The door opened below. Suddenly the music was louder, rampaging up the stairs.

Hélène lifted a single eyebrow. ‘It doesn’t seem . . . quite the same.’

‘Dancing’s the same wherever you go. Maybe they drink whisky and rum down here instead of Moët et Chandon, but it’s all for the love of the dance.’

Raymond had started to walk down the stairs. Steeling herself, Hélène followed. This was your idea, she had to remind herself. And as they reached the bottom of the stairs, she remembered why. The door opened up. Louis Kildare was already standing there, with three tumblers filled with some dark spirit whose taste had never passed Hélène’s lips before. Through the reefs of grey cigar and cigarette smoke, a thronged dance floor was surrounded by tables and chairs. In recesses in the walls, gangs of friends were drinking and laughing and watching the dancers. Bodies were clasped tight. One girl was up on the table, head hunched down against the low ceiling arch, kicking her legs wildly. And on a tiny decked stage set into one of the alcoves itself, lit by the light of a hundred guttering candles in braziers on the walls, a six-piece band put up such a sound that Hélène had imagined there must have been a full orchestra hidden in these tiny halls. A saxophone soared. The trumpets were ablaze. A man was singing, his voice half drowned out by the music.

It was paradise – of a sort – thought Hélène as she allowed Louis to take her by the arm.

*

The only reason Billy Brogan could keep pace with Nancy as she hurried along the now barren market row, past the Blue Posts public house spilling out its drinkers, was because she kept stopping to give her stubborn leg a moment to rest. Up ahead, from a little doorway sandwiched between two closed shop fronts, music spiralled up from a dark basement staircase. She hovered, ten yards away, just . . . thinking.

Billy Brogan had no need to think. The moment they’d come along the open thoroughfare of Carnaby Street, he had known where they were going. By now, the revellers on Carnaby Street had been few – only the after-hours drinkers at the Tatty Bogle had been putting up a racket – but here, off the Berwick Street market, there was no denying the music in the air. It was loud and it was wild and, above all things, it was infectious.