He realized he was hard. Now would not be the time to get up from this table. What had they been talking about? He cleared his throat and looked away. ‘You, erm, asked about my parents. Dad was a taxi driver, Mum did some cleaning. They split up; I went to live with Dad in Nottingham. They both passed away a while back.’ There, he’d said ‘dad’ a few times without suddenly blurting out all his plans. Okay, he decided, two can play at this game. He reached into his jacket pocket and found the card. ‘Listen, I just remembered, sorry to bring up job things tonight, but I found this in here earlier and, well, I didn’t mention it to the team today.’

‘What?’ She was looking openly suspicious at him now.

He slapped the card down on the table. It was a business card with just a map that had a bit of the Sight about it and a date. ‘I found a few of these behind the bar at the Goat, in a drawer marked “auction”. What do you reckon that’s about?’

*   *   *

Ross tried to keep her expression steady, but she was so angry – with herself and with him – that she wanted to leap up and throw this table over him. She had to wait while the waiter brought their meals over, and Costain made ridiculous small comments about the preparation of the dishes, as if he was still trying to impress her.

She’d thought she could safely see how much he knew, but he’d had that card. He knew it was an auction. He could either tell the others about it – and there must be a reason he hadn’t done so already – or, worse, he could come along himself. If the object she was so desperately seeking was on sale there, as the barmaid had hinted it might be, then he would understand, if he didn’t already, that he needed it as much as she did. He would bid against her. He might still have dodgy sources of cash that could go much further than an intelligence analyst’s savings would. Or, if the auction was based on barter, on sacrifice, he was better placed with his life in the underworld to find terrible things to offer, when all she would have was herself.

That whole chain of thought fell like a row of dominoes as the plates were put on the table. If she was honest with herself, she’d been having fun watching his fumbling attempts to unlock her, enjoying watching him, until now.

What was she going to do? She couldn’t risk him bidding against her, so she had to try to get him onside. It meant not showing him this anger and instead telling him what he wanted to hear. So he had won, damn it. For now.