Behind a hedge of thick pink and white oleanders I could hear the water trickling into the swimming pool, and the air was thick with the smell of orange blossom, which was preferable to the absinthe martini and the cigarette corrupting the old man’s mephitic breath, which now poured over me like chlorine gas drifting across no-man’s-land.

“Do you want a d-drink before you go?” he asked.

“No thanks. I’d best keep a clear head for the rubber I’m about to play with Herr Hebel. But I’ll certainly have one on my return. In fact, tell Ernest I might have several.”

“Of course. We’ll even save some dinner for you.”

He dropped the bag onto the passenger seat and, taking out a folded handkerchief, wiped his forehead, which was glistening with sweat. Robin appeared in the doorway, and then so did Alan Searle. Maugham sensed their lingering presence and glanced over his shoulder with a hint of displeasure, as if he were being minded like someone who was senile; he was anything but that.

“Where are you meeting him?”

“He’s rented a room at the Voile. That was his suggestion, not mine. But it’s neutral territory, you might say. Harder for me to lay any kind of trap for him there.”

“Robin and Alan are both of the opinion that one of them should accompany you. And, more importantly, the money.”

“Those aren’t Hebel’s instructions.”

“I know.”

“But sure, why not? As long as Robin or Alan stays in the car, I guess it would be all right.”

“Aren’t you a bit nervous?”

“No.” But this was a lie. For some reason, I had a strange feeling of foreboding, as if something dreadful was going to happen. I’d even started to question the whole damn arrangement. Was it possible that this was all some kind of elaborate setup designed to put me in the frame for Hebel’s murder, which the wily old Englishman had somehow arranged separately? He was a supremely gifted author, after all, and it would not have been beyond his fertile imagination to have devised some labyrinthine plot. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that I’d been played for a fool. After all, I had only Maugham’s word that it was actually Harold Heinz Hebel who’d asked me to take charge of the handover. I even wondered if Spinola’s gun was still sitting on top of my bathroom cistern where I’d left it and if Spinola’s death was somehow connected to all this. A double cross in a woman is something you can never really hold against her; you have to factor it in, like the weather; it’s just the way they’re made. To my old-fashioned way of thinking, W. Somerset Maugham was like a wily old woman in so many respects.