Ruby sits alone at a table, nursing the champagne she’s charmed from the barman for free, waiting for a man to ask her to dance. A girl might forget her troubles here, carried away on a tide of bubbles and music. She tries to relax her shoulders and let the sound and sensation of the club wash over her. Tries to ignore her unease at the conversation in the ladies’ room, and her concern for Daisy. It is what Monte Carlo would be like, perhaps, or Hollywood. She half-expects to see film stars in the warm haze of light and smoke. Like the photographs on Peter’s office wall. Daisy would love it.

‘Ruby, it’s good to see you here tonight.’ Peter is there, next to her table, smiling at her as if she had a choice. ‘But you’re looking lonely, and we can’t have a girl like you on her own, can we?’

The question needs no answer. He takes her hand, pulls her up from her seat and makes a point of considering her outfit, holding her at arm’s length and turning her this way and that. ‘Good choice.’ He approves.

‘I wanted to dance,’ she says, over the music. ‘You might dance with me.’

‘Gladly.’

They dance for a time while the orchestra plays a foxtrot. He holds her tightly against him, and she can almost allow herself to believe that it is she alone who commands his attention and that he is just as entranced by her now as he was when they first met, when he had plied her with champagne. He dances well, leading her effortlessly, with grace as well as direction. For a moment, she is floating, lost in the music, in the press of his body and the sensations rising within her.

Peter wheels her abruptly from the dancefloor. ‘Someone I’d like you to meet.’

She finds herself in front of two tall men. The first she recognises as the man Billy had called ‘General’. Haversham, Peter had said his name was. He nods in recognition and smiles as enigmatically as last time. The other is handsome, as tall as the General, and obviously wealthy. She can spot wealth from a distance; at close quarters, she can smell it. Old money again.

‘Charles Haversham, this is Ruby Mills. I think you may already have met.’

The General takes her hand, amused, and plants a light kiss on her knuckle. ‘I believe we have. Hello again.’

‘And this is…?’ Peter does not appear to know the other man. But he is playing a game. She is alert to it.

‘Forgive me.’ Charles Haversham is involved in the same game. ‘Alexander Somers. Alex, this is Peter Lazenby. He owns the nightclub. An old friend of our mutual acquaintance, Ralph Christie. And this, as you’ve heard, is Miss Mills.’