‘Thank you for what?’

Ronnie looked down at the ground and kicked at something that probably wasn’t there.

‘For not trying to make love to me last night.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I really didn’t know what she expected me to say, or even whether this was the beginning of a conversation or the end. ‘Thank you for thanking me,’ I added, which made it sound more like the end.

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘No, really,’ I said. ‘I appreciate it very much. I don’t try and make love to millions of women every day, and never get a squeak out of most of them. It makes a nice change.’

We strolled on a bit. A pigeon flew towards us and then darted away at the last moment, as if he’d suddenly realised we weren’t who he thought we were. A couple of horses trotted down Rotten Row, with tweed-jacketed men on their backs. Household Cavalry, probably. The horses looked quite intelligent.

‘Do you have anybody, Thomas?’ said Ronnie. ‘At the moment?’

‘You’re talking about women, I would think.’

‘That’s the ticket. Are you sleeping with any?’

‘By sleeping with, you mean…?”

‘Answer the question immediately, or I’ll call a policeman.’ She was smiling. Because of me. I’d made her smile, and it was a nice feeling.

‘No, Ronnie, I’m not sleeping with any women at the moment.’

‘Men?’

‘Or any men. Or any animals. Or any types of coniferous tree.’

‘Why not, if you don’t mind me asking? And even if you do.’

I sighed. I didn’t really know the answer to this myself, but saying that wasn’t going to get me off the hook. I started talking without any clear idea of what was going to come out. ‘Because sex causes more unhappiness than it gives pleasure,’ I said. ‘Because men and women want different things, and one of them always ends up being disappointed. Because I don’t get asked much, and I hate asking. Because I’m not very good at it. Because I’m used to being on my own. Because I can’t think of any more reasons.’ I paused for breath.

‘All right,’ said Ronnie. She turned and started walking backwards so she could get a good view of my face. ‘Which of those is the real one?’

‘B,’ I said, after a bit of thought. ‘We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words a little more carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men don’t have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.

‘That, of course, is the other main difference.’

‘Do you honestly think I would want to have a relationship with you?’

Tricky. Straight bat, head over the ball.

‘I don’t know Ronnie. I wouldn’t presume to guess what you want out of life.’

‘Oh, other bollocks. Get a grip, Thomas.’

‘On you?’

Ronnie stopped. And then grinned. ‘That’s more like it.’

We found a phone box and Ronnie called the gallery. She told them that she was feeling overwrought with the strain of dealing with her broken car, and that she needed to lie down for the rest of the afternoon. Then we got into the car and drove to Claridges for lunch.

I knew that eventually I was going to have to tell Ronnie something of what had happened, and something of what I thought was going to happen. It would probably involve a little lying, for my sake as well as hers, and it would also involve talking about Sarah. Which is why I put it off for as long as I could.

I liked Ronnie a lot. Maybe if she’d been the damsel in distress, held in the black castle on the black mountain, I would have fallen in love with her. But she wasn’t. She was sitting opposite me, chattering away, ordering a rocket salad with herDover sole, while a string quartet in Austrian national costume plucked and fiddled some Mozart in the lobby behind us.

I looked carefully round the room to see where my followers might be, knowing that there could be more than one team by now. There were no obvious candidates nearby, unless the CIA had taken to recruiting seventy-year-old widows with what looked like a couple of bags of self-raising flour tipped over their faces.

In any case, I was less concerned about being followed than about being heard. We’d chosen Claridges at random, so there’d been no chance to install any listening equipment. I had my back to the rest of the room, so any hand-held directional microphones wouldn’t be getting much. I poured us each a large glass of perfectly drinkable Pouilly-Fuissй that Ronnie had chosen, and started to talk.

I began by telling her that Sarah’s father was dead, and that I’d seen him die. I wanted to get the worst of it over with quickly, to drop her down a hole and then pull her up slowly, giving her natural pluck a bit of time to get to work. I also didn’t want her to think that I was scared, because that wouldn’t have helped either of us.

She took it well. Better than she took theDover sole, which lay on her plate untouched, with a mournful ‘did I say something wrong?’ look in its eye, until a waiter swept it away.

By the time I’d finished, the string quartet had ditched Mozart in favour of the theme fromSuperman, and the wine bottle was upside down in its bucket. Ronnie stared at the tablecloth and frowned. I knew she wanted to go and ring somebody, or hit something, or shout out in the street that the world was a terrible place and how could everyone go on eating and shopping and laughing as if it wasn’t. I knew that because that’s exactly what I’d wanted to do ever since I’d seen Alexander Woolf blown across a room by an idiot with a gun. Eventually she spoke, and her voice was shaking with anger.

‘So, you’re going to do this, are you? You’re going to do what they tell you?’

I looked at her and gave a small shrug.

‘Yes, Ronnie, that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t want to do it, but I think the alternatives are slightly worse.’

‘Do you call that a reason?’

‘Yes I do. It’s the reason most people do most things. If I don’t go along with them, they will probably kill Sarah. They’ve killed her father already, so it’s not as if they’re crossing any big bridges from now on.’