‘I march with them every day to the oil industry’s offices in the Strand, not far from Australia House,’ Haut said. ‘I dress very well. Starched collar, polished shoes, straightened tie. Have to keep up appearances for the industry, like poor old Clancy.’

‘Never mind,’ Cavalier said, ‘all for a good cause.’

They shook hands. Just then an ashen-faced Florence came up to Haut and took him aside.

‘Ernie’s dead,’ she whispered. She broke down, crying.

‘How? When?’

‘Last night at his Willesden mansion. His girlfriend found him when she got home. He’d been stabbed.’

‘Who did it?’

‘Don’t know.’

Haut held her as she sobbed. She broke free and disappeared into the club.

‘Natalia, Ken, now Ernie!’

‘You should leave London,’ Cavalier said, handing him an envelope before Haut hurried inside the club.

*

‘He was stabbed in the heart,’ Haut told Cavalier in a phone call later in the day. ‘I insisted on seeing the body. This was Satan’s work!’

‘Is there a suspect?’

‘His son, who’s a drug addict.’

‘Then it was coincidence that this happened about the time of Ken’s death.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Haut said, saddened rather than exasperated. ‘It’s spiritual. It’s demonic. They’re getting at me.’

Cavalier wanted to debate this but stopped himself. Every now and again, Haut would speak about the spiritual that no one else, including close friends and associates, understood.

‘My radar is warning me to go,’ Haut said.

‘As long as you have your phone and a computer, you can run things from anywhere, at least until you market your version of the cold fusion technology.’

‘My plasmoid technology,’ Haut corrected him. ‘I’ve been on it intermittently for decades. William Donnelly told me of a place on the remote east side of the Thai island Koh Samui. It’s a set of villas formerly owned by a US merchant bank. After the 2008 crash they sold them off. A few are vacant. They’re on the top of a mountain with good security. The mountain is so steep that cars can’t even reach within three hundred metres of it.’

‘That puts you two hours away from me by plane. I’ll be back in Chiang Mai soon.’

‘I have no money to get there.’

‘Did you look in the envelope I gave you?’

Haut pulled it out of the jacket pocket.

‘I forgot about it in the rush to see Ernie,’ he said, opening it.

Inside it was two thousand pounds in twenty-pound notes. Haut uttered one of his hackneyed phrases: ‘Various acts of God.’

57 AS YOU WERE

57

AS YOU WERE

Bleulance, in top hat and tails, kept his binoculars on the horses in the race at Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. His horse, Antoinette, had led most of the way on the scenic racecourse, France’s most famous.