She frowned a bit.

‘So you don’t know where Sarah is now?’ she said.

‘Not the faintest idea. She may be all right, just laying low, or she may be in quite a lot of trouble.’

Ronnie sat back and gazed out of the window. I could tell that she was fond of Sarah, because she was taking her worrying seriously. Then suddenly she shrugged and took a sip of coffee.

‘At least you didn’t give them the file,’ she said. ‘That’s one thing.’

This of course is one of the hazards of lying to people. They start getting confused about what’s true and what isn’t. No great surprise, I suppose.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ I explained gently. ‘There is no file. I told them there was one, because I knew they’d have to check it out before they had me arrested or dumped in the river or whatever they do to people like me. You see, people who work in offices believe in files. Files are important to them. If you tell them you have a file, they want to believe it, because they set a lot of store by files.’ Me, the great psychologist. ‘But I’m afraid this one simply doesn’t exist.’

Ronnie straightened up and I could see that she was suddenly excited. Two little red dots had appeared in her cheeks. It was rather a pleasant sight.

‘But it does,’ she said.

I shook my head once to check that my ears were where I’d left them.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Graduate Studies,’ she said. ‘Sarah’s file. I’ve seen it.’

Ten

Yet in oure asshen olde is fyr weye.

CHAUCER

I arranged to meet Ronnie at four-thirty, when the gallery closed for the day and the thundering stampede of customers had been safely locked out for another night to drool on the pavement with their camp-beds and open cheque-books.

I didn’t actively try to enlist her help, but Ronnie was a game young thing who, for some reason, sensed a combination of good deeds and high adventure and couldn’t resist it. I didn’t tell her that so far it had only involved bullet holes and mashed scrota, because I couldn’t ignore the possibility that she would be extremely useful. For one thing I was now without transport, and for another, I find I often think better when there’s someone else around to think for me.

I killed some hours at the British Library, trying to find out what I could about the Mackie Corporation ofAmerica. Most of the time was spent getting the hang of the index system, but in the last ten minutes before I had to leave, I

managed to establish the following priceless information - that Mackie was a Scottish engineer who had worked with Robert Adams in producing a solid frame trigger-cocking cap-and-ball percussion revolver, which the two of them exhibited at the Great Exhibition inLondon in 1851. I didn’t bother to write that down.

With one minute to go, I cross-referred my way into a crashingly dull volume calledThe Teeth O f The Tiger,by a Major J. S. Hammond (ret’d), where I discovered that Mackie had founded a company that had since grown to become the fifth largest supplier of defence ‘materiel’ to the Pentagon. The company’s headquarters were currently inVensom,California, and its last given annual pre-tax profit had more noughts on the end of it than I could fit on the back of my hand.

I was on my way back toCork Street, weaving through the afternoon shoppers, when I heard the news vendor’s cry, and it may well have been the first time in my life that I actually understood something a news vendor said. The other passers-by were almost certainly hearing ‘Reeded In Silly Shut Up’, but I hardly had to glance at the poster to know that he meant ‘Three Dead In City Shoot-Up.’ I bought a copy and read as I walked.

A ‘massive police investigation’ was under way following the discovery of the bodies of three men, all of whom had perished as the result of gunshot wounds, at a derelict office building in the heart of London’s financial district. The bodies, none of which had yet been identified, were found by the security guard, Mr Dennis Falkes, 51 and father of three, returning to his post after a dental appointment. A police spokesman declined to speculate on the motive behind the killings, but was apparently unable to rule out drugs. There were no photographs. Just a rambly background story about the rise in the number of drug-related deaths in the capital in the last two years. I tossed the paper into a bin and kept walking.

Dennis Falkes had taken some folding money from

someone, that much was obvious. The chances were it was Groomed who paid him, so when Falkes got back and found his benefactor dead he didn’t have much incentive not to call the police. I hoped for his sake that the dentist story was true. If it wasn’t, the police were going to make his life extremely difficult.

Ronnie was waiting for me in her car outside the gallery. It was a bright red TVR Griffith, with a five litre V8 engine, and an exhaust note that could have been heard inPeking. It fell some way short of being the ideal car for a discreet surveillance operation, but (a), I wasn’t in a position to quibble, and (b), there’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.

Ronnie was in high spirits, which didn’t mean she hadn’t seen the newspaper story about Woolf. Even if she had, and even if she’d known that Woolf was dead, I’m not sure it would have made much difference. Ronnie had what they used to call pluck. Centuries of breeding, some of it in, some of it out, had given her high cheek-bones and an appetite for risk and adventure. I pictured her at the age of five, careering over eight-foot fences on a pony called Winston, risking her life seventy times before breakfast.

She shook her head when I asked her what she’d found in Sarah’s desk at the gallery, and then pestered me with questions all the way toBelgravia. I didn’t hear a single one of them thanks to the howl of the TVR exhaust, but I nodded and shook my head whenever it seemed appropriate.

When we reached LyallStreet, I yelled at her to take a run past the house, and not to look at anything but the road ahead. I found a tape of AC/DC, slotted it into the cassette player, and turned the volume up as far as it would go. I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are. Given the choice, I’d usually say that the more obvious you are, the more obvious you are, but choice was one of the things I was short of at that moment.

Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.

As we passed the Woolf house, I put my hand up to my eye and prodded a bit, which allowed me to stare at the front of the house as hard as I could while apparently adjusting a contact lens. It looked empty. But then again, I’d hardly expected to see men with violin cases on the front steps.