Their name was not Simon, and God knew where they lived or why they wanted to find her but it made no sense, this coincidence of the solicitors being so adjacent. Unless surely they had tracked her down previously, and then placed their business with the firm of Lane and Soames to give it a spurious orderliness and a handy quality. Easy to nab her when she was only next door—it had been perfect for them. And that other one was their agent.

The file came with the glowing cerise-clawed secretary. She teetered in and out as if high on something.

‘The name,’ Rachaela said again. ‘Is it actually Scarabae?’

Soames did not twitch or flinch. He was impervious, a little irked.

‘The name I have is Simon, Miss Day.’

He opened the file before her and indicated a lengthy correspondence, lots of long sheets with neat dates and slightly faulty typing, and handwritten letters on featureless white paper. Rachaela could not read handwriting of any kind. Probably its intimacy repelled her. She glanced at the indecipherable address on the handwritten sheets and raised her brows, trying to convey to Soames an air of sensible concentration. She was not responding as he wanted. She felt cornered. The leopard was prowling round the room.

Had she always been afraid these people would one day reach out for her? Why was the idea so dreadful—for it was, it was horrific. Her mother had always maligned them but knew nothing of them. They had been a shadow at the back of her lover, she conveniently blamed them for his desertion. To the child she must have told horror stories now too recessed and entrenched to come forward to the light, embedded like black fossils in Rachaela’s subconscious. For she was afraid of the tribe of the Scarabae.

‘No, Mr Soames. I’m very sorry. I don’t think your clients are being honest, either with you or with me. If they’re relatives of my father’s there’s really no reason for them to be interested in me. I never knew him. I can’t help them. That’s all I have to say.’ Rachaela got up. ‘I hope now that I’ll be left in peace.’

‘I regret you take this view, Miss Day.’

He was pedantic and huffy, he had lost.

Rachaela went out and passed by the secretary who flooded into a terrifying fake smile all teeth and lipstick.

The lift descended.

It was raining in the street.

I must shrug it off now. But she could not. The leopard, invisible in light as in murk, still followed at her heels.

‘You’re late, Rachaela,’ said Mr Gerard. Three quarters of an hour. It’s too much. I had a rush, ten people, and where were you?’

‘I went to see Lane and Soames.’

‘Any joy?’ cried Mr Gerard.

Rachaela loathed the expression but expected nothing else of him.