A woman. Height around five six, hair shoulder length and midbrown. A large leather satchel slung over one hip. Shorts, lightweight shirt and sandals, but the skin too pale to be a Californian. Mutton bounded up to the woman, barking cheerfully. At once, she stopped and crouched to pat him. “English,” Lindsay grunted to herself. She slowed till she was barely faster than walking pace. The woman looked up, met her eyes and straightened up. By then, only a dozen yards separated them.

“Lindsay Gordon.” It was a statement, not a question. Two words were enough to confirm Lindsay’s presumption that those pale limbs didn’t belong to an American. Mutton dropped on to his stomach on the sand, head down between his front paws.

Lindsay paused, hands on hips, breathing slightly harder than she needed to. If she was going to have to take off, better that the other woman thought she was more tired than she was. “You have the advantage of me, then,” she said, a frosty imitation of Mel Gibson’s proud Scottish dignity in Braveheart.

“Meredith Miller sent me. I . . . I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

The accent was Estuary English. It had never been one of Lindsay’s favorites, always reminding her of spivvy Tory MPs on the make. Distance hadn’t lent it enchantment. She wiped away the sweat that had sprung out on her upper lip. She cocked her head to one side and said, “I know Penny’s dead, if that’s what you mean. It made the papers. Who are you?”

The woman opened her satchel and Lindsay rose on to the balls of her feet, ready for fight or flight. The past she’d tried so hard to bury in California had conditioned her responses more than she liked to admit. Especially when she was dealing with people with English accents. But nothing more threatening than a business card emerged from the bag. Lindsay took it and read, “DGM Investigations. Sandra Bloom, senior operative.” There was an address with an East London postcode that would have rendered the whole card a joke before Canary Wharf started to fill up. Now, it signalled that Sandra Bloom’s company thought they were out at the leading edge of private investigation, light years away from the bottle of bourbon and the trilby.

“DGM?” Lindsay asked.

Sandra Bloom’s mouth twisted in a wince. “Don’t get mad?”

Lindsay nodded. “Must have seemed like a good idea at the time. So what’s all this about, Ms. Bloom? What are you doing here? What’s your connection to Meredith? And why are we standing in the middle of a beach when we live in a world that has more phones, faxes and modems than hot dinners?”

Sandra looked faintly embarrassed. “I don’t know exactly what it is that Ms. Miller does for a living . . .”

Lindsay interrupted with a snort of ironic laughter. “Join a very large club.”

“. . . but whatever it is, it’s made her rather paranoid about normal methods of communication,” she continued regardless.