‘You Micky?’ I said, looking busily round the hall.

‘I am.’ Micky was a Scot, and was trying frantically to get some sign from his partner as to who the hell I was. Micky was going to be a problem.

‘Dave Carter sends his regards.’ I was at school with a Dave Carter.

‘Oh. Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right.’

Bingo. Two Boyd Loops in five minutes. In a giddy whirl of triumph, I walked over to the hall table, and picked up the phone.

‘ Gwinevere,’ I said, enigmatically. ‘I’m in.’

I put the receiver back on the cradle and moved towards the stairs, cursing myself for having so massively overdone it. They couldn’t have fallen for that one. But when I turned, they were both still standing there, meek as lambs, with a pair of ‘you’re the guv’nor ’ looks on their faces.

‘Which one is the girl’s bedroom?’ I snapped. The lambs exchanged nervous glances. ‘You checked the rooms, right?’ They nodded. ‘So which is the one with the lacy pillows and the poster of Stefan Edberg, for Chrissakes?’

‘Second on the left,’ said Micky.

‘Thank you.’

‘But…’

I stopped again. ‘But what?’

‘There’s no poster…’

I gave them both a fair rendition of a withering look, and carried on up the stairs.

Mickywas right, there was no poster of Stefan Edberg. There weren’t even that many lacy pillows. Eight, maybe. But Fleur de Fleurs was in the air, one part per billion, and I felt a sudden, physical stab of worry and longing. For the first time I realised how much I wanted to protect Sarah from whatever it was, or whoever they were.

Now maybe this was just a lot of old damsel-in-distress nonsense, and perhaps, on another day, my hormones might have been busy on another subject entirely. But at that moment, standing in the middle of her bedroom, I wanted to rescue Sarah. Not just because she was good, and the bad guys weren’t, but because I liked her. I liked her a lot.

Enough of that kind of talk.

I went to the bedside-table, lifted the phone receiver and tucked the mouthpiece under a lacy pillow. If either one of the lambs started to regain some courage, or just curiosity, and felt like trying Dial-An-Explanation, I’d hear it. But the pillow ought to stop them from hearing me.

I ran through the cupboards first, trying to guess whether a sizeable chunk of Sarah’s clothes had gone. There were a few empty hangers here and there, but not enough to indicate an orderly departure to a far-away place.

The dressing-table had a scattering of pots and brushes on it. Face-cream, hand-cream, nose-cream, eye-cream. I wondered for a moment how serious it would be if you ever got home drunk and accidentally put face-cream on your hands or hand-cream on your face.

The drawers of the dressing-table contained more of the same. All the tools and lubricants necessary to keep a modern Formula 1 woman on the road. But definitely no file.

I closed them all and walked through to the adjoining bathroom. The silk dressing-gown Sarah had worn when I first saw her was hanging on the back of the door. There was a toothbrush in the rack over the basin.

I walked back through to the bedroom and looked around, hoping for a sign of something. I mean, not an actual sign - I wasn’t expecting an address scrawled in lipstick on the mirror - but I’d hoped for something, something that should have been there and wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been there and was. But there was no sign, and yet something was wrong. I had to stand in the middle of the room and listen for a while before I realised what it was.

I couldn’t hear the two lambs talking. That was wrong. They ought to have plenty of things to say to each other. After all, I was Dalloway, and Dalloway was a new element in their lives; they should have been talking about me.

I crossed to the window and looked down into the street. The door of the Ford was open, and it looked like the whisky lamb’s leg sticking out of it. He was on the radio. I got the phone out of bed and put it back on the hook, and as I did so I automatically opened the draw of the bedside-table. It was a small drawer, but it seemed to contain more than the rest of the room. I rummaged through the packets of paper tissues, the cotton-wool, the paper tissues, the pairs of nail scissors, the half-eaten bar of Suchard chocolate, the paper tissues, the pens, the tweezers, the paper tissues, the paper tissues - do women eat these fucking things or what? - and there, at the bottom of the drawer, nestling on a bed of paper tissues, was a heavy bundle wrapped in a strip of chamois leather. Sarah’s fetching little Walther TPH. I popped out the magazine and checked the slot down the side. Full.

I slipped the gun into my pocket, took another deep breath of Nina Ricci, and left.

Things had changed amongst the lambs since I’d last spoken to them. Definitely for the worse. The front door was open, Micky was leaning against the wall next to it with his right hand in his pocket, and I could see Whisky standing on the steps outside, looking up and down the street. He turned when he heard me on the stairs.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and then remembered I was supposed to be American. ‘Not a goddamn thing. Shut the door will you?’

‘Two questions,’ said Micky.

‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘Make it fast.’

‘Who the fuck is Dave Carter?’

There didn’t seem to be much point my telling him that Dave Carter had been under-sixteen fives champion at school, and that he’d gone on to work for his father’s electrical engineering company in Hove. So I said, ‘What’s the second question?’

Mickyglanced across at Whisky, who’d come up to the door and got himself very much in the way of my exit. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Dalloway,’ I said. ‘Want me to write it down for you? What the hell is the matter with you guys?’ I slipped my right hand into my pocket and saw Micky’s right hand move in his.

If he decided to kill me, I knew I would never even hear the shot. Still, I’d managed to get my hand into my right pocket. Just a pity that I’d put the Walther in the left. I brought my hand out again, slowly, with my fist closed. Micky was watching me like a snake.

‘Goodwin says he’s never heard of you. He never sent anybody. Never told anybody we were here.’

‘Goodwin is a lazy son-of-a-bitch who’s way out of his depth,’ I said, irritably. ‘What the hell has he got to do with it?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Micky. ‘Want to know why?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I want to know why.’

Mickysmiled. He had terrible teeth. ‘Because he doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘I made him up.’