She wore a négligé of black silk, the sleeves trimmed with mink and her face was very pale, the eyes like dark shadows. She picked up a glass from the side table, poured a double gin and turned to face him, curiously defiant.

‘What’s Harry been up to then? Don’t tell me you’ve managed to pin something on him after all these years?’

‘Harry?’ Nick frowned and then he remembered. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Bella. Fred Manton’s the one who’s gone in too deep. He was going to make a run for it with the contents of the safe at the Flamingo. Harry was invited down to check on things, that’s all.’

A stranger stared out from the mirror behind her. A man in a blue raincoat whose dark eyes beneath the peak of the semi-military cap stared through and beyond.

She shivered and swallowed some of her gin hurriedly. ‘Is that all you wanted to say?’

‘No, I came to tell you that Ben won’t bother you any more.’

There was something in her eyes, but only for a moment and her head went back. ‘Is that a fact? Well you can tell him to go to hell as far as I’m concerned.’

‘He wouldn’t hear me,’ Nick said calmly. ‘He’s lying on his back in the mud at the end of Hagen’s Wharf, Bella. Somebody put a couple of bullets in him.’

Until then it had been only a nightmare compounded of the rain and the fog and the night, something to be shrugged off in the light of morning, to be forgotten as quickly as any bad dream.

But now, in one terrible visionary moment of clarity she saw him lying there in the mud, the smile hooked into place, and it was only then that the full force of what had happened hit her.

She dropped the glass and put out a hand as if to ward him off and her head turned from side to side, her face contorting until the vomit rose in her throat and she staggered across to the bathroom, a hand to her mouth.

She leaned over the sink, her shoulders heaving, and Nick stood in the door and watched her, strangely calm. It was as if he stood outside himself, outside of both of them, but that was the whisky talking. He stood in the shadows of the other room looking in at himself and this woman and knew with the most tremendous certainty that he was standing right on the brink of something.

He caught her by the shoulder and jerked her round. ‘Why did Ben come back in the first place, Bella? It was to pick up the money, wasn’t it? The money you’ve been keeping for him all these years. His share of the Steel Amalgamated hoist?’