I can sense that Dinah isn’t altogether happy. She starts fidgeting. ‘What are you looking for?’ she asks irritably.

‘I’m checking them for the condition report. So that we can make the valuation.’

‘This one here,’ Dinah says, jerking her thumb towards me, ‘thinks seven hundred pounds each. She’s a fashion curator.’

‘That’s nice,’ Cathy says, looking at me briefly.

I smile ingratiatingly.

She lays the black-and-gold jacket down and checks the label again. Then she goes back to the green tweed suit. Now it’s the turn of the white one with the black braid and the A-line Sixties skirt that’s too short.

‘You looked at them already!’ Dinah says in frustration. ‘How many times?’

Cathy gets to her feet. ‘I’m just going to have a word with Tallulah.’

‘Oh my goodness,’ I say to Dinah once she’s out of the room, ‘what if they’re worth more than we thought? The Fifties ones have got to be rare.’

‘Maybe in that case I’ll only sell one,’ Dinah says. ‘The green one.’

‘Definitely the green one,’ I agree.

We look at each other gleefully.

Tallulah Young comes into the room with Cathy. She’s wearing a sleeveless cotton camisole and culottes, her grey hair tucked behind her ears. She doesn’t acknowledge either of us. She, too, looks carefully at the suits and then at the labels, and then she looks at Dinah. Her expression isn’t that of someone who’s about to deliver good news and I’m suddenly churned with nerves.

‘These aren’t right,’ the auctioneer says to Dinah. ‘We can’t accept them.’

Dinah turns to me and spreads her hands in a gesture of incredulity. ‘What’s she saying? I don’t understand.’

Me neither. ‘What’s the problem?’

Tallulah Young says, ‘They’re couture standard, beautifully constructed, but the label’s wrong.’

I’m confused. ‘In what way?’

‘You’re blind,’ Dinah says, her anger rising. ‘My husband bought these for me many years ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tallulah says.

I stare at her, utterly baffled by this development. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Perfectly.’ She turns down her mouth in a gesture of sympathy. ‘I’m afraid there are a lot of fakes out there.’

Cathy begins to move the garments from the table, draping them over the chairs we were originally sitting on.

‘Hey!’ Dinah says to Cathy. ‘Stop that!’ And to Tallulah: ‘Fakes?’

I try to think of a rational explanation; how Moss, in the 1950s, came by these suits and was duped. ‘Moss must have been misled,’ I say.

‘Misled?’ Dinah seizes the word vigorously. ‘Who misled Moss?’

‘Look,’ I say, trying to climb out of the nightmare, ‘it might not even have been deliberate – what I mean is, the person who sold them to him might have been taken in as well, because as she just said, they’re haute couture quality.’