It was a large, bustling, dimly lit space with a separate bar area, crowded with people fresh from their day’s work grabbing a quick drink or two before heading home to face their families. Like most of the English, they seemed to prefer standing outside smoking or crushed together around the bar. The dining area was separated by a small step down, and consisted of a number of tables with white tablecloths and gleaming silver cutlery. It was just as noisy down there as it was at the bar.

Zelda took a table at the back of the dining area, which gave her a panoramic view of the whole restaurant, and settled in with her book. Just another bored businesswoman in town for meetings. She ordered a glass of Chardonnay and a clam linguine, and watched the people come and go.

When her plate and glass were empty, and Willie Garvin had saved Modesty Blaise’s bacon, still Zelda had seen nothing of Keane or his girlfriend. She was beginning to think it was a restaurant that Hawkins had chosen because it was near his place of work. But wouldn’t he have picked somewhere farther away, and perhaps less public, in case he was seen, if the choice of location had been up to him? Maybe so, but perhaps she was overthinking the case. Perhaps Hawkins hadn’t been meeting Keane to mention his concerns about her interest. After all, nothing had come of it. She was still alive. Perhaps he had never even known that she was especially interested in the photograph of Tadić and Keane. Loath though she was to contemplate it, if Hawkins had succeeded in getting Keane paranoid about Zelda’s behavior, and they were somehow involved in a criminal conspiracy to do with trafficking, then Keane and Tadić might have thought they needed to do something about her. Something permanent. But they hadn’t. And work with Hawkins had gone on as normal, with no further incident, until she had returned from Croatia to discover that he had died in a chip-pan fire.

The conversations rose and fell. Someone kept emitting a laugh like a witch’s cackle, and another a deep foghorn rumble. As usual in crowds, one voice was louder than all the others and had nothing interesting to say. It was still fairly early and the restaurant wasn’t too crowded. The later it got the more the throng at the bar thinned out and quietened down, and the more people—mostly couples—came to sit down and eat.

“Would you care to see the dessert menu?” said the waitress.

“No, thanks,” said Zelda. “But I’ll have another glass of wine, if that’s all right.”

“No problem. Same again?”

“Yes, please.”