I felt all attention on me. Perhaps I shouldn’t even have mentioned it – I hadn’t realized that the name alone signified something. I had thought that out in the countryside there would be less suspicion and fewer conversations that you couldn’t have, but were there CIs even here? There must have been. I could sense these men were as distrustful of me as I was of them now, and I wished I had been more secret, hadn’t let my tongue rush before my head. I tried to bluff it out. ‘That’s right.’

‘Mansford. The big house,’ he muttered. He turned away from me.

‘You know it well?’ I asked his back. He slowly shook his head. ‘Have you been there?’

‘Once.’

‘For work?’

‘Not my work,’ he said.

‘Then whose?’

‘My brother’s.’ The men around us looked uncomfortable and shifted on their feet but said nothing.

‘What does he do?’ He made no answer but rolled his shoulders backwards and stalked out the door.

‘Mansford,’ the publican said ruminatively behind me, as if he were turning the name over in his mind. ‘What’re you going there for?’

‘A party.’

‘A party,’ he repeated. It sounded like the answer he had expected and didn’t like.

I walked out after Pete. I could see a body moving in the gloom a hundred metres up the lane. I said nothing but he heard me and stopped. I walked slowly and deliberately. ‘I don’t know the way,’ I told him.

‘You’ll find it.’

‘I’m not from around here.’

‘That road,’ he said, pointing. I could hardly make it out. He came close to me. ‘What do you want?’ I said nothing in reply. ‘People like you. Women like you.’ He pursed his lips. ‘All right, I’ll show you the way.’

Eventually, we faced the gate of a huge square brick house – Tudor, it might have been. A clamour of voices and music was bursting out in a crash of sound, and there was something about it that reminded me of the madhouse that held Rachel. Here too there were guards on the gate and I looked at Pete. We both knew there was no point inviting him: he wouldn’t want to come in and they wouldn’t let him.

‘Thank you for walking with me,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I know where to find you when I come back.’

‘Aye.’

‘Goodbye.’ As his back melted into the darkness, I called after him. ‘What’s your brother’s name?’

‘Greg. Gregory.’ And he disappeared.

‘May I ask your name, ma’am?’ said one of the gatemen.

‘Lorelei Cawson.’ Having been Lorelei to Pete and the other men, it felt more natural now.