'Because of what you are.' She pushed her plate away and wouldn't look at me for a moment, furious, I thought.

Probably hard up for a man. Four months into the divorce and he'd been 'fantastic in bed', so forth, too much of a lady to take the first man she could find, too much pride or just too hurt, bugger them, I hate them all.

The phone rang and she got up to answer it. The flat was small, understated, a few bamboo chairs and a chaise-longue, stereo, poinsettias in a Chinese vase, worn silk rugs, half a wall full of books, mostly paperbacks, a lot of them re-read, ragged.

'I can't do it now,' on the phone, her slender body arched backwards against the wall, leaning, examining the nails of her right hand in the light from the windows. 'Look, ring up Holli and ask her if she can pop round there - she's always terribly willing to help. I'll ask her about it in the morning.'

I finished my tomato juice and left the table and went across to the alcove to look at the water-colours: Romney Marsh; The Shore at Rye; Lewes Crescent, Brighton. Delicate, wistful, blues and greys.

'I'm awfully sorry, Martin. Had you finished?"

'Yes. Did you do these?'

'All my own work.' She stood beside me, faintly scented, but it was more her skin.

'They're charming.'

'Honestly? There's some zabaglione.' She took my hand.

'Are you having some?'

'I don't know. Perhaps later. You'll be wanting to know about the homework I did for you.' She turned and went across to finish her wine, and then curled up on the floor with one arm on the chaise-longue. 'I've written it out for you and you can take it when you go. Don't you want a chair?'

'I like it here.'

'It's something I learned as a child, or taught myself, found out, I don't know which. When you're on the floor, you can't fall any farther. Anyway, it's about Mariko Shoda. I - don't want that bitch to hurt you, so I dug up everything I could.'

'You do a lot for me.'

'I told you, I'd do anything.'

'Because of what I am. What's that, exactly?' I didn't know if she meant because of what I did, how much they'd told her at the Thai Embassy. But of course she was a woman, and I'd missed the point.

'Tough as hell on the outside, but vulnerable, endangered, hence dramatic, hence sexy.' She brushed the air, feeling for the words she wanted. 'Pushing yourself to some kind of brink all the time. And therefore' - she looked away - 'doomed, I suppose. So I just want to help you' - her fair hair swung as she looked back at me, her eyes resting on mine, gravely -'while there's time.'

Piano wire.

Random image, unimportant.

This man succeed to kill, always.

Ignore.

'Anyway,' Katie said, 'this is roughly the picture. Her father was Prince Shoda Phomvihane of Cambodia, and in 1975 the Khmer Rouge stormed his palace - that was when they were sweeping across the whole country, as you know. She was eight years old at that time, and when the communists attacked the palace her father tried to get her to safety. She was in her father's arms, coming down the steps of the palace, when a sabre cut his head in two and Shoda fell, with his blood all over her. I got this from an eyewitness, an old woman in one of the refugee camps we help to look after. A man picked her up and ran with her through the melee and got her clear - but then lost track of her the same night in the jungle. This I got from someone who used to know her, after she reached safety.' She stretched out a stockinged leg, smoothing it. 'Sometimes we don't know the half of what other people go through, do we?'

Her face was losing definition - dusk was down, with equatorial suddenness.

'Do you mind pulling the shutters across?'

'What? All right.' She turned, halfway across the room. 'But you said -'

'Just routine.'

She came back, switching on the big oil-jar lamp in the corner, turning down the rheostat. 'Is that too dim?'

'No.'

I like dim light, shadows, darkness, night, invisibility. Going to ground soon, have to, because of Manif Kishnar.

'Are you all right?'

'Yes.' There'd been nothing in my face, in my eyes; she was picking up vibrations again. That'd be so dangerous in an enemy.

'Well,' curling up on the floor again, 'she was seven months in the jungle, alone.'

'At the age of eight.'

'Yes.' Her shoulders lifted an inch. 'I don't think it's just legend, although there are plenty of legends about her. I mean, it's feasible, plausible, that a woman like Mariko Shoda, vicious and powerful and so on, could easily have been that kind of child - resourceful, adaptable, savage, especially after losing her father like that in a literally bloody rite of passage. Wouldn't you think?'

I said I would.

'Or to put it the other way round - that a resourceful, savage child could have become what Shoda is now. Someone asked her how she could possibly have managed to survive seven months in the jungle, and apparently she said it was easy, once you became an animal. She watched the monkeys, and ate only the berries and things they ate, so as not to get poisoned. She killed a tiger.'

'How?'

'When she found out which berries were poisonous, she stuffed a half-dead marmoset with them and dropped it from a tree near the tiger's beat.' She pulled her hair back. 'That sort of thing. Is this of any use, Martin? I mean -'

'It's vital to me.'

'Oh.' She touched my arm. 'That makes me feel -' leaving it, looking away - 'Johnny Chen didn't give you any of this?'

'No.'

'He's terribly cut up, you know, about losing his best friend. That pilot.' Her eyes levelled, focussing. 'He's genuine, Martin. You can trust him. And I wouldn't say that unless I were a million times certain. I wouldn't want to do or say anything that might hurt you. I'm beginning to wish I'd never met you, as a matter of fact. It's such a responsibility.' She leaned and tugged at a loose thread at the fringe of the rug, her fair hair falling across her face. Quietly, 'Just joking. Well, anyway, when she got out of the jungle she fell foul of the Pol Pot forces again, and went through five years of torture, starvation, terror, repeated rape, and an epidemic of cholera. Hundreds of thousands like her didn't survive. She was at the infamous execution centre at Tuol Sleng but got away. When -'

The telephone began ringing and she looked around. 'That'll be the office again. Unless it's for you?'

'No one knows I'm here.'

'Then it can go on ringing. When she reached a refugee camp on the Thai border she looked like a skeleton and couldn't even speak - it took a year to get her back to something like normal. I got this from the actual camp administration. There were thousands there - still are - but she gradually began standing out from the crowd, helping with the work and the organisation. She was about fourteen by then, and she'd already had something of an education as a princess of the royal house, up to the age of eight.' She swung her head, 'That bloody phone -' then it stopped ringing. 'There's a gap after that, but someone else said that by the time she was seventeen she was helping them to administrate the whole camp. That was when she killed one of the officers for trying to mess about one night in the sleeping quarters. There was an enquiry, but nothing was proved against her, not enough even to have her charged.

The woman I spoke to was a witness, but refused to give evidence - like Shoda, she'd been through absolute hell and felt that any man who started any funny business ought to be shot. Then a year later there was a camp guard found knifed, and very expertly. The next day Shoda was missing. So are you getting the picture, and would you like some zabaglione now?'

We went back to the table and she brought it in and talked some more about Mariko Shoda. 'A Thai police inspector told me that so far she's killed off fifteen of her top competitors in the drug trade, taking care of six of them personally and using her crack hit man for the others - he's from Calcutta and his name's Kishnar.' She went to put on some music, kicking off her snakeskin shoes. 'Any questions?'

I asked her for the Thai police inspector's name and phone number and she gave them to me.

'Anything else?'