‘It’s just one of the leads we’re pursuing. As far as we know there’s only one thing that links Mr Buck and Mr Jones – the past. Did anything happen during your school days that—’

‘Might make someone want to kill them?’ King said. The practised smile drew some of the sting from his words. He was trying not to laugh at me. ‘You’re talking as if their murders were somehow justified, detective.’

‘I didn’t mean to give that impression.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he said, forgiving me. He let his eyes drift away, as if remembering. ‘We were just ordinary boys,’ he said. And then back at me. ‘But if anything occurs, then of course I will immediately get in touch. I want what you want. Could I possibly have your card?’

I gave it to him, and realised that I was being very politely dismissed. And that there was someone else being brought in to see him. A dishevelled, overweight man blinking with awe behind his greasy specs, some kind of journalist, there for an interview, looking like a tourist. All hot and flustered, as if it had not been easy to find the unmarked door of a gentlemen’s club on St James’s Street. And then I was standing up and shaking Ben King’s hand and thanking him for his time and the coffee.

I collected my coat from the smirking porters and I was back on St James’s Street before it sank in that the MP for Hillingdon North had scheduled a meeting for every course of his lunch.

I was dessert.

‘That little gang,’ I said back at the incident room. ‘It was all about the King brothers, Ben and Ned. They were the alpha males. Ben looks like the pack leader.’

‘Why do you think that?’ Mallory said.

‘The mess he made of his brother’s face. Guy Philips was their pit bull. Salman Khan was their poodle. Hugo Buck was their jock, their star athlete. Adam Jones – I think he just tagged along. Let them run wild at his house when his parents were away. Adam was their mascot. Their lapdog.’

‘And what about the one who killed himself? James Sutcliffe.’

‘They all seem to love him,’ I said. ‘Died young. Good-looking corpse and all that. I doubt if it was so different when he was alive. And he was the one genuine aristocrat among them. The Honourable James Sutcliffe, younger son of the Earl of Broughton. These boys – these men – they all come from money. Even Adam, with his music scholarship, grew up with money. But Sutcliffe was the only true toff, the only one of them that came from a family where the money had been there for generations. He was their hero.’