Sitting in one of the jump seats, Karen couldn’t see the house very well until the chauffeur turned the Lincoln around on the gravelled front apron, applied the brake, and opened the door for her. When she climbed out, though, and stood waiting for Peter and Senator Jones in the wind that blew off the lake, she realised just how much one and a half million dollars could buy, especially out in rural Kansas.

Lake Vista – a name which one of Shearson’s mistresses had chosen – was a modernistic two-story house built out of natural stone, timber and glass. It was set in the rock overlooking the lake, with two balconies actually overhanging the dark and glittering water. But its most striking feature was the triangular timber roof which rose from the centre of the house like a stylised Indian tepee. Shearson kept at Lake Vista one of the country’s most valuable and important private collections of primitive Indian art, including a Pottawatomie painting on buffalo hide that had been valued at six million dollars.

‘Quite a place, huh?’ asked Peter, taking Karen’s arm and leading her towards the front door. ‘You wait until you see the inside.’

‘It’s unbelievable,’ said Karen. ‘It’s just like something out of the movies.’

The featureless wooden front doors of the house opened up, and two tall blue-jawed men in plaid shirts and mushroom-coloured stetson hats came out to help Senator Jones across the gravel. One of them tipped his hat to Karen and said, ‘How are you?’

‘They’re the Muldoon brothers,’ explained Peter, leading Karen up the steps and into the polished wood hallway. ‘They used to work a farm in Elk county, until they were bought out by an oil company. They’re pretty wealthy in their own right, but for some reason they’ve always attached themselves to Shearson as unpaid side-kicks. Don’t ever ask me why. You’ll have to find out for yourself.’

The inside of Shearson’s house was even more spectacular than the outside. The interior of the pointed wooden roof was lined with zig-zag galleried steps, so that a visitor could climb upwards from level to level, admiring Shearson’s Indian paintings and artifacts all the way up to the very tip of the house. Under the stressed-concrete beams which supported the ‘tepee’, there was a spacious conversation area; and off to the left, towards the lake, there was a sitting-room with Cherokee rugs and leather furniture and genuine Canadian totem poles.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Karen.

Behind her, the Muldoon brothers were almost carrying Shearson into the house. Grimacing, they supported him through the doors, across the conversation area, and into the sitting-room, so that they could deposit him at last in a sturdy studded library chair, with a view through the sliding-glass windows of the darkling lake.

‘Travel grows less and less desirable every day,’ grumbled Shearson. ‘Did Della get here yet?’