“Yes.”

“And no more Excellencies. No? Not,” the Boomer added without turning a hair, “when we are tête-à-tête. As at present.”

“As at present,” Alleyn agreed, and was instantly reinvolved in an exuberance of hand-shaking.

It was arranged that he would be driven around the city for an hour before joining the President for luncheon. The elegant A.D.C. reappeared. When they walked back along the corridor, Alleyn looked through its French windows into the acid-green garden. It was daubed superbly with flamboyants and veiled by a concourse of fountains. Through the iridescent rise and fall of water there could be perceived, at intervals, motionless figures in uniform.

Alleyn paused. “What a lovely garden,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” said the A.D.C., smiling. Reflected colour and reflected lights from the garden glanced across his polished charcoal jaw and cheekbones. “You like it? The President likes it very much.”

He made as if to move. “Shall we?” he suggested.

A file of soldiers, armed and splendidly uniformed crossed the garden left, right, left, right, on the far side of the fountains. Distorted by prismatic cascades, they could dimly be seen to perform a correct routine with the men they had come to replace.

“The changing of the guard,” Alleyn said lightly.

“Exactly. They are purely ceremonial troops.”

“Yes?”

“As at your Buckingham Palace,” explained the A.D.C.

“Quite,” said Alleyn.

They passed through the grandiloquent hall and the picturesque guard at the entrance.

“Again,” Alleyn ventured, “purely ceremonial?”

“Of course,” said the A.D.C.

They were armed, Alleyn noticed, if not to the teeth, at least to the hips, with a useful-looking issue of sophisticated weapons. “Very smartly turned out,” he said politely.

“The President will be pleased to know you think so,” said the A.D.C., and they walked into a standing bath of heat and dazzlement.

The Presidential Rolls, heavily garnished with the Ng’ombwanan arms, waited at the foot of thé steps. Alleyn was ushered into the back seat while the A.D.C. sat in front. The car was air-conditioned and the windows shut and, thought Alleyn, “if ever I rode in a bullet-proof job, and today wouldn’t be the first time, this is it.” He wondered if, somewhere in Ng’ombwana security circles there was an influence a great deal more potent than that engendered by the industrious evocation of Davidson’s.

They drove under the escort of two ultra-smart, lavishly accoutred motor-cyclists. “Skinheads, bikies, traffic cops, armed escorts,” he speculated, “wherever they belch and rev and bound, what gives the species its peculiar air of menacing vulgarity.”

The car swept through crowded, mercilessly glaring streets. Alleyn found something to say about huge white monstrosities — a Palace of Culture, a Palace of Justice, a Hall of Civic Authority, a Free Library. The A.D.C. received his civilities with perfect complacency.

“Yes,” he agreed. “They are very fine. All new. All since the Presidency. It is very remarkable.”

The traffic was heavy, but it was noticeable that it opened before their escort as the Red Sea before Moses. They were stared at, but from a distance. Once, as they made a right-hand turn and were momentarily checked by an oncoming car, the A.D.C., without turning his head, said something to their chauffeur, that made him wince.

When Alleyn, who was married to a painter, looked at the current scene, wherever it might be, he did so with double vision. As a stringently trained policeman, he watched automatically for idiosyncrasies. As a man very sensitively tuned to his wife’s way of seeing, he searched for consonancies. As now, when confronted by a concourse of black heads that bobbed, shifted, clustered and dispersed against that inexorable glare, he saw this scene as his wife might like to paint it. He noticed that, in common with many of the older buildings, one in particular was in process of being newly painted. The ghost of a former legend showed faintly through the mask — SANS RIT IMPO T NG TR DI G CO. He saw a shifting, colourful group on the steps of this building and thought how, with simplification, rearrangement and selection, Troy would endow them with rhythmic significance. She would find, he thought, a focal point, some figure to which the others were subservient, a figure of the first importance.

And then, even as this notion visited him, the arrangement occurred. The figures re-formed like fragments in a kaleidoscope and there was the focal point, a solitary man, inescapable because quite still, a grotesquely fat man, with long blond hair, wearing white clothes. A white man.

The white man stared into the car. He was at least fifty yards away, but for Alleyn it might have been so many feet. They looked into each other’s faces and the policeman said to himself: “That chap’s worth watching. That chap’s a villain.”

Click, went the kaleidoscope. The fragments slid apart and together. A stream of figures erupted from the interior, poured down the steps and dispersed. When the gap was uncovered the white man had gone.

“It’s like this, sir,” Chubb had said rapidly. “Seeing that No. 1 isn’t a full-time place, being there’s the two of us, we been in the habit of helping out on a part-time basis elsewhere in the vicinity. Like, Mrs. Chubb does an hour every other day for Mr. Sheridan in the basement and I go in to the Colonel’s — that’s Colonel and Mrs. Montfort in the place — for two hours of a Friday afternoon and every other Sunday evening we baby-sit at 17, the Walk. And—”

“Yes. I see,” said Mr. Whipplestone, stemming the tide.

“You won’t find anything scamped or overlooked, sir, Mrs. Chubb intervened. “We give satisfaction in all quarters, really we do. It’s just An Arrangement, like.”

“And naturally, sir, the wages are adjusted according. We wouldn’t expect anything else, sir, would we?”

They had stood side by side with round anxious faces, wide-open eyes and gabbling mouths. Mr. Whipplestone had listened with his built-in air of attentive detachment and had finally agreed to the proposal that the Chubbs were all his for six mornings, breakfast, luncheon and dinner: that provided the house was well kept up they might attend upon Mr. Sheridan or anybody else at their own and his convenience, that on Fridays Mr. Whipplestone would lunch and dine at his club or elsewhere, and that, as the Chubbs put it, the wages were “adjusted according.”

“Most of the residents,” explained Chubb when they had completed these arrangements and got down to details, “has accounts at the Napoli, sir. You may prefer to deal elsewhere.”

“And for butchery,” said Mrs. Chubb, “there’s—”

They expounded upon the amenities in the Capricorns.

Mr. Whipplestone said: “That all sounds quite satisfactory. Do you know, I think I’ll make a tour of inspection.” And he did so.

The Napoli is one of the four little shops in Capricorn Mews. It is “shop” reduced to its absolute minimum: a slit of a place where the customers stand in single file and then only eight at a squeeze. The proprietors are an Italian couple, he dark and anxious, she dark and buxom and jolly. Their assistant is a large and facetious Cockney.

It is a nice shop. They cure their own bacon and hams. Mr. Pirelli makes his own pâté and a particularly good terrine. The cheeses are excellent. Bottles of dry Orvieto are slung overhead and other Italian wines crowd together inside the door. There are numerous exotics in line on the shelves. The Capricornians like to tell each other that the Napoli is “a pocket Fortnum’s.” Dogs are not allowed, but a row of hooks has been thoughtfully provided in the outside wall and on most mornings there is a convocation of mixed dogs attached to them.

Mr. Whipplestone skirted the dogs, entered the shop and bought a promising piece of Camembert. The empurpled army man, always immaculately dressed and gloved, whom he had seen in the street, was in the shop and was addressed by Mr. Pirelli as “Colonel.” (Montfort? wondered Mr. Whipplestone.) The Colonel’s lady was with him. An alarming lady, the fastidious Mr. Whipplestone thought, with the face of a dissolute clown and wildly overdressed. They both wore an air of overdone circumspection that Mr. Whipplestone associated with the hazards of a formidable hangover. The lady stood stock-still and bolt upright behind her husband, but as Mr. Whipplestone approached the counter she sidestepped and barged into him, driving her pin heel into his instep.