Well, there you are. I’d been Looped. As ye sew, so shall ye knit.

‘I’m going to ask you again,’ he said, starting towards me. ‘Who are you?’

I let my shoulders slump. The game was up. I held my wrists out in front of me in a ‘handcuff me, officer’ gesture. ‘You want to know my name?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

The reason they never heard it was because we were interrupted by an ear-drum-splitting howl of incredible intensity. The sound bounced off the floor and ceiling of the hallway and came back twice as strong, rocking the brain and blurring the eyes.

Mickywinced and backed away along the wall, and Whisky started to lift his hands to his ears. In the half second they gave me, I ran for the open door and hit Whisky in the chest with my right shoulder. He bounced back and fell against the railings, as I turned left and took off down the street at a speed I hadn’t travelled at since I was sixteen. If I could get twenty yards away from the Airweight, I’d have a chance.

To be honest, I don’t know if they fired at me. After the unbelievable sound from Ronnie’s little brass canister, my ears were in no state to process that kind of information. All I know is they didn’t rape me.

Eleven

There is no sin except stupidity.

OSCAR WILDE

Ronnie took us back to her flat off the King’s Road, and we drove past it a dozen times in each direction. We weren’t checking for surveillance, just looking for a place to park. This was the time of day when Londoners who own cars, and that’s most of them, pay heavily for their indulgence - time stands still, or goes backwards, or does some fucking thing that doesn’t correspond with the ordinary rules of the universe - and all those TV commercials showing sexy sportsters being flung about deserted country roads start to irritate you a little. They don’t irritate me, of course, because I ride a bike. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.

When she’d finally managed to squeeze the TVR into a space, we discussed taking a taxi back to her flat, but decided that it was a nice enough evening and we both fancied the walk. Or rather, Ronnie fancied the walk. People like Ronnie always fancy the walk, and people like me always fancy people like Ronnie, so we each put on a stout pair of walking legs and set off. On the way, I gave her a brief account of the LyallStreet session, and she listened in rapt near-silence. She hung on my words in a way that people, particularly women, don’t usually hang. They usually let go, twist their ankle in the fall, and blame me for it.

But Ronnie was different somehow. Different because she seemed to think that I was different.

When we finally made it back to her flat, she unlocked the front door, stood to one side, and asked, in a strangely little girl voice, if I wouldn’t mind going in first. I looked at her for a moment. I think perhaps she wanted to gauge how serious the whole thing was, as if she still wasn’t quite sure of it or me; so I put on a grim expression and went through the flat in what I hoped was a Clint Eastwoody sort of a way - pushing open doors with my foot, opening cupboards suddenly - while she stood in the corridor, her cheeks spotted with red.

In the kitchen, I said, ‘Oh God.’

Ronnie gave a gasp, and then ran forward and peered round the door-jamb.

‘Is this bolognese?’ I said, and held up a wooden spoonful of something old and badly misjudged.

She tutted at me and then laughed with relief, and I laughed too, and we suddenly seemed like very old friends. Close, even. So obviously, I had to ask her.

‘When’s he coming back?’

She looked at me, and blushed a little, then went back to scraping bolognese from the saucepan.

‘When’s who coming back?’

‘Ronnie,’ I said. I moved round until I was more or less in front of her. ‘You’re very well put together, but you do not take a size forty-four chest. And if you did, you wouldn’t take it in a lot of identical pin-stripe suits.’

She glanced towards the bedroom, remembering the cupboards, and then went to the sink and started to run hot water into the pan.

‘Drink?’ she said, without turning round.

She broke out a bottle of vodka while I threw ice-cubes over the kitchen floor, and eventually she decided to tell me that the boyfriend, who, as I think I could probably have guessed, sold commodities in the City, didn’t stay at the flat every night, and when he did he never got there before ten. Honestly, if I’d had a pound for every time a woman has told me that, I’d have at least three by now. The last time it happened, the boyfriend came back atseven o’clock - ‘He’s never done that before,’ - and hit me with a chair.

I deduced from her tone, and from her words too, that the relationship was not going as swimmingly as it might and, in spite of my curiosity, I thought it probably best to change the subject.

As we settled ourselves on the sofa, with the ice-cubes making sweet music inside the glasses, I started to give her a slightly fuller version of events - starting withAmsterdam, and ending with LyallStreet, but leaving out the bit about helicopters and Graduate Studies. Even so, it was a goodish yarn, with plenty of derring-do, and I added some derring -didn’t-really-but-it-sounds-good, just to keep up her glowing opinion of me. When I’d finished, she wrinkled her brow slightly.

‘But you didn’t find the file,’ she asked, looking disappointed.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Which doesn’t mean it isn’t there. If Sarah really wanted to hide it in the house, it would take a team of builders about a week to search the place properly.’

‘Well; I went over the gallery, and there’s definitely nothing there. She’s left some paperwork around, but it’s all just work stuff.’ She went over to the table and opened her briefcase. ‘I did find her diary, if that’s any good.’

I don’t know if she was serious about this. She must have read enough Agatha Christies to know that finding diaries is almost always good.

But maybe not Sarah’s. It was a leather-bound A4-sized affair, produced by a cystic fibrosis charity, and it didn’t tell me much about its owner that I couldn’t have guessed. She took her work seriously, lunched a little, didn’t put circles instead of dots above her ‘ i’s, but did doodle cats when she was on the phone. She hadn’t made many plans for the months ahead, and the last entry simply said ‘CED OK 7.30’. Looking back over the previous weeks, I saw that CED had also been OK three times before, once at 7.30 and twice at 12.15.

‘Any idea who this is?’ I said to Ronnie, showing her the entry. ‘Charlie? Colin? Carl, Clive, Clarissa, Carmen?’ I dried up on women’s names beginning with ‘C’.