‘Hardly the first time,’ said Alec. He was drinking tea.

‘No. This is different. This isn’t a bracelet or a ring.’

‘Money?’

‘She’s taken a pill,’ said Larry. ‘I don’t know how but we’ve got to get it back.’

‘One of Mum’s?’

‘One of mine. From my wash bag.’

‘What kind of pill?’

Larry shook his head.

‘A painkiller? Sleeping tablet?’

‘I wish.’ He took a deep breath and started to explain, though he knew the story required more context than he could ever hope to provide. He said he had gone to LA to discuss a film deal. He omitted to mention the nature of the film, though he gave Alec something of the characters of T. Bone and Ranch, despite the fact that talking of them in the calm of an English garden made them seem like figures in some outlandish cabaret. He mentioned the hotel, the lunch party, the bathroom, the box. The pills. He’d hoped to make it sound casual and mostly normal, but actually it didn’t sound normal at all.

‘Suicide pills?’

Both of them – a reflex with its roots in the hinterlands of childhood – glanced up at the window above as though the light might suddenly flick on, and Alice lean out, wise to their secrets and demanding explanations.

‘Fucksake...’ said Larry, wincing. He had not introduced the ‘sex’ pills. Nor did he know which of the two Ella had taken because he could no longer remember Ranch’s explanation of the difference. Either way, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Alec blinked behind his glasses for a while. ‘You’re sure it was Ella?’

‘Of course it was Ella.’

‘You talked to her?’

‘For an hour, yesterday, as soon as I found the thing was gone. Again today. She blanked me completely, both times. When I told her how dangerous it was she seemed to understand, but with Ella you never know. I even phoned Hoffmann...’

‘Hoffmann?’

‘Her shrink in Frisco. He’s away at some child homicide convention in Detroit, so I left a message on his machine, then had a panic attack thinking what if he tells Kirsty? Can you imagine? So I called back and left another message saying he was only to talk to me about it. Not that I trust him much.’

‘Did you tell him what she took?’

‘I said she was having a regressive episode. After a while you start to speak like them.’

Alec sipped from his mug. Larry the athlete, Larry the party king, Larry the handsome, Larry the successful, Larry the happy husband. And now Larry the man who kept suicide pills in his wash bag. He hardly knew who he was sitting next to.

‘What on earth were you going to do with it?’ he asked.

Larry shrugged. ‘I meant to chuck them away in the plane.’

‘Why didn’t you?’