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to thigh in an increasingly passionate embrace, and then Harry began to slide his hands questioningly beneath the luxurious dark red velvet. Angelica gasped with delight, and reached down to pull at her skirt. There was the snapping open of buttons, and a rustle of sound as the skirt slid to the floor. She stepped out of it and kicked it out of the way—Harry retained just enough mental equilibrium to think it took terrific style to treat designer clothes like that. And practice, said a sneaky voice.
    It was stockings after all, rather than tights. They were held up by garters and she was wearing silk underwear.
    As she pulled him back into the living-room, towards the deep sofa at one end, he was aware that the coffee had filtered and switched itself off. But presumably they could always drink instant coffee afterwards.

    It was almost three a.m. before he went out into the odd half-world of the extreme early morning. He picked up a cruising taxi near Holland Park which took him home. In the morning—the real morning, when the world was up and about its lawful occasions—he would send flowers to Angelica. ‘Thank you for a memorable evening,’ he would say on the card. She would smile the wry cat-smile at that.
    After he had done that he would tell Markovitch that he was following a number of promising leads and that they had better regard his working hours as flexible for a week or two, and then he would see what he could find about the Bloomsbury house and its previous owners. Angelica had said that Simone had been ‘intense’ about leasing it for Thorne’s. ‘She picks up atmospheres,’ Angelica had said. What had Simone picked up about the house that had made her so passionate about it? As he got into bed he was aware of Angelica’s scent still clinging faintly to his hair, but it was not Angelica he was thinking about as he switched out the light; it was Simone.
    It ought not to have given him such a jolt when Angelica had made that reference to Simone being a twin.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T WINS. IT HAD given Melissa Anderson a considerable jolt to hear the word, but it had been a very pleasurable jolt. Twins.
    â€˜And first off, as far as we can tell, they’re both developing at a normal rate,’ said Martin Brannan, regarding her from behind his desk. He was rather nice-looking: dark-haired and with a kind of enthusiastic intensity, and he was a lot younger than Mel had expected. He might be in his early thirties, but no more than that.
    â€˜But?’
    He had not moved, but he looked as if he might mentally be taking a deep breath, like a man about to plunge into something dark and cold and unpleasant. Mel waited, and then in a voice that managed to be both professionally detached and humanely compassionate, Martin Brannan said, ‘Mrs Anderson, they’re joined.’
    Joined?’ Mel did not immediately take this in. ‘I don’t—Oh. Oh God, joined . You mean—like Siamese twins, don’t you?’
    â€˜Well, we don’t call them that any more. We call it conjoining.’
    Mel did not care what it was called. She was aware of a rushing sound in her ears, but she fought it back because she would not faint like some helpless wimp, she absolutely would not—
    The thing to do was establish the facts—even to write everything down. Joe would want to know details when she got home; he would ask a great many questions and be annoyed if Mel could not supply the answers. The trouble was that she did not think she could hold a pen at the moment, never mind write decipherable notes.
    But after a moment she was able to say, ‘You can do something about it, can’t you? There are operations—’ You heard about the operations on TV. Lots of publicity, heart-breaking photographs, newscasters talking in hushed voices, and gruesome reports of eight- and twelve-hour operations. Sometimes one child died at the expense of the other.