Office clerks and workers were streaming up out of the Underground tunnels and the streets were thronged by the time he stood outside the Midnight Rooms. Billy had once passed this way at nightfall, when the music played and you might see girls dancing on the corner. The Midnight Rooms sat off a little alleyway behind the Berwick Street market. The market was already a maelstrom of activity as tinkers and florists and fishmongers and grocers set out their stalls, griping at each other as they staked out their plots. Billy weaved his way through the hubbub and slipped into the open door of the Midnight Rooms itself. At the bottom of a thin, narrow stairwell, some of last night’s revellers remained. Billy could hear them bickering, their voices ripe with whisky and gin, but when he reached the bottom of the stairs he could go no further. The darkness had hardened around him. A heavy wooden door, marked with iron rivets, stood in his way.

He knocked and the door drew back.

‘You again, Brogan,’ came a bass, Irish voice from somewhere down in the dark.

‘Aye,’ said Billy, ‘back again.’

There was silence. Then, the same voice muttered, ‘Come through.’

When Billy emerged back into the morning, ten minutes later, he had a small drawstring purse in his hands: a pouch of pink felt stitched with indigo thread and a ribbon to tie it together. Billy weaved through the market’s first punters, helping himself to a bright red apple from the grocer’s on the way. Sleight of hand was something he’d turned into a high art form in the Buckingham, and the grocer was none the wiser as Billy sank his teeth into the juicy flesh.

By the time he tumbled back through the staff entrance, the hotel was stirring. Maynard Charles always said that there was something dramatic in the way the hotel woke up each morning and today Billy felt it. The lift opened and out stepped the first guests. The kitchens came to life as the dining rooms filled for breakfasts and the flock of waiters marched out to war. If it had all been serenaded by the dramatic trumpet blasts of the Archie Adams Band, it might have seemed something fit for the London Palladium.

Billy kept his head down as he crossed the reception. A short burst up the servants’ stairs and into Vivienne Edgerton’s suite, and his work for Mr Simenon would be done. Yet, as he barrelled onward, a voice startled him. He looked up. Vivienne Edgerton was standing by the great obelisk, in a pale blue house dress with a cap hiding her auburn hair. By her side stood Maynard Charles himself.