In the feeble pre-dawn gleam Nick could see or sense through his half shut, half open eyes the figure of a man come into the room. He stood in the doorway for a few seconds while the shadow of someone else passed behind him. Nick could pick out no detail, only shapes and shadows and then even they disappeared as the man turned on a strong flashlight that he held in front of himself. Through his gritty, half-shut eyes he could see enough to know that the light was soon being directed from the door towards the bottom of his bed, and then he felt its cold, clinical beam begin to crawl up the length of his body, stopping briefly on his face. Resisting the strong temptation to turn away, Nick lay stock still, not daring to try to cover himself or to move his eyes out of the glare of light. He had never felt so vulnerable in his life. The beam flicked away from him further over the bed to where Veema was lying. It seemed to linger for a longer while on her sleeping body than it had on his, and Nick was glad that at least his wife’s body had been well covered by the sheet unlike his own.

The beam of light shot quickly around every corner of the room then it went out. The intruder shrank back out of the door and closed it with a soft click. Nick lay still for a while then sat up feeling cold and violated but didn’t want to waken Veema into the obscenity of what had just happened so he just sat there, his mind distracted, his new-found taste for adventure and action extinguished. His nocturnal visitors clearly had not been thieves; there was no attempt to take his watch or wallet that were lying where he had left them on the table by the door that the beam of the torch had swept carefully over. He reasoned that the man had been looking for Titus, either that or that he wanted to make sure that he, Titus’s friend, was where he should have been, in his own bed, and couldn’t be  involved in the radio newsreader’s disappearance.

Sleep finally came to Nick as the sun began to rise and colour the room. Veema stirred and woke feeling warm, delicious and ready for love, with no trace of a hangover, and not an inkling of what had been going on during the dark hours. In a bleary-eyed daze Nick was keen to oblige in spite of the busy, unsettling night that Veema was unaware of. He felt the need to reclaim her as his own after the travelling, dirty beam had moved along the length of her sleeping body, exposing her shape to the careful scrutiny of anonymous eyes.

They showered and went down to breakfast, and while Veema satisfied a voracious appetite with waffles, honey and fruit salad, Nick debated with himself whether he should tell his wife all that had happened since that first round of Martinis.