At two thirty Cam and Ehrlichman stood in an empty room. “Well done,” said Ehrlichman. “Are you sure all those people were students?”

Cam hesitated. “Are we on the record?”

Ehrlichman laughed. “Listen,” he said. “When the semester ends, do you want to come and work on Dick’s presidential election campaign? We could use a guy like you.”

Cam’s heart leaped. “I’d love to,” he said.

• • •

Dave was in London, staying with his parents in Great Peter Street, when Fitz knocked on the door.

The family were in the kitchen: Lloyd, Daisy, and Dave—Evie was in Los Angeles. It was six, the hour at which the children had used to eat their evening meal, which they called “tea,” when they were small. In those days the parents would sit with them for a while and talk about the day, before going out for the evening, usually to some political meeting. Daisy would smoke and Lloyd would sometimes make cocktails. The habit of meeting in the kitchen to chat at that hour had persisted long after the children grew too old to have “tea.”

Dave was talking to his parents about his breakup with Beep when the maid came in and said: “It’s Earl Fitzherbert.”

Dave saw his father tense up.

Daisy put her hand on Lloyd’s arm and said: “It will be all right.”

Dave was consumed with curiosity. He knew, now, that the earl had seduced Ethel when she was his housekeeper, and that Lloyd was the illegitimate child of their affair. He knew, too, that Fitz had angrily refused to acknowledge Lloyd as his son for more than half a century. So what was the earl doing here tonight?

Fitz walked into the room using two canes and said: “My sister, Maud, has died.”

Daisy sprang up. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Fitz,” she said. “Come and sit down.” She took his arm.

But Fitz hesitated and looked at Lloyd. “I have no right to sit down in this house,” he said.

Dave could tell that humility did not come naturally to Fitz.

Lloyd was controlling intense emotion. This was the father who had rejected him all his life. “Please sit down,” Lloyd said stiffly.

Dave pulled out a kitchen chair and Fitz sat at the table. “I’m going to her funeral,” he said. “It’s in two days’ time.”

Lloyd said: “She was living in East Germany, wasn’t she? How did you hear that she had died?”

“Maud has a daughter, Carla. She telephoned the British embassy in East Berlin. They were so kind as to phone me and give me the news. I was a minister in the Foreign Office until 1945, and that still counts for something, I’m glad to say.”

Without being asked, Daisy took a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard, poured an inch into a glass, and put it in front of Fitz with a small jug of tap water. Fitz poured a little water into the whisky and took a sip. “How kind of you to remember, Daisy,” he said. Dave recalled that Daisy had lived with Fitz for a while, when she was married to his son, Boy Fitzherbert. That was why she knew how he liked his whisky.