He went quietly, without a backward glance. As they slowly crossed the courtyard towards the entrance gate Carriscant – his arm around his shoulders – asked him if there was anyone at his house.

'The servants are there,' he said. 'The place is all packed up, but they're still there.'

'Will you be all right?'

'I… Yes, I think so.'

'Try and sleep,' Carriscant said. 'I'll make sure everything is sorted out here.'

'Thank you, Doctor, thank you… I don't think I'll be capable of anything.'

'Leave it to me.'

'Will you be here in the morning?'

'Yes,' Carriscant lied. 'I'll send for you.' He helped Sieverance into his victoria. Sieverance sat back shaking his head with some vigour, whether from the effects of the chloral or the shock he was under, Carriscant could not be sure. He was not in the least surprised at the complete success of his subterfuge. It was all a matter of suggestion. Here was a hospital at night, a woman covered in blood, a grave medical crisis. All possible prognoses would be going through Sieverance's mind, especially the worst. Many women die of complications in pregnancy: Carriscant's efforts had merely reproduced the man's darkest fears. If you half expect an event to occur, you rarely question it when it does. And even more, Sieverance trusted him, as a man and as a doctor. He had placed his trust in me absolutely, Carriscant thought, in his hour of need. The fact that his most terrifying fears were realised does not reflect on me at all. With trust all duplicity becomes simple. He looked at Sieverance now and, for a moment, seeing the man in this state, he felt an icy squirm of guilt wriggle through him. There was a price to pay for this elaborate subterfuge and it was Sieverance's awful pain and misery. He watched the man sit there struggling to come to terms with this brutal reckoning life had served him. Carriscant turned away, telling himself to be strong and not think about it: there was no other way and, he reminded himself without much conviction, time was a great healer.

Sieverance's carriage pulled off and Carriscant walked as fast as he dared back to the theatre. Delphine was still unconscious and some warmth was beginning to seep back into her limbs. He lowered the big arc light so the heat of its glare would penetrate better and piled some blankets on top of her. He rubbed her hands and wrapped her feet in hot towels. As he saw her temperature steadily rise he began to clear away the evidence of the operation.

He rang for a porter and told him to bring a coffin from the hospital store. The man showed no curiosity at the news that a patient had died. But then why should he? Carriscant said to himself. Fetching a coffin or wheeling a cadaver into the morgue was doubtless a task he performed unreflectingly many times a day, especially working from Cruz's wards. So desperate was he to create an illusion of death, he was forgetting just how commonplace and unremarkable it was in a place like this.

The coffin arrived, wheeled on a trolley by two porters. As he opened the door of the theatre he allowed them a glimpse of Delphine on the table before dismissing them. Some work had to be done on the body before it went into the coffin, he said. He would call them when everything was ready. Alone again, he locked all doors that communicated with the rest of the hospital and pushed the coffin into his temporary morgue. He lifted the body of the murdered Filipino woman out of its ice-chest and laid it in the coffin. He fetched the foetus and placed it alongside its mother. Then he nailed the coffin shut and tied the necessary label and the envelope containing a copy of the death certificate to the top handle.

The coffin was waiting in the corridor outside the theatre when the porters returned to collect it. Carriscant told them to take it to the hospital morgue whence it would be taken for burial the next day.

As the coffin was duly wheeled away the thought came to Carriscant that Sieverance might not be satisfied with one of the simple, crude coffins that the hospital provided. Indeed, he might not want his wife buried in the Philippines at all and would want to ship her home, in which case the body would have to be embalmed… He suddenly felt his heart jolt with alarm. Surely, even if that was what he wanted to do, they would have a day or two's grace? Sieverance was in no state to set about ordering new coffins and searching for a responsible undertaker the next day. The death certificate was signed, the hospital administration would routinely inform the necessary authorities. It would take a man of unusual morbidity – having already been profoundly shocked by the sight of his dead wife and dead child – to order the coffin reopened so he might see them again.

But in any event, Carriscant thought, as he hurried back to proceed with the reviving of Delphine, even if he had foreseen that eventuality it would have been one beyond his powers to prevent or forestall. Whatever happened, whatever alarm was raised, he and Delphine would be far out at sea, a day or more's sailing from Manila. The trail vanished, or at any rate stone cold.

However-as he watched the colour slowly return to Delphine's cheeks, and felt the warmth of her hands spread to her fingertips-the bowel-loosening sense of excited relief he was now beginning to feel was qualified by this small persistent undertone of worry. There was an irredeemable vanity about Sieverance, his every utterance and mannerism testified to it, and it would be very typical of the man to want to order his wife the most splendid casket in Manila, and to organise a funeral of ostentatious grief and circumstance. He was not the sort of man to nurse his sorrow silently or with solitary dignity.

'How do you feel?' he said to Delphine, cupping her sweet face with his hands. 'Any better?'

'Very strange…' she said. 'Sort of distant… and groggy.'

She sat in a chair in the operating theatre dressed in the clothes she had given him days earlier-a simple dark blue dress with high collar. She had a bonnet on her lap with a deep low brim that would shadow her face.

'Can you manage?'

'Yes.' She had not asked him one question about Sieverance and how he had taken the news of her death. 'I think so.'

She looked up at him, still a little vague. 'How was it, I mean… Did Jepson-'

'It went perfectly. Not a moment's doubt.'

'Good,' she said, in a small neutral voice. She might have been responding to some news about the weather holding fair for the next twenty-four hours. 'Good.'

He looked at his watch: it was nearly 4. He helped Delphine to her feet and led her down a passage to a rear door that gave on to the hospital garden. There was a moon, enough to provide a faint grey-washed light. The air was warm and moist and the sound of the crickets in the bushes was shrill. They hurried along a path, through the dark shadow-thronged garden, to a back gate that opened on to the Calle Francisco.

Carriscant took the key from his pocket, unlocked the gate – the hinges were stiff and they groaned as the door swung open – and peered out. The carriage he had ordered was waiting by the church fifty yards away. They slipped out of the door and walked quickly and silently down the street towards it. The horse snickered and the sleepy driver looked round as they approached. He would have no idea they had come from the hospital, Carriscant was glad to observe. He gave the address of the destination to him.

'Axel will be waiting for you,' he said to her in a whisper. 'He'll take you to the boat. I'll be there shortly after six.'

She gripped his hands. 'I can't believe this has actually happened,' she said. 'He really believes, I mean he has no doubt I'm -'

'Completely. I saw him, comforted him. He saw you dead with his own eyes.'

'So we're free – really, truly?'