The band blared out, taking Redfyre by surprise. They were excellent. They made his heart beat faster and his blood pump in rhythm. His feet, in their appalling shoes, would not keep still. Someone had chosen ‘La cumparsita’ for the opening dance, a tune known to everyone. Dorine and the smouldering Alexis threw themselves from the first beat into the jerky, stalking rhythms, the saxophones restrained but carrying the swirling tune up above the dark bass notes like a wreath of nose-tickling smoke. Alexis’s long, dark limbs entwined with unbelievable speed and sinuosity with the slender ones of Dorine, clad in red chiffon. They were male and female, fluttering flame and carbon-black embers. They were love and loathing. Indivisible, but eternally in conflict.

Too soon for Redfyre, the dance swirled to a conclusion. With a move that owed more to the techniques of jujitsu than the dance floor, Dorine thrust out an elegant leg and threw Alexis, in choreographed unbalance, over her hip. With both arms raised triumphantly in the air, she fixed him to the ground with his throat under her high red heel. The applause for the demonstration was thunderous. An odd moment for Redfyre’s thoughts to turn to his aunt Hetty, but he wished, as he gave a piercing whistle of approval, that she’d been by his side to see this. She would have been scandalised, horrified by the louche spectacle, and laughing her socks off as she told him so.

At last, he spotted them. Rosamund Wells was wearing the lavender-coloured dress he’d seen her in when he’d climbed up on the water butt in the churchyard. She’d enlivened it with a diamanté bandeau, secured a green-and-purple peacock’s feather over her right ear and a long rope of pearls dangled over her slim bosom.

Redfyre’s heart thumped, and his muscles tensed on seeing that her hand was clutched firmly in that of a multiple murderer. If MacFarlane had it right.

Digby Gisbourne was not at his dying father, Syd’s, bedside. Nor was he dutifully writing letters of condolence to the family of his mentor, Oliver Fanshawe. No. He was here, ungrieving, unashamed, making flirtatious conversation with Pansy-Face, as uncle Gerald had called her, and waiting in the lineup of dancers about to entertain the crowd with their prowess in the waltz, fox-trot and tango. In view of the whole of Cambridge. Despite himself, Redfyre found himself admiring the man’s spirit and insouciance. His bloody cheek!