Hélène Marchmont slipped quietly through the door. Maynard could see that she was flustered; the dancers of the Buckingham Hotel took nothing more seriously than their daily demonstrations. Quite rightly so. Maynard Charles had not been confident that opening a ballroom was the right thing to do when one of the board first suggested it, but the hotel director’s job is not to protest at the wishes of the board; it is only to make sure that whatever they desire becomes a resounding success. And so, Maynard Charles had set to work. Reasoning that he was not himself a dancing man – he had been born with two left feet and, regardless, had never been intoxicated by music in the way so many young people were – he had done the only thing he knew of that would guarantee success. He had spent. The board had not needed convincing – they were the kind of fellows who understood that the only way to fight your way out of a financial morass of the kind the Buckingham had faced after the Wall Street Crash was to spend. And so the Grand Ballroom had arisen in the place where an ill-attended restaurant used to be. Dancers had been hired from rival establishments, and the Buckingham became the place to be seen. And at least it did not mean stooping as low as the dreadful cabarets that the lesser London hotels had started to open. The dancers and the Archie Adams Band may cost the Buckingham eleven hundred pounds each month of the year, but what they brought in return was incalculable. Even a man of numbers like Maynard Charles did not attempt to put a value on elegance and class.

‘Mr Charles, I was told you needed me.’

‘Yes, Miss Marchmont. If, perhaps, you would sit.’

Hélène was reluctant. ‘The band is due to begin playing.’

Maynard fixed her with one of his quelling looks. ‘This won’t take a moment.’

Hélène did as she was told. It was cold in Mr Charles’s office – which, as she understood it, was exactly the way he liked it. Opulence for the guests did not, she was often reminded, have to extend as far as those who ran the hotel.

Maynard Charles drew a ledger book from one of the drawers beneath his desk, paged through it until he found the right section, and turned it around for Hélène to see. ‘I understand you’ve reserved the weekend of the fifteenth. Is that correct?’

‘I have . . . family plans,’ she said, stressing the word family as if it were a shameful thing.