The housekeeping was finished for Christmas Day. The porters were left with so little to do – for Christmas Day was the one day in the year when guests neither arrived nor departed from the Buckingham Hotel. The chambermaids, the laundry staff, the members of the Archie Adams Band not grand enough to take their places in the Queen Mary; all were here, where the glasses were overflowing with whatever cheap alcoholic delights the grandees in the Queen Mary could not withstand. In front of Raymond and his family was a scene more reminiscent of the Midnight Rooms than the Buckingham Hotel itself. A small contingent from the Archie Adams Band, led by Louis Kildare and his soaring saxophone, were playing something that sounded, to Raymond’s ears, like American swing. On the tables, pushed against the walls, Sofía LaPegna and her friends were dancing, baring their ankles for all the room to see.

‘Artie,’ he said, ‘Ma, Aunt May. Rebecca.’ He opened his arms wide. ‘You don’t want to be up there with ambassadors and doyennes. Where’s the fun in talking politics and high society with that lot of old toffs? No, you want to be here. Welcome,’ he beamed, ‘to the beating heart of the Buckingham Hotel . . .’

Raymond watched them fan out, his mother and aunts reticent to join the hubbub, Artie’s eyes drawn slavishly to Sofía LaPegna and the rest, shimmying up on the tables. He had the most disorientating feeling of his worlds colliding; the whole of the Buckingham Hotel seemed different somehow. For a moment, panic ripped through his body – with just a few words his family could bring the truth of Raymond de Guise crashing down around him. But he shook himself – if you couldn’t trust family, who could you trust? He watched as Artie took a swig from one of the bottles left on display, then spun himself in a circle to capture the hand of one of the kitchen girls. Moments later, he was spinning her around. Raymond had quite forgotten that Artie was no slouch on the dance floor; Stanley Cohen, he remembered, was a part of them both. And here was his ma, drawn into conversation with one of the housekeeping mistresses. Aunts May and Rebecca were already stripping off their coats and looking for partners with whom to dance.

Raymond beamed, giddy as a man who’d been drinking champagne since before breakfast. He’d spent so long denying he had any family at all. Was it possible he’d been wrong, all this time?

And was Artie charming Sofía LaPegna already?

At that moment, he felt a hand snake around his waist and looked down to see Nancy standing there, with a glass of champagne in her hand.

‘I thought you had duties to attend to?’ she asked, with a wicked grin.