‘Thanks a lot. It’s my home you’re talking about, and I don’t think it’s the role of a housebreaker to criticize the victim’s taste.’

‘I love your taste,’ she said. ‘Thousands wouldn’t, but I do. It’s sort of post nuclear holocaust.’

‘The cleaning lady’s away sick.’

‘Has she been away long?’

‘About eighteen months.’

‘You haven’t answered my question. What do you do?’

‘I’m a spy. I work for MI5.’

She giggled. ‘Spies are short and fat and old, and wear grubby mackintoshes. I don’t believe you. What do you really do?’

‘I work for a venture capital company.’

‘Your own firm?’

‘Afraid not. If it was, I’d have a mansion in Belgravia, with a pet interior decorator in a cage, and an unpickable butler on the door.’

‘Wouldn’t even I be able to pick him?’

‘No, not even you, Sherlock. Not unless you asked him very, very nicely.’

‘I think I would,’ she said. ‘Very, very nicely. What does your venture capital firm put venture capital into?’

‘Almost anything that’s risky but has a chance of a fat profit: a mini-computer firm; a company with a revolutionary method of making maps; a chain of do-it-yourself shops; a cargo airline; a shipping firm; an oil-exploration company; a chain of medical clinics specializing in sports injuries; a firm that manufactures mini tractors; a geological exploration company; a nickel-mining company in Australia; and a whole load of other things.’

‘My father owns a mine,’ she said.

‘Does he? What do they mine? Front-door keys?’

She ignored the taunt. ‘No, plutonium, I think it is.’

‘You don’t mine plutonium; it isn’t a raw material.’

‘Oh, well, it’s the raw material – whatever you call it.’

‘Uranium?’

‘Yes, that sounds right. I’m not really sure though, he does so many different things. It’s in Namibia, I think.’

‘Where the hell’s that?’

‘South West Africa, ignoramus.’

‘All right, Einstein, don’t get smart with me.’

She took the cigarette out of my mouth and placed it in the ashtray. Her hand started moving menacingly down my body.

Suddenly, something ice-cold hit my stomach, and for a moment I tensed right up. It was a trap. She had stabbed me. Then the coldness spread further over my stomach. I pulled back the sheet. In her hand was a blue-and-white tube out of which she was squirting a clear-coloured liquid.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, moving further down my anatomy.

Talking became difficult. ‘I wondered what it was,’ I was able to gasp.

‘KY Jelly,’ she said, ‘like it?’

I liked it a lot. After a few minutes I didn’t know whether I was going to come or die. I lived.

When I came around, she was dozing. Bright daylight was shoving its way through the curtains. She opened her eyes. ‘You haven’t told me your name,’ I said.

‘You never asked.’