Farrer let the name soak into the walls, raking his scrutiny over each of them in turn, like a pianist dragging his hand over the ivories. Marina Quincy. Marina Quincy. But it wasn’t a name with any obvious material connections – not a Rockefeller or Rothschild, Spencer or Goldsmith. She wasn’t Someone, a name they should automatically know. No green lights were flashing to make immediate sense of the directive.

‘Mateo had never heard of her. We’re awaiting a full report but all we know right now is that she’s forty-five and working in a cafe in Madrid,’ Farrer added.

Forty-five? Charlotte frowned. Carlos Mendoza was very elderly, late nineties if she remembered correctly.

‘Could she be an illegitimate daughter?’ someone behind her piped up.

Farrer gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. ‘According to Mateo, his father had a vasectomy in his late thirties which he understands to have been successful.’

‘So then she’s his mistress,’ Dan Milton stated beside her with characteristic frankness. It was the obvious assumption and Milton was nothing if not obvious. Thirty-one and already head of private banking for continental Europe , he wouldn’t know a euphemism from an embolism. Chicago-born, with a Harvard business degree and an MBA from INSEAD, he had joined the London team eight months earlier and the aftershocks of his blunt managerial style were still rippling through the office.

Farrer settled his gaze upon his protégé, which was always a disconcerting experience. Almost albino-blonde, his eyelashes and brows were so pale as to appear bleached, creating a piscatorial impression. Milton had told her once, during a shared lift ride, that it was like being eyeballed by a trout. ‘Mateo Mendoza is adamant he’d met all his father’s mistresses. He’s put a researcher on to it and they’re working up a profile as we speak, but there’s got to be something more to her than just that. Dying old men don’t just give away their fortunes to hot women, no matter how much they fancy them.’

‘Well if she is the lover, then the family has a very strong case for contesting it,’ Milton said, confidently clasping his hands together and beginning to assert his authority. He had had a brief stint running the team in Madrid before this. ‘Spanish inheritance law strongly protects the immediate family. His wife would automatically get fifty per cent, with the rest parcelled up in forced shares or legitimas’ – he pronounced the word with a strong Spanish accent – ‘for both antecedents and descendants. There’s simply no way he can just dump the lot on his girlfriend and rob his legal family of their birthright.’

Farrer arched an almost-invisible eyebrow. ‘You’re quite right, Dan, he couldn’t do this – if it was a bequest.’

Milton’s mouth opened a little, as he realized too late he’d tripped up over semantics, his ego running away with him. ‘But as I said, it’s a donation. Or donación de bienes,’ Farrer said, matching Milton’s pretentious accent with one of his own.