After the English spymasters had returned to the Belle Aurore I drove back to Villefranche. The road home took me straight past their hotel and for a while I parked outside the entrance and contemplated sneaking into the little cliff-top garden to eavesdrop some more. All of the lights on the upper floors were burning brightly and I even caught a glimpse of Sinclair at the window, with the telephone pressed to his ear. But I’d had enough of spies and blackmail for one day. I was tired and all I wanted to do now was go to bed with Anne. There was that and the fact that at least two of them were carrying guns.

Although it was well past ten o’clock I found her typing in the guesthouse on her big pink Smith Corona. But the Hallicrafters radio was still on. I could hear the BBC World Service chattering away in the background.

Disaster was in the air, but it wasn’t the kind everyone else was expecting. This was to be a rather more bespoke, disastrous kind of disaster, created just for me.

“What’s the news?” I asked. “About Suez. Have the British invaded the zone yet? The French?”

“No. But it’s not looking good.”

She was wearing a crocheted white dress, with little flowers on the hem. Her feet were bare. In retrospect I ought to have counted the toes on her left foot just to make sure she didn’t have seven. She wasn’t wearing makeup and seemed smaller than I remembered, and just a bit more vulnerable, too. Even a little sad. She opened a bottle of wine and we drank some of it on the terrace. I told her I’d been back to the Villa Mauresque. She was quiet, unusually so, almost hermetically self-contained. And smoking a lot, too; there were at least a dozen cigarettes in the ashtray.

“Where’s the body? Floating in the pool? Or lying on the bedroom floor?”

“You’re looking at it.”

“I thought as much. Is something wrong? Only you seem a little tense.”

“Nothing serious. Just a little rigor mortis. It’s infectious when you’re researching a man like Somerset Maugham.”

She touched my face with the neatly manicured tips of her fingers and suddenly I realized how much I wanted her. I ached for her inside and I realized how much I’d missed her. And now that I had the scent of Mystikum in my nostrils, everything seemed all right; just about.

“Were you working on the biography all day?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve been on my own too much, really. I should have gone into town, or to the Grand Hôtel for a swim, but I didn’t. And it’s still in my head a bit, that’s all. Books are like that sometimes. They get jealous of time spent doing other things. A bit like husbands, I suppose.”