I lay listening to the storm blustering outside, the rain peppering the windows, the wind howling down the chimney. Given the perpetual gales at Castle Rannoch I should have been immune to a mild London storm, but this night I was so tense that I jumped at every noise. I tried to tell myself that, now Belinda was sleeping beside me, now my grandfather was here, everything was all right. But he had injected a new and alarming facet into this nightmare: the suggestion that someone was trying to kill me. Also that someone might have mistaken de Mauxville for Binky. I racked my brains but I had no idea who or why. We weren’t the sort of people who had enemies. We were too far from the throne to warrant bumping us off. We were well behaved to the point of being boring.

I relived that moment on the tube platform, trying to remember if I had seen any vaguely familiar face in the crowd, but the whole thing was just one big blur. One thing was very clear, however: but for that giant of a workman standing on the platform beside me, I should be dead by now.

Then I realized something else: the accident on the boat the night before. I sat up in bed, every muscle tense. It had been no accident. I might be clumsy, but how could a rope have wound itself so tightly around my ankle that I couldn’t undo the knot, unless somebody had deliberately tied that rope? I realized that I had been sitting on the side of the boat, with loads of other people standing and sitting around me. We’d all been having a good time and truthfully I would probably not have noticed if someone had eased a rope around my ankle and then given me a shove at the right moment. Someone I knew, then. One of my own set. I felt cold all over.

“Belinda,” I whispered and nudged the shape beside me.

“Mmmm,” she grunted, already deeply asleep.

“Belinda, wake up. I need to know who was on that boat.”

“Wha . . . boat?”

“The one I fell off. Belinda, wake up, do. I need to know exactly who was on that boat. You were there the whole time.”

She turned over, grunting, and half opened her eyes. “The usual crowd,” she said, “and some friends of Eduardo. I didn’t know them all.”

“Tell me who you did know. People who knew me.”

“I really don’t know who knew you. Whiffy Featherstonehaugh, for one. And Daffy Potts was there, and Marisa, the girl who got so drunk at the wedding. Apart from that I can’t really say. Now can I go back to sleep?” And she did.