Valera had already memorised their schedule, and knew what was expected of her. She was to dazzle Peterson’s contacts with her genius, while he worked on extracting the best deal from them. She didn’t know who she would be meeting, and Peterson had made it clear that she wouldn’t find out until she was in the room with them. He may have been doing his best to exude an air of confidence, down to organising the ostentatious car and moving Valera to an expensive hotel, but his paranoia still showed through. Valera tried to sneak a look at the contents of his folder, but all she could see was the handle of a pistol resting under it in the briefcase.

‘Then what?’ she asked.

‘Then,’ he replied, closing the briefcase, ‘it’s back to the Richmond for dinner and an early night, and we do it all again in the morning.’

The Jaguar started to cross Westminster Bridge. Twenty seconds later, the Anglia did the same. Bennett followed Peterson and Valera over the bridge, past Big Ben and Parliament Square, and along the sides of St James’s Park and Buckingham Palace, before turning east along Piccadilly and into Mayfair.

The little convoy travelled up Clarges Street, then Curzon Street, just a few hundred yards away from Leconfield House. It looped around Berkeley Square, then continued on along Conduit Street. After the junction with New Bond Street, the Jaguar slowed to a stop in the middle of the road, indicating right.

Bennett pulled in to the kerb fifty yards behind them on the other side of the junction, and watched as the car turned into the set-back entrance of a six-storey hotel. She got out of the Anglia and ran over the junction just in time to see Peterson and Valera walk inside, then she sprinted back to Berkeley Square, stepped into one of the bright red phone boxes that stood in a row at its northern end, and dialled White’s office number.

Chapter 59

Chapter 59

The owners of the Richmond had started to worry that they’d made a terrible mistake. They’d bet that the super-wealthy were growing tired of the faded glories of hotels that had last been decorated at the height of the belle époque, and that there was money to be made by being the first to embrace a more modern aesthetic. So they’d spent a sizeable fortune stripping back and renovating the hotel, then filling it with one-of-a-kind pieces by designers like Arne Jacobsen and Eero Saarinen that blended forms and materials in radical, outlandish ways. Unfortunately it hadn’t worked.