Petra sighed. It was her fate to be locked in small rooms with sadly deluded people. She was starting to think she was some sort of weirdness magnet. ‘You’re all truly expecting me to believe that lithe Rashida Barnes out there is around sixty years old and… or… what? That she’s been dead for four years? And that the young woman I saw in the Club Room is the same age as Rashida, but she’s supposed to be dead too?’

Ellis opened his mouth as if to launch into an explanation of how things work, but closed it again. He checked his phone. ‘We’re up.’

25

25 Two minutes later, Petra was standing on an X marked in matte black tape on a black marble tile beside a vast cold stone hearth. Salvador the head chef had become staff leader here in the dining room, and equipped her with a heavy starched linen cloth to drape on her arm and a magnum of champagne to insert into the ice bucket standing by the fireplace.

‘What should I do?’ Petra asked.

‘Stand by. Listen,’ he told her. ‘Pour the drinks when asked, Camilla. Do what seems appropriate in your position, that’s all.’

Petra was situated at the bottom end of the hall, far from the high table where key characters seemed to be playing a scene in front of a dozen guests who were standing gathered around it. She was much too far away and the lively, lubricated chatter in the room was too loud for her to make any of it out, but she knew it wasn’t her scene. They wanted her here, not there, for a reason. Trusting, knowing that she had no option, that her course would be corrected if she strayed, was comforting – it erased the pressure to make a choice. Meanwhile, the lighting had changed at this end of the hall. Any pretence at a real-world dining room had been dropped; bright spots of stage lighting now creating dark eddies and swirling curtains in cigarette smoke and dust, obscuring most of the diners’ faces at the round tables in front of her. There were seven guests at each table and it seemed she was responsible for topping up the drinks at the two tables in front of her. Waiters stood by, spaced along the side walls to serve the other tables between her and the top of the room.