He had long since calculated what he might inherit when Alice died, the preliminary sums done, in the teeth of selfdisgust, shortly after she was first diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in the winter of ’95. It would not be much. The house would be sold off, but an old place in poor repair on a stretch of waterlogged moorland would hardly raise a fortune, and half of it, of course, would go to Alec. The good furniture, which amounted to the dining table and silver candlesticks, a couple of decent paintings, also in the dining room, and some of Stephen’s collection of antique clocks, would bring in another three or four thousand. All in all he had reckoned – reckoning on despite a shame that made him sweat – he might clear forty or even fifty grand. But when? He had already started borrowing (Kirsty knew nothing of this) from men with pampered attack dogs, people who said ‘We understand each other, right?’ and ‘You’re a real nice guy’, but who would certainly have a thorough and instinctual way with slow payers.

Larry and the man from Ogbomosho entered Century City and the Avenue of the Stars, a zone of high-rises and underground shopping complexes between the LA Country Club and Rancho Park. A few moments later they swung into the half-moon drive of the Park Hotel, where a doorman, dressed in the red-and-gold livery of a Yeoman of the Guard, opened the cab door and examined Larry through mirror shades. Larry paid the driver, tipping him heavily. The man only had one ear; the other looked to have been removed, clumsily, with something blunt – teeth perhaps. He was, decided Larry, peeling himself from the varnished surface of the rear seat, a man who had passed through darkness, and who might, had Larry found a way into him, have proved wise on the subject. Help, like trouble, could come from anywhere. He was sorry he had missed his chance.

Out of the cab, he lit the cigarette he had been holding in his fist since the airport, and nodded at the Beefeater’s uniform. ‘You’re a long way from home,’ he said.

‘Pasadena,’ said the Beefeater. ‘You a dentist?’

‘No,’ said Larry, obscurely offended.

‘Fifty thousand in town. Convention.’

Larry gave a low whistle, and tried to conjure in his mind an image of so many thousand white-coated men marching like an army, ten abreast, through the great boulevards and byways of Los Angeles. Then, recalling a line from a poem he had read in a schoolboy elocution competition for which he had won an honourable mention, he muttered, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the doorman, frowning.

Larry shook his head. ‘Think it’s going to get hotter?’ he asked.

‘Bet your life,’ said the Beefeater. ‘Hot as hell.’