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wall around us and let us get on with killing ourselves, they'd do it.”
    Solomon looked across at the teenager. In any other situation he'd be wondering why someone so young could be so bitter, but not in Yugoslavia. The whole world knew the havoc that the warring factions had wreaked on each other. Genocide. Mutilation. Rape. Emir was right. Solomon had no idea how many dead people he'd seen, but however many it was, the boy had earned the right to be cynical. He flicked ash on the floor.
    “When did you see Nicole?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “On the phone you said you had spoken to her. After her family were killed.”
    Emir shook his head.
    “I didn't talk to her. She wrote me a letter. I haven't seen her since the football match.”
    “Football match?”
    “My school was playing against a team that had come over from Ireland. I was in goal. Nicole came to watch.”
    “All the way from Pristina? She must like you a lot.”
    “Not as much as I like her,” said Emir, flatly.
    “I love her.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
    “How old are you, Emir?”
    “What's that got to do with anything?” said the boy, fiercely.
    “You're just like her she said I was too young. She was only three years older than me but she made it sound like she was ancient. She's nineteen now. I'm sixteen. Big deal. I told her that when I'm ninety-seven she'll be a hundred. So what?”
    His hands began to shake and he put the cigarette to his mouth, his left hand supporting his right wrist as he inhaled.
    “She must have thought a lot of you, to send you the letter,” Solomon said quietly.
    “She didn't tell Nana where she'd gone. She didn't tell anyone. Only you.”
    “She said I had to forget her. She said that the old Nicole was dead and that she was starting again. A new life.”
    “Did she say where she was going?”
    Emir shook his head.
    “Did you keep the letter?”
    Emir nodded.
    “Can I see it?”
    Overhead a helicopter clattered. Solomon looked up but the sky was obscured with a thick layer of grey cloud. When he looked back at Emir, the boy was holding a crumpled envelope. Solomon pulled it slowly from between his fingers. It was a pale blue airmail envelope but the postmark was Sarajevo. Dated just a month after the family had been herded into the truck.
    Solomon lifted the flap and slid out the letter. It was handwritten on a sheet of lined white paper that had been torn from an exercise book. The edges were grubby from countless readings, and tear stained.
    The handwriting was a childish scrawl and he had trouble deciphering some of the words, but he didn't want to ask Emir for help. His spoken Bosnian was just about good enough to hold a simple conversation, but his reading and writing skills were basic. However, Nicole's message was simple: she had seen her family taken away at gunpoint, and had no doubt that they had been killed. She was running away from the farm, away from Pristina, away from Kosovo. She had considered killing herself, but said she didn't have the courage so she was going to forget everything the life she once had, the people she knew. She was starting a new life, with a new name, and she was never coming back. She told Emir to forget her. Then she spoilt it by signing it 'always in my heart'. With a pay-off like that, Solomon knew that Emir would never forget her. And maybe she had known it, too.
    “She's hurt,” said Solomon quietly.
    “She wrote this because she was hurt. She's trying to blot out what happened.”
    “I know that,” said Emir.
    “I'm not stupid.”
    Nowhere in the letter did it say where she was going or what she was planning to do.
    “Did she have friends in the city? Someone who might have given her somewhere to stay?”
    Emir shook his head again, vehemently this time.
    “I was her friend. If she was going to stay with anyone she would have stayed with my family.”
    “But you're not in the city, are you? You live quite a way outside. Maybe she