‘I hope you’re right,’ said Helen softly. ‘I want him to be back, very much.’ She didn’t, in her preoccupation, see the quick anxious glance that Chloe shot at her.

After an hour of sitting with Rose in the impenetrable untidiness of her kitchen, Oliver stood up restlessly. He drank the remains of the dark brown sherry in his glass and made a face. Rose went on impassively with her sewing, not looking at him. ‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘what are you doing to that nice little thing upstairs?’

Oliver shrugged himself into his coat without answering, turned to go, and then as an afterthought sketched a kiss in the air between himself and Rose. ‘Doing nothing at all, darling Rose. All the treasures are kept securely locked away, as you must have guessed. Bloody boring. And now, au revoir or I shall be late for Hall.’

Rose, left alone in the kitchen, smiled a little and went on sewing.

Oliver took the steps into the misty dampness shrouding the city two at a time. He noticed the outline of a big car parked on the bridge as he came level with it, then as he swung out on to the pavement he saw that it was a white Rolls. Beside it, a man in a peaked cap was lifting a heavy trunk. Three other people were standing close together in the orange glare of the street lights, moisture from the mist beading brilliantly on their hair and clothes. The tallest was a thickset man in an expensive overcoat; one of the two women was clinging affectedly to his arm.

But it was the other woman who drew Oliver’s startled attention.

She looked very young. Over a cloud of pure white fur, the face was as innocent as an angel’s, and as expressionlessly beautiful as if carved in marble. Oliver stopped dead. At once, the face burned itself into his memory. He knew that he had never seen it before, yet it was familiar, even down to the faintly startled reflection in the depths of the immense eyes. And the girl went on looking back at him, her lips slightly parted and the street lights darting jewels of dampness among her snow-white furs.

The thickset man made an irritable sound and Oliver wrenched his attention from the girl.

‘Can I help?’ he asked politely.

The man stabbed a finger towards the square black bulk of Follies House.

‘Is this Follies House?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Jesus, will you look at those steps!’ The accent was mid-Atlantic, but beneath it were the unmistakable echoes of London’s East End. Hobbs, can you get all this down there?’

The chauffeur leaned over the parapet. ‘Yes, Mr Warren, I think so.’