O’Neal was also being hustled by the doormen, but he seemed to know where he was going and didn’t once turn his head to the advertised wares. Instead, he jinked left and right a few times, never looking back, until he reached his oasis, The Shala. He turned and walked straight in.

I kept going until the end of the street, dawdled for a minute, then headed back to admire The Shala’s intriguing facade. The words ‘Live’, ‘Girls’, ‘Erotic’, ‘Dancing’ and ‘Sexy’ were painted round the door in a random fashion, as if inviting you to try and make a sentence out of them, and there were half-a-dozen faded snaps of women in their underwear pinned up in a glass case. A girl in a tight leather skirt lolled in the doorway, and I smiled at her in a way that said I was fromNorway and yes, The Shala looked like just the place to refresh oneself after a hard day being Norwegian. I could just as easily have yelled that I was coming in there right now with a flamethrower, I doubt whether she would have batted an eyelid. Or could have batted it, under the weight of all that mascara.

I paid her fifteen pounds and filled in a membership form in the name of Lars Petersen, care of the Vice Squad, New Scotland Yard, and trotted down the steps into the basement to see just exactly how live, sexy, erotic, dancing and girls The Shala could really be.

It was a sorry sort of dive. Very, very sorry indeed. The management had long ago decided that turning the lights down was a cheap alternative to cleaning the place, and I had the constant feeling that the carpet-tiles were coming away with the soles of my shoes. Twenty or so tables were arranged around a small stage, on which three glassy-eyed girls bounced along to some loud music. The ceiling was so low that the tallest of them had to dance with a stoop; but surprisingly, considering all three were naked and the music was the Bee Gees, they were carrying the whole thing off with a fair degree of dignity.

O’Neal had a table at the front, and seemed to have taken a shine to the girl on the left, a pasty-faced creature who looked to me as if she could do with a large steak and kidney pie and a good night’s sleep. She kept her eyes on the wall at the back of the club and never smiled.

‘Drink.’

A man with boils on his neck was leaning over the bar at me.

‘Whisky please,’ I said, and turned to the stage.

‘Five pounds.’

I looked back at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Five pounds for the whisky. You pay now’

‘I don’t think I do,’ I said. ‘You give me the whisky. Then I’ll pay.’

‘You pay first.’

‘You fuck yourself with a garden fork first.’ I smiled, to take the sting out of it. He brought the whisky. I paid him five pounds.

After ten minutes at the bar, I decided that O’Neal was here to enjoy the show and nothing else. He didn’t look at his watch or the door, and he was drinking gin with enough abandon to convince me that he was definitely off the clock. I finished my own drink and sidled over to his table.

‘Don’t tell me. She’s your niece and she’s only doing this so she can get her Equity Card and join the Royal Shakespeare Company.’ O’Neal turned and stared at me as I pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said, crossly. I rather think he may have been a little embarrassed.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘That’s the wrong way round surely. You’re supposed to say "hello" and I say "what are you doing here?"‘

‘Where the hell have you been, Lang?’

‘Oh, hither and yon,’ I said. ‘As you know, I am a petal borne aloft on the autumn winds. It should say that in my file.’

‘You followed me here.’

‘ Tut. Followed is such an ugly word. I prefer "blackmail".’

‘What?’

‘But, of course, it means something completely different. So all right, let’s say I followed you here.’

He’d started looking round the room, trying to see if I had any large friends with me. Or maybe he was looking for large friends of his own. He leant forward and hissed at me. ‘You are in very, very serious trouble, Lang. It is only fair that I should warn you of that.’

‘Yes, I think you’re probably right,’ I said. ‘Very serious trouble is certainly one of the things I’m in. A strip club is another one. With a senior civil servant who shall remain nameless for at least an hour.’

He leaned back in his chair, a peculiar leer spreading across his face. The eyebrows raised, the mouth curled upwards. I realised it was the beginning of a smile. In kit form.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You really are trying to blackmail me. That is terribly pathetic.’

‘Is it? Well we can’t have that.’

‘I am meeting someone here. The choice of rendezvous was not mine.’ He drained his third gin. ‘Now I should be greatly obliged if you would take yourself off somewhere, so I don’t have to call the doorman and have you ejected.’

The sound-track had moved seamfully into a loud but bland cover of ‘War, What Is It Good For?’ and O’Neal’s niece moved down to the front of the stage and started shaking her vagina at us, almost in time to the music.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I like it here just fine.’

‘Lang, I am warning you. You have at this moment very little credit in the bank. I have an important meeting here, and if you disrupt it, or inconvenience me in any way, I shall foreclose on you. Do I make myself plain?’

‘Captain Mainwaring,’ I said. ‘That’s who you remind me of.:

‘Lang, for the last time…’

He stopped when he saw Sarah’s Walther. I think I probably would have done the same, in his place.

‘I thought you said you didn’t carry firearms,’ he said, after a while. Nervous, but trying not to show it.

‘I’m a victim of fashion,’ I said. ‘Someone told me they’re in this year, and I just had to have one.’ I started to take off my jacket. The niece was only a few feet away, but she was still staring at the back wall.

‘You are not going to fire a gun in here, Lang. I don’t believe you are entirely insane.’

I bundled the jacket into a tight ball and slipped the gun into one of the folds.

‘Oh, I am,’ I said. ‘Entirely. Thomas "Mad Dog" Lang they used to call me.’

‘I am beginning…’

O’Neal’s empty glass exploded. Shards scattered across the table and on to the floor. He went very pale.

‘My God…’ he stammered.

Rhythm’s the thing. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. I’d fired on one of the big crashing chords of ‘War’ and made no more noise than if I’d been licking an envelope. If the niece had been doing it, she would have fired on the upbeat and ruined everything.