‘Lemon pastry? Or vanilla pastry? Or bilberry pastry? Or—’

‘Anything. As long as it’s not stale.’

‘All of our pastries are fresh-baked today, sir,’ said the waiter indignantly.

‘Just bring it, will you?’

When the waiter had gone, Collis wiped the steam from the window with his grey morning glove. There was no sign of Sarah Melford’s carriage yet. Nothing but rain and passers-by, and wagons rolling through the mud. He prayed that none of the wet-hooded carriages which were bumping along the street would get themselves bogged down in front of Sarah’s carriage, and prevent her coachman from moving on. He looked at the clock again, and with a hesitant shudder, the minute hand moved to twelve.

The waiter brought his coffee and a lemon pastry, and banged them down on the table in front of him. He spent a restless minute cutting the pastry with his cake fork, until his plate was strewn with flaky fragments; and then he sat looking at it with no appetite at all. He took two or three sips of hot coffee, but it didn’t seem to taste like anything. He could see the waiter watching him balefully from the opposite side of the fountain, and even though it annoyed him, it was just what he needed. An independent witness who would remember his face.

The clock shuddered around to five after three. At the next table, two young girls had succumbed to an uncontrollable fit of giggles, and Collis glanced at them in irritation. He finished his coffee and swallowed a gritty mouthful of grounds by mistake. Outside in the street, like undersea divers in a strange dream, shoppers and clerks and messenger boys struggled through the mud and the fierce gusts of rain.

At eight after three, Collis looked up and the Melford carriage was suddenly there. Dark-blue, its varnish beaded with rain, with Martin the coachman sitting stiffly up front in his waterproof cape and his tall hat. Collis’s heart began to beat at a fast, regular rate, and he quickly wiped the window again so that he could see what was happening.

The fish-crate wagon — where the hell was the fish-crate wagon? It was time — where was it? Martin was already reining in the horses and tugging at the brake, and Collis could see the mud being scraped from the iron rims of the wheels. He looked towards the fountain entrance to reassure himself that the doorman was still sheltering from the rain, but a large woman in a black cape was obstructing his view. He turned back to the window again.

At last — there it was. The fish-crate wagon. Grinding its way along the street like Krishna’s Jagannath, an unsteady tumbril of wet crates and broken lumber. Its wheels were almost hub-deep in the mud, and the oxen were dragging it rather than pulling it, but the Chilean driver was standing up on his seat, cracking his whip again and again, and cursing so loudly that Collis could hear him from inside Winn’s, and somehow the wagon was slowly creeping forward.