In the absolute silence in the court, only the sound of her own tears, Simone Taylor suddenly looked straight at Terence. Terence Blue the famous film star who she had wept over when she was eighteen, who she had never ever forgotten, and whose life she had at last joined to hers. And then with a little shuddering sigh she looked up at the kind judge.

‘Could I talk to you by myself My Lady?’ she whispered and her voice sounded like that of a child.

Elvira knew from experience that the majesty of the courts was never so great as when the impersonal and the personal come together in the person of the judge sitting at the long bench of power and history and law and knowledge. She stared down at the judge from the public gallery, wondered what she was really thinking.

‘Miss Taylor,’ said the judge and her voice was both firm and kind, ‘I regret that that is not possible. Your lawyers will explain to you why not. I am here only as an arbitrator, and as the representative of Justice.’ She turned to the barristers in front of her.

‘I will adjourn the court Mr Lee, ‘ she said to the prosecuting lawyer. ‘Perhaps, after you have spoken to your client, you and your colleague Mr Tweed will be good enough to come to me in my chambers.’

And the judge, just for one moment, rested her eyes on the crumpled, fur-coated figure in the witness box. There might, Elvira thought, have been a kind of sad compassion in her eyes, or perhaps it was only the light.

*

It was early afternoon when the police came to the Dorchester. They asked very politely to speak to the Italian room-service waiter, the one who had brought the whisky and told of Terence Blue’s state of undress, the one who had said so sadly, ’E wassa once my ’ero.

For Simone Taylor had wept more and more hysterically in a room off Court Number Ten where she had been taken with her lawyers. Perhaps I made a mistake, she wept in her high, childish voice, perhaps it was someone else perhaps – and she had finally lain on the floor in her fur coat and cried as she had cried over thirty years ago I LOVE TERENCE, I LOVE HIM. A doctor was quickly called and she was sedated. The woman lawyer attached to the prosecution team held Simone’s hand while she slowly calmed down, slowly lay back at last on the brown sofa in the anonymous room. Then the lawyer put her arm gently around Simone’s shoulder.

‘What happened Simone?’