In the bar the businessmen were becoming rowdy. There was boozy laughter and loud, crude jokes.

“Let me take you home,” George said. “ We can’t talk here.”

“I don’t know you,” she said, but it was almost a formality. She was not really frightened of him.

“I’m a friend of Greg’s,” he said, and she looked at him gratefully because that allowed her to trust him.

“Greg never wanted anyone to know where he was living,” she said. “But I don’t suppose it matters now.”

She directed him back to the city and along the river to a hilly district below the suspension bridge, with narrow winding streets and terraced houses. Obviously it had become fashionable since George had known the area well. There was a new delicatessen on one corner, and on another an old lady stood bewildered on the pavement staring into a dimly lit wine bar where once her local pub must have been. Ferndale Avenue was wider than most of the streets and backed onto a churchyard. The houses were Edwardian, big, and had been divided into flats. They would be too expensive for students and most single young people, and George thought the population would be elderly, shabby, respectable. Occasionally they passed an uncurtained window, and George saw elegant, decaying rooms, a piano, a canary in a large hanging cage.

“It’s number seven,” she said. “ You can park round the corner in the alley.”

Discretion had become a habit, he thought. Greg would not want the neighbours to see how many visitors came to the house. He followed her instructions. In the dark lane behind the house she got out of the car, smoothing her skirt automatically, searching in her bag for her keys.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Didn’t Greg talk about me, then?”

“Not to me,” George said. “Perhaps to the others, who were younger.” But she seemed not to believe him.

“It’s Vicky,” she said. “ Vicky Jones.”

The night was hot and humid. There was the smell of dusty streets and the trees in the churchyard. She used one key to let them into a cool gloomy hall painted with green gloss paint and a second to open the door to her ground-floor flat. She switched on a light and drew the curtains. That was a habit, too, George thought, a ritual.

The room was big and square. It was conventionally furnished—at one end was a glass dining room table and four chairs and at the other a sofa which might have been bought at any High Street store. But there were touches of excess: a cream leather chair, a very expensive hi-fi system, and in one corner a stuffed and mounted gazelle. Vicky saw George looking at the animal.

“Greg bought it,” she said. “It was a present. After one of his trips abroad.”

“How long had you been living together?” George asked.