Lindsay saw her chance to dig an explanation out of Paddy and immediately called out, “Dinner was a bit of a strain. I could hear my accent becoming more and more affected with every passing sentence. But I thought you said you’d never met our guest of honor?”

There was a lengthy silence filled only by the sound of the percolating coffee. When Paddy eventually spoke there was deep bitterness in her voice. “I didn’t realize I had,” she said. “I only ever knew her as Lorna. In that particular circle, first names were all we ever seemed to exchange.”

She returned to the living-room and poured coffee for them both. “You make it sound like a John Le Carré novel,” Lindsay said.

“Nothing so dramatic.”

“You don’t have to tell me about it unless you want to. No sweat.”

“I’d better tell someone before I blow up. It goes back, oh, eight or nine years. I was doing bit parts in London and the odd telly piece. Looking back at it now, the people I used to hang around with were a pretty juvenile lot, myself included. We thought we were such a bunch of trendies, though. We were heavily into nightclubbing, getting stoned, solving the problems of the world, and talking a lot about permissiveness without actually being particularly promiscuous. A depressing hangover from the sixties, our crowd was. It was all sex and drugs and rock and roll. Or at least we tried to convince ourselves it was.”

Paddy looked Lindsay straight in the eye as she spoke, not afraid to share her shame with someone she trusted. “An expensive way of life, you see. And not easy to sustain on the sort of money I was making. But I found a way to finance it. I started dealing dope. No big-time hard stuff, you understand, but I put a fair bit around, one way or another. So there were always people coming round to my flat to score some dope. Regular customers, word of mouth, you know.” Lindsay nodded. She knew only too well the scenes that Paddy described. “One of my customers was a musician, a pianist. William. Came several times with his girlfriend. The girlfriend was Lorna.”