approached and closed noiselessly behind it, as a security officer came out of the small guard house to check them in.
‘Good evening, Sir. I don’t have a guest on my list for tonight, Sir.’
‘Spur of the moment, Fred. Bella meet Fred, who keeps the bad men out. Fred, this is my lady, Bella Greenwood. I’ve no doubt you know all about her by now.’
Fred smiled. ‘Very nice to meet you, miss. I’ll add Ms Greenwood to the Approved Visitors List, shall I, Sir?’
‘You bet. Good night, Fred.’
‘Good night, Sir. Miss.’
Richard drove round a corner into a sort of square formed by an substantial eighteenth-century house, a small Jacobean block, and what looked like a nineteenth-century school house, its front covered in ivy.
‘You’ll need to check in with Security whenever you come here, if you’re not with me. If I’m not around, just poke your head though the guard-house door and the guys will sign you in. You’ll need keys, too. I’ll organise that.’
He led the way into what Bella was privately thinking of as the school house. Inside it was warmer and more comfortable than the Palace. The ceilings were lower and the art was less warlike. There was even an elevator, with gilded bars and a leather-covered bench seat around three sides of it. Richard flung open the doors for her.
‘You must take a ride in Gertrude. Don’t look down if you get vertigo, but Gertrude is a work of art. They wanted to put in something modern and silent that opened straight into my apartment, but I said no. She’s part of my childhood, Gertrude.’
He patted the leather seat as if it were a friendly dog and swung the hands of a floor indicator as big as a grandfather clock face. Gertrude clanked into life and juddered sedately to the top floor.
Richard’s apartment was a shock. Bella had seen him in someone else’s cottage, in Lottie’s flat and in the shared houseboat. All those places were friendly, book-filled, cosy. This flat was enormous. The main room ran the entire length of the building, as far as she could see, with a pale blond-wood floor and minimalist furniture: deep ivory-coloured sofas surrounded a low wooden table inlaid with an intricate pattern of pale woods. There was a cocktail cabinet at one end, currently closed up to reveal its flowing Art Deco lines, and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the other. No flowers or knick-knacks here, but a spotlit alcove housing a beautiful urn, the colour of the sunlit stone of the Acropolis, and a huge painting occupying the whole of one wall. At first glance it looked like a black-and-white architectural study of a ruined castle in the middle of a mediaeval town. But the longer you looked at it, the more you saw anomalies: tiny touches of colour, staircases that couldn’t possibly exist, hints of people just out of sight, a shoe, a drifting scarf.
‘That,’ said Bella, staring, ‘is amazing.’
He stood beside her and looked too. ‘I never tire of it. Every time, I see something different.’ He put an arm round her. ‘The Palace is full of stuff. People are always giving you things and some of my ancestors were avid collectors, too. And you never throw anything away, on principle, in case the next generation would like it. So my mother lives in an upmarket junk yard and tries to hide it with flowers. I didn’t want that.’
‘You haven’t got it. This is beautiful.’
There were windows all along another wall. She went to them and saw that they looked out across lawns to another building.
‘Is that part of Camelford House too?’
He shook his head. ‘Government building.’
‘So you’re in this great big place all on your own?’
His eyes started to dance in the way she loved; the way they hadn’t for too long. He took her hand and pulled her towards him.
‘Not,’ he said, ‘tonight.’
*
It was a good start but things went wrong almost immediately.
Richard had to leave to take a flight to Edinburgh the next morning, so he left before Bella did. And no one had told her that she had to sign out when she left Camelford House. So in the middle of the day she got a frantic phone call from someone in Richard’s entourage of the day, asking her to call the Guard House. She did, and a meticulous functionary insisted that she come back at once and sign out. She would do well to apologise to the Officer of the Watch as well,