Oh, no, I wasn’t starting that again. Not even if it did remind me of that bit in The Scarlet Pimpernel where Marguerite spies the small red flowers on her husband’s crest and it all clicks into place for her. Fiction, I reminded myself. They call it fiction for a reason. And could you really imagine James Bond with biscuit crumbs?

All the same, I couldn’t quite resist casting a casual eye over the contents of the desk as I waited for the Guest setting to boot up. The computer was making the huffing and grunting noises that indicate that it might do what you want but it will have to think about it for a while first. Idly, I flipped through the papers that had been piled to the far side of the mouse, held together at the top with a large binder clip. They were all newspaper clippings. I squinted at the tiny print in the top right-hand corner. And recent ones, at that. The top one was dated last week; the others were all dated within the past month. They came from a wide variety of papers. I saw The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times of London, the Daily Mail, articles in French from Le Monde, in Italian from Corriere della Sera, and in German from something with a very long compound title that I won’t even bother to reproduce.

It was nice to be dating a man who not only spoke his own language properly, but others as well.

The article on top reported that Dubai banks had been used to wire money to Al-Qaeda. So did the article underneath it. Others concerned undersea communications cables located in the Persian Gulf outside Dubai; the Dubai engineering boom; the influx of German engineers to Dubai (this in the German paper with the unpronounceable name); the percentage of the world’s cranes currently in Dubai; and so on. Every single article touched in some way on Dubai. Maybe his former company had investments in Dubai. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of looking for a job out there. I doubted it, though. He seemed too attached to Selwick Hall to ever really leave.

Logging into Hotmail, I quickly checked my email — a “Hi! Where are you?” from a grad school friend; a longer email from Alex that I saved to read later; a three-liner from my mother; and five emails, all in the exact same block letters, offering to help me enlarge my penis — and then went to Google.com to try to find the source of the elusive country code. To be honest, it had become more a matter of boredom than burning interest at that point. It took me a while to find a site that would just give me the country codes without trying to sell me phone cards, but, eventually, there it was. The country code for the United Arab Emirates is 971. In other words, for Dubai.

I looked sideways at the pile of articles. Okay, so that was just a little bit weird.

There weren’t any other articles on the desk, but there were Post-it notes scattered here and there, and others that looked like they had been torn carelessly out of a notepad, scribbled with notes in Colin’s hen-scratch handwriting. Some looked like phone numbers, only they were longer than any phone numbers with which I was acquainted, with the dashes in odd places. More international numbers?

The country code finder was still up on the screen, so I typed one of the numbers in, just because. “Russia,” announced the computer.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

But where in Russia? It had been hard enough finding the country code site; I didn’t have the patience to hunt around for city codes — and, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure which bit of the number was the city code. As an American studying English history, I had the New York-to-London calling routine down by rote, but I’d never had to tackle calling internationally anyplace else. Not so with Colin, apparently.

Twisting in his desk chair, my nightgown bunching around me, I squinted at the bookshelves behind the desk. “DUBAI” was splashed in lurid green letters down one binding, next to a Fodor’s guide with “United Arab Emirates” in more discreet lettering down the spine. There were half a dozen guides on Dubai alone, others to the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Farther down the shelf, Moscow elbowed Saint Petersburg for shelf space, cramming Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan all the way into a corner. Kyrgyzstan? Who had ever heard of Kyrgyzstan?

Colin, apparently. Not only did he own the one and only official guide, but it had evidently been well read. The binding was cracked in three places. Tugging it out of the shelf, the book fell instantly open to the description of a city named Osh. Colin had underlined a section about Osh’s proximity to the Uzbek border and resultant raids by an Uzbek militant Muslim group. Wow, everyone seemed to have their own homegrown terrorists these days.

Frowning, I shoved the book back into its corner on the shelf. By this point, I was up on my knees on Colin’s desk chair, my back to the computer, leaning over the back of the chair to try to see the books in the farther shelves. There was a whole shelf dedicated to nothing but dictionaries, dictionaries in languages I had never seen before. Oh, some were perfectly mundane and extremely well used — French, German, Latin, Greek, all presumably relics from Colin’s school days — but others were shiny and new, with lettering that looked even more like hieroglyphs than Colin’s handwriting.

I had leaned out too far. The chair tipped precipitously forwards, sending me whapping stomach-first into the crossbar as I caught at the edge of the shelf to keep from going over. After a few wobbly moments, the chair steadied and I settled safely back down on my haunches, staring with narrowed eyes at the bookshelves. The row I was facing was all biography and cultural history. A biography called Sultan in Oman about Sultan Qaboos, another on the conflict between tradition and modernization in the Middle East, and so on.

All right, I told myself, feeling for the ground with one foot as I wiggled backwards off the desk chair. Calm down. So Colin was interested in other countries and cultures. So were many other people. He might have been an international relations major in college or, rather, read international relations at university as they put it here. Perfectly normal, perfectly innocent.

Only he hadn’t, had he? Hadn’t he told me that he had read economics at Oxford? Or was I making that up? Between the lateness of the hour and everything else, I was so muddled that I was finding it hard to distinguish between what Colin had actually told me and what I had merely assumed. I had had so many imaginary conversations with him in my head over the past few weeks that it was very hard to sort them out from the real ones. Let’s be honest; we all do that. Aren’t there times when you’re sure you’ve told someone something and then remember you’d only intended to tell them? Or that you assume one thing until they tell you another?

Right, let’s say Colin had been an econ major. Everyone needed a hobby. Maybe he just liked the study of languages and their corresponding cultures. Maybe he just had time on his hands after leaving his City job and needed something to do. Maybe.

Feeling a bit like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey pouncing on the Tilneys’ old laundry lists in the hopes that they were moldering manuscripts, I attacked the drawers of Colin’s desk, yanking them open one by one. If he came in — well, I was just looking for paper and pen to scribble down some dissertation ideas. Ignore the fact that I had paper and pen of my own in my bag in the bedroom.

The top drawer had nothing but the usual office effluvia of stretched-out paper clips, capless pens, boxes of spare staples, eraser-less pencils and pencil-less erasers. The second drawer was more promising. Hands unsteady, I reached for the first of the hanging files. “Business Expenses,” it read. Business expenses for what? What business? The first batch were all estate related, reports of land taxes paid, necessary repairs made, machinery bought. No pigs, I noticed.

Feeling considerably less excited, I eased the file back into the folder and drew out the next one. This really was turning into Catherine Morland with her laundry list, wasn’t it? I was all ready to dismissively tuck away this file as I had the last one, closing the drawer on the files and the whole embarrassing episode, when something made me stay my hand.

Unlike the last file, there were no neatly printed-out spreadsheets of estate accounts. Instead, it was just a bunch of receipts shoved haphazardly into a folder. The one on top had been folded three times and tucked into a blue holder that read “Hilton Dubai Jumeirah.” Jumeirah? On an impulse, I tugged down one of the UAE books from the shelf. And there it was. Jumeirah, one of the outlying areas of rapidly developing Dubai. The guidebook listed the hotel as “moderate” and enthused that it was “a bargain for the beachfront.” Hmm. What was Colin doing going to beachfronts in Dubai? Pre-me, I hoped.

Easing it out of its holder, I unfolded the hotel receipt. It hadn’t been pre-me. In fact, it had been this month. Colin had stayed there for a week, one of the two weeks he had been out of London “on business.” Other receipts in the pile were for various restaurants in Dubai, drinks at Vu’s, lunch at Bastakiah Nights, taxi rides, coffees, bus tickets, the usual petty expenses of travel.

Well, that explained how brown he had gotten over Christmas. He had spent enough of his youth in the sun that he had one of those perma-tans, a permanent overlay of brown over a naturally fair skin that probably signaled melanomas later in life, so it hadn’t been striking enough to warrant questions; if anything, I had ascribed his heightened color to the effects of his ski trip with his mother and her husband when he had visited them in Italy over the New Year.