As I was carried heavenwards I could hear her thick rubber soles squealing hurriedly across the parquet below. The elevator stopped silently at a metal door with a large Gothic figure three painted on it in gold. Before I could open the gate, it slammed back and I was in a different world. Light, steel gleaming, glass flashing, white and yellow all about me, a heavy white marble figure on a tall plinth and a smiling black man with extended hand.

‘Welcome! I’m Joseph. Late, I’m afraid. Our error. You are Mr Caldicott, and Mr Millar will be right with us and what will you drink? Did Mrs Millar offer you something? She usually forgets. Millie is a little vague with guests.’

By this time we were into the flat, for that is what it was, and my host, or my host’s assistant, was leading me to a chair. He was tall, at least six foot four (the shadow in Florence’s photograph?), with exceptionally fine features, slender build, very tight jeans, no shirt, and about, I guessed, in his mid-thirties.

‘Sit anywhere. No matter. Be comfortable. A Scotch? Malt? Bourbon? You ask, we got.’

It was a very pleasing room after the Edwardian gloom of the lower floors. White carpet, white and yellow walls, glass tanks filled with white flowers, Bauhaus chairs covered in zebra and pony skins, glass-topped tables, a Derain on one wall, a Miró on another. The room of a man with money. And taste.

‘Your Scotch,’ he said. ‘You don’t look like your brother. Not one teensy bit. But I guess you are bored with that remark?’ He settled himself into a zebra skin opposite me, a glass in his hand.

‘I get a bit bored, yes. Did you know him well?’

He waved his glass vaguely before him, prodded the ice with a long finger. ‘Here and there. Now and then. He was very blond and you so dark. I guess it’s genes, right?’

‘I guess. You are very tall. What? Over six foot four? I feel crushed sitting here.’

He laughed. Even white teeth. Humourless eyes, no laughter there. ‘Don’t be, man. I think I’m an Abyssinian. Y’ know? Talk of genes. That or Ethiopian … something! Else my daddy was very, very tall. But I am not skinny, right? And I don’t have those fat lips, right? Mr Millar said I am a “patrician”. That feels good. Do you speak French?’

‘I do. And you?’

‘Enough. For what I need.’

‘When did you last see James?’