“I hate to see a good idea going to waste.”

“You hate to pass up a chance of getting money for nothing.”

He grinned. “It’s the same thing.”

Mrs Bannister shook her head. “We still talk a different language, you and I. No, Charles,” she said again: “I don’t want to make any changes. I’m doing very well as it is.”

“Yes, indeed …” There was so sudden an alteration of tone and inflection in those two drawled words that she looked up, to find him staring at her fixedly. “That’s exactly what people are going to say.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you’re doing very well as it is.” It was extraordinary how significant, how evil her own words sounded, when Charles Bannister got to work on them. “Mrs Bannister doing very well – it’ll make a good headline.”

“There’ll be no headlines,” she said, secretly appalled. “There’s no occasion for them.”

“I’ll make the occasion.” The thing that had been in his manner from the very beginning, the lurking thing in the background which she had not identified, now emerged into the open. She recognized it at once: it was a threat, a completely confident threat. “A word or two in the right quarter could make a lot of difference to you. Even a hint that you’re holding back some of this money–” he gestured. “It would kill you – stone dead.”

“They’d never believe you.”

“They’d never believe you – unless you showed all the accounts, and gave the full figures. Are you prepared to do that? Can you stand an investigation? You know damned well you can’t! You’re breaking every law in the States! Mrs Bannister doing very well–” he repeated her fatal phrase, with yet more crude sarcasm. “Gives nearly ten per cent to charity, keeps rest.”

His absurd English voice, aping a newspaper report, might have been funny if it had not mirrored so brutally her encroaching terror.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

He put the fresh drink down beside her without answering: then he straightened up slowly, standing above her with no trace either of humour or of weakness in his face.

“There are a lot of things I’ll dare, if you don’t see this thing my way, and do as I want. The real truth about the Esther Costello donations – that’s one good story. I’m another.”

“You?”

“Yes. Mrs Bannister’s husband returns.” Again that absurd newspaper caricature, which once more clawed at her heart. “Mystery Englishman surprised by wife’s activities. Sues for divorce.”

“What? You must be crazy!”

“Sues for divorce,” he repeated. “And not only because of the Esther Costello racket. What about this man you’ve been going around with, for years on end. What about Paul Marchant?”

She stared, horrified at once by his ruthless look and by his knowledge. “How long have you been in America?”

“Long enough to find out that … By God, I’ll sue him for alienation!”

She laughed wildly at that. “Where will that get you? You’ve slept with more women–” she broke off, at a loss for detailed words. “You’ll get precisely nowhere, if you try that divorce idea.”