'I can't imagine any outsider wanting to cut a piece of that market’ Zen remarked.

'No, but he might have had other things in mind. People trust the Moroccans. Well, most of them are Sudanese actually, but the point is that they police themselves very effectively. They make a sale or they don't, but no one gets ripped off. Same with the Chinese masseurs and fortune tellers. But there have been several robberies reported on the beach recently, people's handbags and cameras disappearing while they're away from their place, and if some white person has made himself up to look like the immigrants, he might get away with it There are plenty of Albanians and gypsies about and they can be very imaginative. Normally they do houses, sometimes while the owners are asleep, but this might be a new angle’

She looked at her two companions, who had drawn ahead, and nodded goodbye to Zen. He picked up his scattered belongings and started pensively back. That was the third anomaly this afternoon, he thought. First the stranger taking his place, then the young man who had stared at him and then rammed into Gemma, and now somebody impersonating one of the African traders. Anywhere else, this would have been a very average day's haul of minor mysteries, but in the placid, predictable world of the beach it was a potential front-page news story. Perhaps there's a pattern, thought Zen, smiling sourly at his wishful thinking.

This enforced vacation was driving him slightly crazy, he realized. What he needed was to get back to work, but there was no prospect of that. The powers that be had their plans for him, and it had been made gently clear to him that these included an early and well-deserved retirement. 'We'll have to bend the rules,' one of the official visitants to his hospital bed had told him. 'But if s the least you deserve after all you've been through’

He walked back past the bar, nodding to Franco and getting a grudging raise of the chin in return, and out into the full glare of the sun. As always, he was surprised to see the line of craggy mountains dominating the skyline to the east, their gleaming white surfaces making them seem even higher than they were in the July heat, although their lustre was not, of course, snow but marble.