And yet, she found her hand reaching for the file anyway as she passed by to curl up on the white leather sofa. Just a quick look-see . . .

She flicked through the pictures first. Marina Quincy was a strikingly beautiful woman, the sort to make men stare open-mouthed and turn their heads in front of their wives as she passed. From what Charlotte could make out from the somewhat grainy photos taken of her waitressing at a cafe, she was tall and rangy but there was a mannishness to her looks too: she was no run-of- the-mill femme fatale with her big hands and feet, thick eyebrows and tawny skin pulled tight over angled planes. Her dark hair was almost black and worn up in a messy bun with wispy tendrils fluttering at her neck. She wore several silver rings on both hands and had a tiny tattoo of a swallow on her left inner wrist, her white shirt straining slightly at the bust and across the shoulders. An old plaster was wrapped around her left pinky finger and the multiple studs, cuffs and small hoops at her ears looked tarnished.

There was nothing polished or refined about her. She looked tired, weary, worn-down. And yet, in the images, though her eyes were cast down as she collected plates from a table, Charlotte could see several onlookers watching her going about her business. Was she aware of the power she had over other people, Charlotte wondered, or oblivious to it?

Charlotte thought not. To transfix a man like Carlos Mendoza, ancient though he was – and he was ancient; two years off a century according to their files – would have been no mean undertaking; she surely had to understand the weapons in her arsenal.

She wondered how long the relationship had been going on for – a glance at the profile told her Marina was forty-five. It surely couldn’t be a new thing? Not with his age. If they had met when she was in her early thirties and he in his mid-eighties though . . . ? It was still a hell of a stretch but he might well have been a vigorous older man, carrying his years well? A silver fox? Charlotte had seen the Rolling Stones playing at Twickenham the year before and watching Mick Jagger race up and down the stage for two hours had redefined what ‘seventy-something’ looked like to her. It was certainly possible, she supposed, and a fortune the size of his was a proven aphrodisiac to many young women before her.

But it wasn’t just the age group that struck her as odd. The fact that she was still waitressing . . . It might have been how Carlos had first met her, but Charlotte would have assumed a man like him would want to keep his lover in fancier style than this. Unless Marina insisted upon it – keeping her job, her old life? Was it a principled stand or a tactical play? And if the latter, it begged the question, did she know what her lover was intending for her: wealth she could never hope to count, land she could never hope to cover?