It was a sombre glassy room, whose window looked towards the park. On the trees there was one last faint wraith of lingering fog. The screen was gone. The hunter out in the open.

‘‘I’m here,’ said Rachaela.

‘Yes indeed. Let me say how glad I am that you reconsidered.’

‘It got rather frantic, didn’t it? Your call. That little man in the overcoat and wool hat.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that can be,’ said Mr Soames smoothly. He had never had eyes, only glasses. All his face had succumbed to them. ‘Won’t you sit?’

Rachaela sat in the leather chair. It did not please her to think it had once been a black bull rushing over tindered meadows. Maybe it was only a clever plastic.

She sat with her hands together, her legs crossed. Her heart beat uncomfortably, but Mr Soames seemed more nervous than she.

‘Miss Day—first of all, I believe that your name was, until a short while ago, something other. Am I correct?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I don’t like to stress this, but my clients, the Simons, made rather a point of it. Your mother—a Miss Smith. And your father—well, these things happen.’

Rachaela waited.

Mr Soames twitched at his cack-handedness.

‘The Simons are a connection of your father’s family. Cousins, I believe.’

Rachaela waited. Her mother had never mentioned cousins, only the Scarabae family, obscure and artistic, darkly ominous, somewhere out of the city, inaccessible, wielding a whip of intent. ‘He never stayed with me because they would keep on and on at him.’ But of course he had never stayed with her because she had conceived Rachaela. Strange she had never flung that in Rachaela’s face. It would have been like her.

‘—And even after all this time, hope that you will be willing to visit them.’

She had not been attending.

‘Visit them? These Simons?’

‘Yes, just so. I have to tell you, Miss Day, a moneyed family.’

‘Is the name Simon?’

‘Yes, Miss Day.’

‘Then I don’t understand what they have to do with me.’

‘Perhaps you should agree to see them. Then you’ll discover. As I say, they’re prepared to pay your travelling expenses.’

She had not listened, and so did not know to where she was intended to travel.

‘I find all this very peculiar. I find it suspicious.’

Mr Soames was ringing for a file.

‘I shall show you the correspondence, Miss Day.’

She did not want to see it. She felt no curiosity. She felt threatened.