve got to be out of here in twenty minutes.”

When he left the bathroom ten minutes later, he was freshly shaved, his dark hair slicked back, and he wore an expensive hand-knitted sweater and slacks. She had laid a small table in the window and placed a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him as he sat down.

As he ate, he pulled back the curtain with one hand and looked down across the lights of Bari to the waterfront. The town was quiet and a slight rain drifted through the yellow street lamps in a silver spray.

“Will you be coming back?” she said.

“Who knows, angel?” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

He finished his coffee, went into the bedroom, picked up a dark blue nylon raincoat and a small canvas grip and returned to the living room. She sat with her elbows on the table, a cup of coffee in her hands. He took out his wallet, extracted a couple of banknotes and dropped them on the table.

“It’s been fun, angel,” he said and moved to the door.

“You know the address.”

When he closed the outside door and turned along the street it was half past twelve exactly. The rain was falling quite heavily now and fog crouched at the ends of the streets, reducing visibility to thirty or forty yards.