She cleared some husk from her throat. ‘Who is he?’ she said.

I think I’d known she was going to be American before she opened her mouth. Too healthy to be anything else. And where do they get those teeth?

‘His name was Rayner,’ I said, and then realised that this sounded a little thin as an answer, so I thought I’d add something. ‘He was a very dangerous man.’

‘Dangerous?’

She looked worried by that, and quite right too. It was probably crossing her mind, as it was crossing mine, that if Rayner was dangerous, and I’d killed him, then that, hierarchically-speaking, made me very dangerous.

‘Dangerous,’ I said again, and watched her closely as she looked away. She seemed to be trembling less, which was good. Or maybe her trembling had just fallen into sync with mine, so I noticed it less.

‘Well… what is he doing here?’ she said at last. ‘What did he want?’

‘It’s difficult to say.’ Difficult for me, at any rate. ‘Maybe he was after money, maybe the silver…’

‘You mean… he didn’t tell you?’ Her voice was suddenly loud. ‘You hit this guy, without knowing who he was? What he was doing here?’

Despite the shock, her brain seemed to be coming along pretty nicely.

‘I hit him because he was trying to kill me,’ I said. ‘I’m like that.’

I tried a roguish smile, then caught sight of it in the mirror over the mantelpiece and realised it hadn’t worked.

‘You’re like that,’ she repeated, unlovingly. ‘And who are you?’

Well now. I was going to have to wear some very soft shoes at this juncture. This was where things could suddenly get a lot worse than they already were.

I tried looking surprised, and perhaps just a little bit hurt. ‘You mean you don’t recognise me?’

‘No.,

‘Huh. Odd. Fincham. James Fincham.’ I held out my hand. She didn’t take it, so I converted the movement into a nonchalant brush of the hair.

‘That’s a name,’ she said. ‘That’s not who you are.’

‘I’m a friend of your father’s.’

She considered this for a moment. ‘Business friend?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of.’ She nodded. ‘You’re James Fincham, you’re a sort of business friend of my father’s, and you’ve just killed a man in our house.’

I put my head on one side, and tried to show that yes, sometimes it’s an absolute bugger of a world.

She showed her teeth again.

‘And that’s it, is it? That’s your CV?’

I reprised the roguish smile, to no better effect. ‘Wait a second,’ she said.

She looked at Rayner, then suddenly sat up a little straighter, as if a thought had just struck her.

‘You didn’t call anybody, did you?’

Come to think of it, all things considered, she must have been nearer twenty-four.

‘You mean…’ I was floundering now.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘there’s no ambulance coming here. Jesus.’

She put the glass down on the carpet by her feet, got up and walked towards the phone.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘before you do anything silly…’

I started to move towards her, but the way she spun round made me realise that staying still was probably the better plan. I didn’t want to be pulling bits of telephone receiver out of my face for the next few weeks.

‘You stay right there, Mr James Fincham,’ she hissed at me. ‘There’s nothing silly about this. I’m calling an ambulance, and I’m calling the police. This is an internationally approved procedure. Men come round with big sticks and take you away. Nothing silly about it at all.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I haven’t been entirely straight with you.’ She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.

She narrowed her eyes.

‘What the hell do you mean "not entirely straight"? You only told me two things. You mean one of them was a lie?’ She had me on the ropes, there’s no question about that. I was in trouble. But then again, she’d only dialled the first nine.

‘My name is Fincham,’ I said, ‘and I do know your father.’

‘Yeah, what brand of cigarette does he smoke?’

‘Dunhill.’

‘Never smoked a cigarette in his life.’

She was late-twenties, possibly. Thirty at a pinch. I took a deep breath while she dialled the second nine.

‘All right, I don’t know him. But I am trying to help.’

‘Right. You’ve come to fix the shower.’

Third nine. Play the big card. ‘Someone is trying to kill him,’ I said.

There was a faint click and I could hear somebody, somewhere, asking which service we wanted. Very slowly she turned towards me, holding the receiver away from her face. ‘What did you say?’

‘Someone is trying to kill your father,’ I repeated. ‘I don’t know who, and I don’t know why. But I’m trying to stop them. That’s who I am, and that’s what I’m doing here.’

She looked at me long and hard. A clock ticked somewhere, hideously.

‘This man,’ I pointed at Rayner, ‘had something to do with it.’

I could see that she thought this unfair, as Rayner was hardly in a position to contradict me; so I softened my tone a little, looking around anxiously as if I was every bit as mystified and fretted-up as she was.

‘I can’t say he came here to kill,’ I said, ‘because we didn’t get a chance to talk much. But it’s not impossible.’ She carried on staring at me. The operator was squeaking hellos down the line and probably trying to trace the call.

She waited. For what, I’m not sure.

‘Ambulance,’ she said at last, still looking at me, and then turned away slightly and gave the address. She nodded, and then slowly, very slowly, put the receiver back on its cradle and turned to me. There was one of those pauses that you know is going to be long as soon as it starts, so I shook out another cigarette and offered her the packet.

She came towards me and stopped. She was shorter than she’d looked on the other side of the room. I smiled again, and she took a cigarette from the packet, but didn’t light it. She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me.