There was a thick red welt around my neck that was hidden under my shirt collar apart from where the rope had angled up to the knot, leaving a livid stripe of raw flesh slashed from my Adam’s apple to left ear.

She touched my face with both her hands, her fingertips measuring the bones beneath my skin. I took her in my arms and lightly touched my mouth against her mouth. It wasn’t quite a kiss. It was as if we were seeing if our mouths were a good fit. The preliminary exploration was a success. They seemed to fit perfectly. They seemed to fit better than any other mouth I had ever known. We tried again, deeper this time. Then we broke abruptly away, suddenly aware that we were standing under the revolving sign outside New Scotland Yard. But she took my hand and would not let it go. We walked toward my car.

She was not smiling.

‘What just happened?’ she said, running a hand through her hair, the gold wedding band glinting in all that shiny blackness.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

But it wasn’t true.

I knew exactly what had happened.

It is when we are closest to death that we cling most strongly to life. It is when we can feel the chill of the grave on our skins that we crave the touch of warm human flesh. When we learn that we are all alone in the universe is exactly when we need another mouth. It is our most basic human impulse. The meaning of life is more life, I thought, pitching the empty Starbucks carton into a bin.

I squeezed her hand and smiled at her unsmiling face, and at that moment she was the only woman on earth that I wanted.

‘Do you want to get a real coffee?’ I asked her.

We drove to the Bar Italia.

I could have dropped the BMW X5 in the underground car park of West End Central and then we could have walked across Regent Street to Soho. That would have been the obvious thing to do. But I did not want to break the spell, I did not want her to change her mind about going for a proper cup of coffee, I didn’t want her to change her mind about me.

Because as I steered the big BMW around St James’s Park and Trafalgar Square and into the narrow streets of Soho, the spell between us felt like a fragile thing, as if it could dissolve at any moment.

Tara Jones stared straight out of the window and twisted the gold band on the third finger of her left hand and wondered what the hell she was doing with me.

‘Don’t you have to go to work?’ she said.

‘They gave me the rest of the day off.’

‘Because those men tried to kill you last night?’

I nodded. ‘Some guys have all the luck.’