“Nadia has certain concerns about our plans.”

“Basically, I don’t know what they are,” I said.

“I’ll discuss it with her,” said Cameron dismissively, and turned away, not continuing the conversation.

She continued holding her coffee. Hadn’t this woman had enough of me? Didn’t she have a job to do?

“So I’ll see you back here about one?” said Cameron.

“Are you going out?” she asked.

“Whatever we do, we’ll be here at one.”

She nodded.

“Fine. See you later, Nadia.”

“See you, Lynne.”

She was out of the door. I saw her legs going up the steps outside and reaching the pavement. The legs walked away. Safe. I turned toward Cameron.

“About yesterday…”

And he was on me, holding me as if I was unbearably precious, his hands touching my face, stroking my hair. I pushed him away slightly and looked him in the eyes.

“I…” I stammered. “I’m not…”

“I can’t…” he murmured, and kissed me again.

I felt his hands behind me now, on my back, then under my T-shirt, feeling for my bra, discovering there wasn’t one.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“I don’t know. No.”

He took my hand and led me into my bedroom. It was different from the day before: more relaxed, more deliberate, slower. I sat down on the bed. He walked to the window and pulled the blind down. Then he closed the bedroom door. He removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and took that off too. It occurred to me that sex with a man who needed to remove a suit and tie was almost a unique experience.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said, as if it were a symptom. “I see you when I close my eyes. What shall we do?”

“Take your clothes off,” I said.

“What?” He looked down, almost as if it were a surprise to see he was still dressed.

He took his clothes off as if in a dream, tossing his trousers into a heap on a chair, looking at me all the time. I reached out my arms toward him.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Let me. Nadia.”

I lay in a fog of pleasure, and then at last he was inside me and later, when it was over and we lay there entwined, he was still looking at me, stroking my hair, saying my name as if it were some kind of magic spell. After a time we moved away from each other and I propped myself up on a pillow.

“That was lovely,” I said.

“Nadia,” he said. “Nadia.”

“And I feel confused,” I said.

A spell had been broken. He moved back slightly; a shadow crossed his face; he bit his lip.

“Can I be honest with you?” he said.

Suddenly I felt like shivering.

“Please,” I said.

“This job is my whole life,” he said. “And this…”

“You mean this,” I said, gesturing at the bed.

He nodded.

“It’s so not allowed,” he said. “It is so fucking not allowed.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “Is that it?”

“No,” he said bleakly.

“What is it?” I asked. He didn’t reply. “Fucking what is it?”

“I’m married,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

And he started crying. I was lying there with a naked detective crying in my bed. About eighteen hours of the relationship and we’d already moved from first lust to the weeping and recrimination. I felt sour inside. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t pat him and stroke him and say that everything was all right, there, there. Finally he gave a huge sigh, as a sign that he was pulling himself together.

“Nadia?”

“Yes?”

“Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Are you furious with me?”

“Oh, Cameron,” I said. “Just fucked off. And I suppose your wife doesn’t understand you.”

“No, no, I don’t know. I just know I want you. I’m not messing you around, Nadia, I promise you that. I want you so much. It means so much to me I don’t know what to do. Is that all right? What do you think? Nadia, tell me what you think.”

I swung round and looked at my frog-shaped clock on the bedside table. Then I leaned over and kissed Cameron’s chest.

“What do I think? I have a rule not to sleep with married men; it makes me feel bad. I can’t stop thinking about the wife. But I mainly think this is your problem, not mine. And I think that Lynne is due back in about seven minutes.”

The speed of putting clothes on was almost amusing. It felt companionable.

“I wonder if I should put different trousers on,” I said. “Just to test Lynne’s detective skills.”

“No, no,” said Cameron, looking alarmed.

“Oh, all right,” I said.

And we kissed, smiling at each other through the kiss. Married. Why did he have to be married?

That was on the Wednesday. On Thursday he only had time to talk to me on the phone, while Lynne was in the room, a strange conversation with passionate protestations on his part and blank statements on mine: Yes. Yes. Of course. Yes. I feel that as well. All right. On Friday morning, a team of men moved into my flat and fitted new locks on every door and iron grids over each window. And after lunch he came, and Lynne was needed to provide a report. We had time for a bath.

“I’d like to see your show,” he said. “I’d like to see you perform.”

“Come tomorrow,” I said. “We’re performing for a group of four-year-olds just up the road in Primrose Hill.”

“I can’t,” he said, looking away.

“Oh,” I said primly, hating myself. “Family business.”

“I can’t get out of it,” he said. “I would if I could.”

“That’s quite all right,” I said. This was why I didn’t sleep with married men-the shame and the pain and the guilt of it.

“Are you cross?”

“Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you want me to be cross?”

He picked up my hand and held it to his cheek. “I’m in love with you, Nadia. I’ve fallen in love.”

“Don’t say that. It frightens me. It makes me feel too happy.”

She thinks they are invisible. I see them. Kissing. My girl and the policeman kissing. Crashing to the floor. As he stands at the window to close the blinds, I see on his stupid face the besotted, thickened look of a man in love.

I love her more. Nobody can love her the way that I love her. Everyone looks in the wrong direction. They look for hate. Love: That’s the key.

EIGHT

Five- and six-year-old girls make the best audiences. They are sweet and admiring, and sit in decorous rows in their silky pastel dresses, with their hair in plaits and their feet in patent leather shoes. When I call one of them up to the front to help me, she’ll put her finger in her mouth and speak in a whisper. Eight- and nine-year-old boys are the worst. They jeer at us, and shout out that they know the disappeared object is in my pocket, and they push each other about and surge forward to inspect my box of tricks. They snigger when I drop a ball. The puppet show is for sissies, they say. They sing “Happy Birthday” in a sarcastic shout. They burst all the balloons. And Zach and I have an unbreakable rule: Nobody in double figures.

This party was for five-year-old boys, with a few girls drifting round the edges. It was in a large and handsome house in Primrose Hill that had steps leading up to the front door, an entrance hall you could turn several cartwheels in before reaching the other side, a kitchen the size of my flat, a living room filled with children that stretched back, across a pale, deep carpet, to French windows. The garden was long and well tended, with a patio, a goldfish pond, a series of trellised arches, clipped box hedges, white roses.

“Blimey,” I whispered at Zach.

“Just don’t break anything,” he whispered back.

The birthday boy was called Oliver, and he was small and plump; his cheeks were blotchy with excitement; his friends raged round him like random atoms while he ripped wrapping paper off presents. His mother was called Mrs. Wyndham, and she looked very tall and very thin and very rich and already seemed terminally irritated by the party that was just beginning. She looked doubtfully at me and Zach.