‘I still don’t know if I can trust you or not,’ he told her, in a thick voice that had all the warning rumbles of an earth tremor. ‘I still don’t know if I should have let you overhear what I was saying.’

‘I don’t even know who you were talking to.’

He grunted. ‘Don’t give me that. It was Alan Hedges, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, and you realised that as soon as I started talking.’

‘All right,’ she smiled, ‘I did.’

The question is,’ he said, ‘are you going to rush into print with this tasty little morsel of scandal, or are you going to accept my offer?’

‘Offer?’ she asked, tilting her head to one side. Shearson was tugging harder at her wrap now, and her right shoulder was bare. She didn’t make any attempt to resist him. Her skin was pale and freckled in the subdued light from the pierced-brass Moroccan lamp.

‘Come on, Della, you’re an intelligent woman,’ said Shearson. ‘I’m going to need someone to oversee this little fund-raising operation for me. A manager.’

‘Don’t you have anyone in the Department of Agriculture to do your managing for you?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re all too busy digging knives into each other’s backs and trying to outsmart me. I need an outsider. Someone new, and bright, and fresh, and personable. Someone like you.’

‘You don’t know anything about me.’

‘I know that you’re twenty-seven years old, born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, daughter of a horse-breeder and his wife. I know that you studied at Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts at Chickasha, and then found yourself a job in Oklahoma City as a copy girl for the Oklahoma News-Messenger. I know that you married a printer called George McIntosh when you were just twenty-one, and that you bore him a daughter. I know that your daughter died of meningitis when she was two, and that not long after, you and George split up. You went to Kansas City, and found a job on the Kansas City Herald-Examiner – and George – do you know what happened to George?’

‘No,’ said Della, white-faced. ‘I haven’t heard from George in two or three years.’

‘Well, that’s not surprising,’ said Shearson. ‘George died in a very nasty multiple road accident on the Indian Nation Turnpike, a couple of miles outside of McAlester, just about a year ago.’

‘How do you know all this?’ asked Della. ‘You’ve only been dating me for four days. And, my God, nobody told me that George was dead. I didn’t even get a letter from his mother.’