Dominic shook his head. ‘We’ll steal another car. Get out, Alan. Shit, I used your real name. You want to risk it now, Mr Anderson? Ooops.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dominic Watson-Bruce.’

Dominic looked pained for a second, but quickly seemed to decide it didn’t matter if his name was out there. He also started to get out, then changed his mind about that, too. He grinned at her.

‘Since this is the end, I have to know. What’s this all about, countess? What’s on the disk?’

He didn’t know? That threw her mind into a tumble. ‘Something else you don’t know, then.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

For a reason she didn’t know and cared never to learn, his obliviousness to their connection suddenly spiked deep and painfully. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’

His eyes leaped away from her, to behind, and for a fraction of a second she put it down to shame, that maybe something had dawned on him because of her question. But all she got was that fragment of time, because in the very next she felt a terrible impact in her back. The car was shunted forward, hard, to a score of rending metal. The chain-link fence lost resistance at one post and opened like a door to let the vehicle through.

The front dipped, as if about to tumble over a cliff, but in the next moment the car was bumping slowly down a slight decline, carving through flowers. Stones the size of sleeping dogs marked the boundary between the small hill and the rear carpark of a Perry’s car dealership. The car struck one, wobbled violently as the front end climbed atop, and stopped dead. She was thrown forward to crack her temple on the headrest of the driver’s seat.

The next thing she knew, her door was yanked open. Dominic was there, grabbing her with his powerful arms, pulling her out. He must have lost the knife. The struggle caused the carefully balanced front end to list here and there like a great beast injured and staggering.

‘You bastards,’ she heard a familiar voice yell.

Nick. He must have escaped the concierge in time to see which car she got into.

Barely able to comprehend, she looked up the hill, which was a lawn decorated with red and blue and green and yellow flowers: a ‘Britain in Bloom’ logo inside a ring of turned earth. A little graft of nature in the centre of the concrete jungle. The car had sliced twin tracks right through it. Atop the ruined lawn she saw her father’s car, smashed front end poking out over the cliff like a nosey animal. She had no idea where they were, but, despite the garden, it had to still be the centre of London.

And Nick was there, staggering out of the vehicle, his head wound leaking blood again.