My cheek rested on his chest and I could smell the musk on his skin.

The moon was poking through the misty sky when I spoke to him later.

‘Nick,’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ he muttered in the dark, his voice muffled by the stillness.

‘About Lorelei.’

He reached out and rubbed my back. ‘It’s over now. All of it.’

‘It isn’t, though.’ I shivered in the night chill. I had been thinking about what Grest had said. His wild implication about me. ‘We don’t know what happened to her.’

‘The most likely thing is that it was just an accident. You said she had been drinking.’

‘Champagne. There was a bottle there.’

‘Well, there you go. She got drunk on her own – not for the first time – and slipped down. Drowned. It happens sometimes. More often than you would think.’

‘Still, it seems so strange.’

He sighed deeply, becoming more awake. I could see bruises on his stomach that were the result of his time with NatSec. ‘People die a hundred different ways. The only thing you can be sure of about the human body is that it will keep surprising you.’

I rubbed my skull with my knuckles. ‘What about the investigation now?’

‘I don’t know. I presume NatSec will continue with it, though I don’t know why it’s anything to do with them. They probably have “areas of enquiry” they’re following up, or whatever they call them. It’s nothing to do with us and I’m happy to be out of it now.’ I understood. He had good reason to want to let it all go. But I couldn’t. ‘For Hazel’s sake, I hope if she was killed by someone, then they catch him, but, otherwise, I just want nothing more to do with it.’

I stared through a gap in the curtains into the dark.

‘Lorelei wasn’t her original name, was it?’

‘No. It was Anne,’ he said.

‘You never mentioned that.’

‘Why on earth would I? Why do you care?’

‘I used to see her in the films. It was as if I knew her.’

‘She hasn’t acted for years.’ He was getting annoyed, but I couldn’t stop.

‘Did you get on with her? I mean, you saw her at parties, didn’t you? And you had friends in common from when you were together.’

‘We were polite to each other. We weren’t friends.’

I pulled the blankets tighter. ‘How did you meet?’

‘Mutual friends.’

‘And why did it end?’

‘I was told she was having an affair.’

‘Oh. Oh, darling. Who was it?’

He hesitated. ‘Someone in the Party.’

‘In the Party?’ That hesitation suggested there was more to it. ‘Someone senior?’

‘John Cairncross,’ he said through the dark.