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eat, cover the bills, pay the Garfish what he asks, and still have a little to put aside each month towards my boat—my beautiful boat. So it’s all good.”
    “It’s not all good.” Lex took a swig of his beer. It was island-made, strong and sweet. “Now you’ve pissed Finisterre off.”
    “To be strictly accurate, you did that, Lex.”
    “Only to prevent you having the shit kicked out of you.”
    “Fair point. So we’re both responsible. Question is, what do we do about it? Because the Garfish, he isn’t about to forgive and forget.”
    There was a solution, Lex thought. Seraphina and her hundred grand.
    He shook his head. No way. There had to be something else, an alternative to that. Anything but that.
    “Let me sleep on it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll figure out something in the morning.”
    “How’s your spare room?” Wilberforce asked. “Bed all made up?”
    “You want to come for a sleepover?”
    Wilberforce tried not to look pathetically grateful. “If it’s okay. Kind of not feeling so safe under my own roof tonight.”
     
     
    L EX WAS AWAKE at seven. It had rained during the night, as it often did. The air was muggy, the garden hung with wreaths of ground mist. He ate breakfast in the courtyard—toast, fresh fruit, coffee. Rikki joined him at the table and feasted on a raw egg he gave him.
    “Don’t come to rely on me for your food,” Lex warned the mongoose. “You’ll get complacent. Lose your edge.”
    Rikki stared blankly at him, then resumed lapping yolk and albumen from the broken shell.
    Lex’s mobile lay beside the espresso pot. He half expected it to ring. Seraphina calling. Somehow she would know that he was reconsidering her offer. He kind of wished it would happen that way, sparing him the hassle and humiliation of having to make the call himself.
    All of Wilberforce’s problems solved. And the sports cruiser secured outright. Lex wasn’t much of a sailor, but he quite fancied the idea of escorting tourists out to sea and helping them fish. How hard could it be? Wilberforce, having spent a year crewing on a glass-bottomed boat on the reefs, already knew a bit about seamanship, and Lex could pick it up as he went along. He was a quick study. It would be something to do with his days. A change from sitting and brooding and drinking.
    He located Seraphina’s number in the call log. His thumb hovered over the green phone icon, and finally came down on it.
    It took nearly twenty seconds for the connection to be established. The signal had to be rerouted through several British government exchanges, hopping from one to the next and being scrambled and encrypted along the way. It would be next to impossible for any third party to trace either its point of origin or its destination, or indeed to eavesdrop.
    “Lex,” Seraphina crooned. “It still feels strange calling you that. Lex. Rather sexy, too. Like this is some sort of secret assignation.”
    “Isn’t it?”
    “When you put it like that, I suppose it is. How’s tricks, anyway? I gather there was a bit of a wild rumpus in Port Sebastian last night. Gunplay in the streets. Nothing to do with you, of course.”
    “People are shooting each other all the time in Manzanilla.” Sadly, this was true. The rise in tourism and the prosperity it brought had seen a concomitant decline in lawlessness, but armed robbery and gang violence were still far from unusual. Away from the coast and the hotel developments, crime remained a daily fact of life for many islanders. “Why assume I was involved?”
    “I don’t assume anything,” said Seraphina. “I know.”
    “Naturally.”
    “Names get taken down at such incidents, reports get filed on police databases...”
    “And dedicated search engines flag them up whenever they occur,” Lex finished. “Bloody hell, it’s almost as if you’re stalking me.”
    “A run-in with local law enforcement, Lex. That’s not like you at all. Hardly what one would call keeping a low