“Look, Kate, it’s unimportant. It didn’t mean anything. She doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know. That’s what I object to.”

“You’re asking a lot of me, Kate.”

“I’m not asking anything of you. If that’s how you want to live, that’s your affair. I’m simply telling you that I don’t want to have sex with a man who’s sleeping with other women. That may sound unfashionable in a world where a one-night stand means another score on your truncheon, but that’s how I am and I can’t change, so for us it’s the end. It’s a good thing neither of us is in love. We’ll be spared the usual tedium of tears and recriminations.”

“I could give her up.”

“And the next one, and the one after that? You haven’t begun to understand. I’m not offering sex as a good-conduct prize. I don’t want explanations, excuses, promises. It’s the end.”

And it had been the end. For six months he had disappeared completely from her life. She told herself she was getting used to being without him, but it hadn’t been easy. She missed more than the mutual fulfilment of their lovemaking. The laughter, the drinks in their favourite riverside pubs, the stress-free companionship, the meals in her flat which they cooked together, all had released in her a lighthearted confidence in life which she had never before known.

She wanted to talk to him about the future. There was no one else in whom she could confide. The next case might well be her last. It was certain that the Special Investigation Squad wouldn’t continue in its present form. Commander Dalgliesh had so far managed to thwart official plans to rationalise the maverick staffing, define its functions in contemporary jargon devised to obscure rather than illumine, and incorporate the Squad in some more orthodox bureaucratic structure. The SIS had survived because of its undoubted success and relative cheapness—not in some eyes a convenient virtue—and because it was headed by one of the country’s most distinguished detectives. The rumour mill of the Met ground incessantly and more often than not produced a kernel of wheat among the chaff. The present rumours had all come to her ears: Dalgliesh, deploring the politicisation of the Met and much else, himself wanted to retire; AD had no intention of retiring and would shortly take over a special inter-force department concerned with detective training; approaches had been made to him from two university departments of criminology; someone in the City wanted him for an unspecified job at a salary four times that at present enjoyed by the Commissioner.