Jessica Rodean looked him up and down. ‘Hello,’ she said, and that was all. ‘You must come with me to Jamaica,’ she said, grabbing Isabelle by the arm and pulling her towards the bar. ‘You and I are going to be great friends. What do you think of that stepdaughter of mine?’

Isabelle looked desperately over her shoulder for help from Will, but he shrugged and waved and grabbed another drink from a passing tray.

Christine awoke in the middle of the night with a bump, as if someone or something had just shoved the bed. Her heart was racing. But everything was quiet in the house, no sound at all, not even the hum of traffic that passed for silence in London. This was real, tangible silence, as real as the moonlight that came through the window, casting shadows on the floorboards. When had she last seen moonlight bright enough to cast a shadow? When had she last heard nothing but the sound of her own breath, and the breath of the man sleeping peacefully beside her?

She closed her eyes again, but sleep had gone. Her stomach was heavy and sore, as if there was a lump of concrete inside it; maybe that was the pasta they’d eaten, or the red wine they’d drunk, or maybe it was a reaction to the enormous amounts of sex she’d had in the last sixteen hours. She looked at her watch on the bedside table, quite easy to read by the moonlight; it was four o’clock. It was Friday morning. In three hours, she should be getting up, having a shower, eating a piece of toast and leaving for work. There were papers to be read, research to be done, a speech to be written.

And she was lying here in the west-facing bedroom of a luxury cottage in the Highlands, shielded by the interlacing branches of trees, the black, invisible ocean on one side, a wide tract of empty countryside on the other, insulated, as it were, from the world. Rivelli, the magician who had conjured her there with a wave of his wand, sighed deeply in his sleep, turned over, his thigh coming to rest against hers.

Rivelli: her client. Whose divorce she was handling. The biggest divorce of the year, perhaps – the case that would certainly get her into the headlines. She hoped it would be for the right reasons.

‘And then she just dropped me like a stone. I dunno what I’d done wrong. But you know what they’re like, those older women. They’re hot for it when it starts out, but then they feel guilty or something.’ He was staring moodily at the fresh cocktail Victoria had ordered.

‘When did you last speak to her?’

‘This morning, as it goes.’

‘Oh yes? And did she tell you anything about work?’