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the benefit. Plus we run a business that’s based here, and Connie got a bit carried away with the headed stationery, so we can’t move until we’ve written at least another four thousand letters.’
    I know what’s going to happen before it happens: Sam K is going to ask about Nulli. Kit will answer at length; it’s impossible to explain our work quickly, and my husband is nothing if not a lover of detail. I will have to wait to talk about the dead woman.
    Connie got a bit carried away.
    Did he say that deliberately, to plant the idea in Sam K’s mind that I’m an easily-carried-away sort of person? Someone who orders six times more headed notepaper than she needs might also hallucinate a dead body lying in a pool of blood.
    I listen as Kit describes our work. For the past three years, Nulli’s twenty-odd full-time staff have been working for the London Allied Capital banking group. The US government is in the process of prosecuting the group, which, like many UK banks, has a long history of breaking American rules about dealing with sponsors of terrorism, and unwittingly allowing blacklisted people and companies to carry out wire-transfer transactions in the US in dollars. London Allied Capital is currently bending over backwards to right the wrong, ingratiate itself with OFAC, the American office of foreign asset control, and minimise the eventual damage, which will almost certainly be a multi-million-dollar fine. Nulli was taken on to build data-filtering systems that will enable the bank to unearth all the questionable transactions that lie hidden in its history, so that it can come clean to the US Department of Justice.
    Like everyone Kit tells, Sam K looks impressed and confused in equal parts. ‘So do you have a base in London, then?’ he asks. ‘Or do you commute?’
    ‘Connie’s based here, I’m half and half,’ says Kit. ‘I rent a flat in Limehouse – a box with a bed in it, basically. As far as I’m concerned, I only have one home, and that’s Melrose Cottage.’ He glances at me as he says this. Does he expect a round of applause?
    ‘I can see that a small flat in London would have a job competing with this place.’ Sam K looks around our lounge. ‘It’s got bags of character.’ He turns to study the framed print on the wall behind him – a photograph of King’s College Chapel, with a laughing girl sitting on the steps. Does he know he’s looking at a picture of Cambridge? If he does, he says nothing.
    The print was a present from Kit and I’ve always hated it. On the mount, at the bottom, someone has written ‘4/100’. ‘That’s not a very good mark,’ I said when Kit first gave it to me. ‘Four per cent.’
    He laughed. ‘It’s the fourth in a run of a hundred prints, you fool. There are only a hundred of these in the world. Isn’t it beautiful?’
    ‘I thought you didn’t like mass-produced things,’ I said, determinedly ungrateful.
    He was hurt. ‘The handwritten “4/100” makes it unique. That’s why prints are numbered.’ He sighed. ‘You don’t like it, do you?’
    I realised how selfish I was being and pretended that I did.
    ‘My wife calls houses like this “camera-ready”,’ Sam K says. ‘The minute I stepped over your threshold, I felt inferior.’
    ‘You should see the insides of our cars,’ Kit tells him. ‘Or rather, our two dustbin-spillover areas on wheels. I’ve thought about leaving them on the pavement next to the wheelie bin on collection day, doors open – maybe the council’d take pity on us.’
    I stand up. Blood rushes to my head and the room tilts, blurs. I feel as if the different parts of my body are detaching from one another, breaking off and floating away. My head fills with a woolly throbbing. This keeps happening. My GP has no idea what the cause might be. I’ve had blood tests, scans, everything. Alice, my homeopath, thinks it’s a physical manifestation of emotional distress.
    It takes a few seconds for the dizziness to