Oh, sure, don’t you worry. Yes, ma’am, it’s all carpeted in our restaurant. We look forward to hosting you. You have a nice day now.

‘Well, write a sodding review of it for the paper, at least,’ Dash grumbled. ‘We can publish it after the story runs.’

If it runs, he didn’t say. Casey knew Dash didn’t quite believe in this story. Not yet.

Now Casey straightened a fork, twitched a napkin and moved a vase of white irises an inch to the left. She glanced in a mirror to her left, checking the camera, and that all the wires were carefully hidden. In the mirror, she looked like any other glossy businesswoman. Mirrors reflect the soul, she’d read once. And vampires have no soul, and no reflection.

Sitting to Casey’s right was a polite Indonesian man, in a very expensive suit. He turned to Casey, and adjusted his Rolex.

‘I’m good to go,’ Ibrahim said, in a strong New York accent.

‘All Bahasa from now,’ she warned, with a grin. ‘Mr Halim.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘My granny would be proud.’

Gabriel Bantham didn’t speak Bahasa, Casey knew.

She knew that because the day before, she had called the embassy, and asked to be put through to Bantham. While the call was transferred, she passed the phone to Ibrahim. When Bantham answered from his office, Ibrahim had spoken in the Bahasa language of millions of Indonesians.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Bantham had apologised, so politely. ‘I don’t speak . . . Do you speak any other languages? I’m so sorry about this.’

Bantham had tried Mandarin and Japanese and Hindu on Ibrahim, but it was clear that the diplomat didn’t have a word of Bahasa.

It hadn’t taken long to build the rest of the story. First, Casey had called a stringer pal in Djakarta who laughed and posted a few photographs on her popular blog of Mr Halim, the celebrated philanthropist.

I’ll send through some photographs of Ibrahim.

I’ll backdate them. When can I delete them?

A couple of weeks? I’ll call you. Coy references to billions would be helpful.

You owe me.

I do.

Next, Casey put up a brief article on the Post business section about wealth management. The article listed several world-famous family offices. It noted, in passing, that the Halim family’s vast fortune was being invested through a new, but impeccable office in Zug. Casey had found a name for this new family office by stealing an English-Latin dictionary off one of the Post’s more pompous columnists and opening it at random.

A glossy website for Gradibus Capital AG – it was password-protected naturally, with a generic photograph of Lake Zug as its backdrop – offered Swiss and London phone numbers.