‘I didn’t follow the course of his evening,’ Tom answered grimly. ‘Mostly because I was dancing with Pansy.’ His voice softened at her name and Helen looked away. ‘But I can guess. Booze, plus whatever cocktail of pills and dope he fancied. Then I suppose he passed out. Quite inconspicuously, really. Only about five hundred people saw him. Christ, what a fool.’

‘What was he doing with all those horrible, crass people?’

Tom laughed humourlessly. ‘They’re upper-class hooligans. I’ve seen him with them before. It amuses him in some perverse way, egging them on to run riot and break the place up. Doing it in his own home is just the latest development, I guess.’

Helen felt the last vestiges of champagne elation ebbing away. She remembered the crumpled guy of Oliver, and the feet bumping as he was taken away and fear stabbed at her again. Poor Oliver. Tom had been dancing with Pansy, and she had been basking in the glow of strangers’ attention, while Oliver was filling himself with whatever lethal concoction it was that had left him in a pathetic bundle outside the supper room door.

If he had asked the three of them here to save him from himself, they had made a poor job of it.

Sorrow and foreboding crawled icily under her skin. She shivered a little and the folds of her dress whispered around her. In the shadows Tom’s brooding profile shifted and he shrugged, as if to dismiss his own uncomfortable thoughts.

Then, to her surprise, he took her hand and began to trace the shape of her fingers with his own.

‘Helen. Mysterious Helen,’ he said in a lighter, teasing voice that startled her. She realised that Tom had been drinking too. Now that the crisis was over there was no need for him to stay sober any more, and she thought he was retreating gratefully behind a screen of tipsiness. Just the opposite of me, she thought, and remembered with fleeting regret her elated mood of the early evening.

‘Helen?’ Tom said again.

‘What?’ she asked, stupidly. Her voice was shaky and as she shivered again the folds of her dress rustled between them. Suddenly she became acutely conscious of his hand still holding her own.

‘This,’ he answered and bent his head quickly over hers. He kissed her once, lightly, then pulled her close to him. Then he was kissing her again, forcing her head back so that the breath caught in her throat and surprise lapped through her. His fingers felt like iron on her bare arms and for a moment she could have let herself fall against him.

After the shock of his kiss came bewilderment, and then anger. ‘Don’t,’ she said sharply, and pulled away from his hands.

Tom raised one eyebrow and his mocking smile came back.

‘Whyever not? Don’t be so Victorian.’

‘It’s not that.’