Then she stopped, struck by an obvious, and awkward, possibility. What if Paul were to offer to come with her? She saw herself sitting on a plane with her boyfriend on one side of her and Detective Inspector Strafford on the other. It was a prospect at once dismaying and ridiculous, a scene out of a farce. But then, wasn’t there a touch of farce to the thing in general? Certainly, there would have been, if it weren’t literally a matter of life and death – of life or death. The thought of April brought a pang of guilt. She had quite forgotten about her.

In Westmoreland Street, the pavements were drying in big grey patches. For her, the smell of spring rain always brought with it a sense of vague yearning. She was due to attend a lecture this morning, on diseases of the spleen, but decided to skip it. The spleen could look after itself, for now.

At the doorway of the airline office she hesitated. If she crossed the threshold, she would have committed herself irrevocably, and there would be no going back. She could see people standing at the high counter, and the salesgirls in their uniforms, and the clerks at the back, bent over their desks.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

Chapter 28

William Latimer’s secretary wondered if the Boss was coming down with something, he was that distracted. She had to ask him three times, no less, to sign a chit for the office’s monthly pound of Bewley’s tea and tin of Jacob’s assorted biscuits. He had snapped at her, too, when she asked him how she should reply to the French Ambassador’s invitation to a Bastille Day dinner at the embassy. She was used to his gruffness, in fact she secretly admired it as a manly quality, but this kind of bad-tempered treatment she didn’t think she should be expected to put up with. The fact that there was nothing she could do about it wasn’t the point. She had been with him through two ministries, and deserved better. It must be that he was feeling under the weather. There was a dose going around.

At four o’clock he rang through from the inner office and barked at her to bring him his coat and hat. She was on the point of telling him what he could do with himself and his coat and his hat too, but she kept her temper, contenting herself with putting on a sweetly sarcastic tone when she said ‘Yes, Minister’ to him, and slammed down the receiver with a bang. She should have said, ‘Sea, a Aire’, but had spoken in English instead, just to show him.