Besides, she had appeared very different then from the way she planned on looking tonight. Her clothes had been baggy enough to make her seem frumpy, especially with the cheap glasses she had worn, and her hair had been a mess. Tonight she was going to be elegant, sexy and enchanting, and to that end, she spent a while in the hotel’s spa, visited a nearby hairdresser, then went shopping and bought a new dress. She already had a nice tan from the trip to Croatia.

The dress was important. It was essential that it didn’t look obvious, tarty, or anything like a hooker. Yes, she needed to be sexy and alluring, but in a subtle way. Nothing was to be overdone. It wasn’t that she thought Goran Tadić was a particularly subtle human being—he wasn’t—but that she didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself. Subtle but sexy. Casual elegance. The way she planned it, she wouldn’t be out of place at the hotel bar. If she got the appearance right, everything else would fall into place.

She found what she was after in Little Black Dress, a shop where she’d had success before. It wasn’t black, but oxblood, knee-length, bare-shouldered, halter-top style. She also bought new underwear, black and lacy. Finally, she bought a jade pendant on a silver chain to go with the new look, and strappy white sandals, with the heels just high enough to accentuate the curve of her calves. She decided to go bare-legged and spent some time in the bath shaving her legs. Her last port of call was John Lewis, where she bought a set of sturdy kitchen knives.

When she was finally ready, she studied herself in the mirror for anything that seemed overdone. She looked like a woman on her way to meet a date, perhaps for a night at the theater or a meal at a good restaurant, which was exactly the way she wanted to appear.

“I DON’T do that stuff anymore,” said Tyler Cleary, when Gerry tracked him down to the college pub that evening. The music was loud, and the bar was crowded, but she managed to usher him to a reasonably discreet corner for a chat.

“That’s good, Tyler,” she said. “This should be very quick then.”

“What is it you want to know? I want to get back to my mates.”

“You used to go to a house on Hollyfield Lane to score drugs, right?”

Tyler stared at her. He was a rather slack-jawed spotty youth with a shock of unruly dark hair falling over his eyes. “You expect me to admit to that? You must be mad.”

“Tyler,” Gerry said. “We know you did. We know you were there. It’s a drug house. We found your fingerprints all over the place.”