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almost nothing about him. Do you want sources?’
    â€˜Not sources, Katherine. Background. Can you help me – please? I’ll pay for the dinner.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜Cambridge.’
    â€˜I don’t know if I can help. Now I think about it, I can’t even remember when he died.’
    â€˜That’s because he’s not dead. I’ve just been talking to him.’
    â€˜What! He’s alive. You found him. How? Where is he?’
    â€˜London. He runs some kind of antique shop.’
    â€˜How the hell did you find him? Who put you on to him?’
    â€˜Unlike in Britain, life in the United States sometimes happens without us having to contact our own or someone else’s cousins. What I did was get a British telephone directory, look up Lowenthal under L, then I called him. Neat trick?’
    â€˜Phew!’
    â€˜So, dinner tomorrow night? Give me the address and I’ll collect you.’
    â€˜Not tomorrow.’
    â€˜Tomorrow you’re having a working dinner with Professor Thomas Thomson-Thomson, who’s married to your godmother. The affair’s a secret, but everybody knows.’
    â€˜Greg, you’re psychic. Or maybe just psychotic. I’ve sometimes wondered why we ever parted. Now I’ve remembered.’
    â€˜Because, like Dracula, you couldn’t live in daylight.’
    â€˜Cancel the dinner.’
    â€˜No. I’m coming the day after.’
    â€˜No – the day after that.’
    Later Katherine Ledbetter, who was indeed sitting at a book-laden desk in a room overlooking the gardens of Newnham College, Cambridge, including its immemorial elms, put the phone down and whispered, ‘Oh, Christ.’
    While Greg, in his Bayswater Hotel, measured his length on the dismal raspberry-coloured bed-cover and groaned, ‘Oh, God – Katherine, Katherine.’
    It had been many years since they had had their mad affair in Cambridge, followed by a terrible parting. Like Dracula again, it wouldn’t die, never had for Greg, anyhow, and now that he had spoken to her, he knew it had not died for Katherine either. She couldn’t disguise it. He knew her voice too well.
    In Cambridge, Katherine planned rapidly to cancel their meeting on some spurious grounds. Then she made a phone call to a relative.
    Meanwhile Greg, in London, had decided that she was deciding to do this and resolved to take effective counter-measures next day. He would leave for Cambridge as soon as his second meeting with Bruno Lowenthal had taken place. He would arrive twenty-four hours before they had agreed to meet and cut her off at the pass as she tried to escape him.

Chapter 12
    The day after Sally’s visit to Pontifex Street she arrived in the foyer at the Bessemer at six in the morning, somewhat drunk, her maid’s uniform dusty and torn. From the desk, Bates’s eye was gloomy but unsurprised.
    He reported her, of course, and Cora Blow sacked her. ‘You’ve been a chambermaid here for two days – two days too many,’ Cora remarked unemotionally.
    â€˜Mrs Blow, I left the hotel at ten last night and returned at six this morning. Surely you can’t expect me to be on duty all day and all night as well.’
    â€˜Can’t I? In the good old days there was no such thing as time off. Your off-duty time is when I say it is,’ Cora replied implacably. ‘Moreover, there’s the damage to your uniform and a complaint from Colonel le Brun.’
    â€˜He complained about
me
?’ protested Sally.
    â€˜Be that as it may,’ Cora said. ‘It’s your job to stay away from the guests.’
    â€˜He said he knew my mother.’
    â€˜Perhaps. Perhaps it was even true. I fail to see what difference that makes, especially to a Frenchman.’
    â€˜So I’m sacked.’
    â€˜Up to a point,’ Cora conceded. ‘It’s plain you haven’t even the vestiges of the making of a