shrubby borders on either side towards the rear wall which, as he knew it would, contained a firmly locked and bolted door. Along the top of the wall was some sort of vicious revolving spike device designed to repel intruders and on an iron post a swivelling camera.
He felt like a POW who’d just tunnelled out of his Stalag to find himself still short of the perimeter fence. He looked back at the blazing rear windows of the enormous house. He couldn’t go back in there – too many people looking for him: Potts, Sir Simon, Home, Hogg and Malinverno in ascending degrees of threat and malignancy. ‘Malign Fiesta’ wasn’t in it, he thought, and a bowel-loosening, unmanning image of Flavia came suddenly into his head, unbidden. That girl… What was she doing to his life?
He heard footsteps coming down the gravel path towards him, a light tread, not Malinverno, he deduced. Perhaps a waiter sent to investigate the theft of empty wine bottles? Lorimer put his hands in his pockets and whistled tunelessly, kicking at pebbles as if it were the most normal thing in the world to leave a glamorous party and seek some quality time by the rear gate and the dustbins.
‘Hi,’ Lorimer said, breezily. ‘Getting a breath of —’
‘Do you want to get out?’ Amabel Sherriffmuir asked him. ‘I brought a key.’
‘Yes please,’ Lorimer said. ‘There’s someone I’m trying to avoid in there.’
‘Same here,’ she said. ‘My mother.’
‘Right.’
‘That’s why I was sitting in the security room watching the televisions. I saw you.’
She unlocked the door.
‘It fucking makes you want to puke, doesn’t it,’ she said with feeling, gesturing back at the glowing lit mansion, her home. ‘All this crap.’
‘I’m very grateful to you,’ Lorimer said.
She handed him a small cardboard tube – a ‘Smarties’ tube, Lorimer saw – it felt heavy and rattled, as if full of shot or seed.
‘Could you give that to Lulu?’ she said. ‘It’s a present. And tell her to call me.’
She kissed him on each cheek once again, Lorimer thinking that perhaps it did not seem the moment to disabuse her of the fact that he was neither the son of Angus Black nor, he assumed, the brother of Lulu.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Thanks again.’ He slipped out into the mews. Some rain had fallen and had made the cobbles shine. He was not the son of Angus Black but he was the son of the recently deceased Bogdan Blocj and so, as he walked briskly out of the mews and on up to Kensington High Street, he discreetly sprinkled the contents of the tube of Smarties behind him as he went, hearing the tick and rattle of the ecstacy or the crack rocks or the LSD tablets bounce off the pavement like small hail in his wake. Bogdan Blocj would have approved, he thought. He found a cab at a rank and was home before midnight.
Lady Haigh peered through the gap in her door as he crossed the hall. He could see she was wearing a hairy old dressing gown and a kind of night cap.
‘Evening, Lady Haigh,’ he said. ‘Cold night out.’
She opened the door a further inch or two.
‘Lorimer, I’ve been worrying about dog food. I give Jupiter the very best and he’s become accustomed to it. It seems most unfair to you.’
‘I don’t understand –’
‘To ask you to bear this extra expense, just because I’ve been spoiling him.’
‘Oh, don’t give it a thought.’
‘I tried him on a cheaper tin the other day and he didn’t even sniff at it.’
‘I’m sure it won’t be a problem.’
‘I’m so glad your friend has gone. I thought he was most uncivil.’
‘More of a colleague than a friend. He’s been having a difficult time. He lost his job and his wife threw him out.’
‘Sensible woman. He did seem to like rabbit, I remember.’
‘Torquil?’
‘Jupiter. I cooked him a rabbit once and he ate it. That can’t be very expensive, can it? Rabbit.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
She smiled at him, a wide smile of relief. ‘That’s put my mind at some ease. Good night, Lorimer.’
‘Good night, Lady Haigh.’
Upstairs Lorimer made himself a cup of milky coffee and fortified it with a splash of brandy. He had two messages on his answer machine. One from Dymphna giving him the name and telephone number of a financial journalist who would be happy to assist him, the other was from Stella. ‘Hello, stranger,’ the message said. ‘Hope everything’s hunky-dory, dory-hunky. Don’t forget Sunday. See you about twelve. Big