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beside her on the bottom bench, she began, before he started banging on about what an important millionaire his Russian friend Dima was. According to Mark, Three Chimneys was only one of his several properties. He’d got another in Madeira, another in Sochi on the Black Sea.
    ‘And a house outside Berne,’ she went on, ‘where his business is based. But he’s peripatetic. Part of the year he’s in Paris, part Rome, part Moscow, according to Mark’ – and watched as Yvonne made another note. ‘But home, as far as the kids are concerned, isSwitzerland and school is some millionaire internat establishment in the mountains. ‘He talks about the company . Mark assumes he owns it. There’s a company registered in Cyprus. And banks. Several banks. Banking’s the big one. That was what brought him to the island in the first place. Antigua currently boasts four Russian banks, by Mark’s count, plus one Ukrainian. They’re just brass plates in shopping malls and a phone on some lawyer’s desk. Dima’s one of the brass plates. When he bought Three Chimneys, that was for cash too. Not suitcases of it but laundry baskets, somewhat ominously, lent to him by the hotel, according to Mark. And twenty-dollar bills, not fifties. Fifties are too dicey. He bought the house, and a run-down sugar mill, and the peninsula they stand on.’
    ‘Did Mark mention a figure?’ – Luke is back.
    ‘Six million US. And the tennis wasn’t pure pleasure either. Or not to begin with,’ she continued, surprised by how much she remembered of the awful Mark’s monologue. ‘Tennis in Russia is a major status symbol. If a Russian tells you he plays tennis, he’s telling you he’s stinking rich. Thanks to Mark’s brilliant tuition, Dima went back to Moscow and won a cup and everybody gasped. But Mark isn’t allowed to tell that story, because Dima prides himself on being self-made. It was only because Mark trusted me so completely that he felt able to make an exception. And if I’d like to pop round to his shop some time, he had a dandy little room upstairs where we could continue our conversation.’
    Luke and Yvonne offered sympathetic smiles. Perry offered no smile at all.
    ‘And Tamara?’ Luke asked.
    ‘ God-smacked he called her. And barking mad with it, according to the islanders. Doesn’t swim, doesn’t go down to the beach, doesn’t play tennis, doesn’t talk to her own children except about God, ignores Natasha completely, barely talks to the natives except for Elspeth, wife of Ambrose, front-of-house manager. Elspeth works in a travel agency, but if the family’s around she drops everything and helps out. Apparently one of the maids borrowed some of Tamara’s jewellery for a dance not long ago. Tamara caught her before she could put it back and bit her hand so hard she had to have twelvestitches in it. Mark said if it had been him he’d have had an injection for rabies as well.’
    ‘So now tell us about the little girls who came and sat beside you, please, Gail,’ Luke suggested.
    *
    Yvonne was leading the case for the prosecution, Luke was playing her junior, and Gail was in the box trying to keep her temper, which was what she told her witnesses to do on pain of excommunication.
    ‘So were the girls already ensconced up there, Gail, or did they come skipping up to you the moment they saw the pretty lady all on her own?’ Yvonne asked, putting her pencil to her mouth while she studied her notes.
    ‘They walked up the steps and sat one either side of me. And they didn’t skip. They walked.’
    ‘Smiling? Laughing? Being scamps?’
    ‘Not a smile between them. Not a half of one.’
    ‘Had the girls, in your opinion, been dispatched to you by whoever was looking after them?’
    ‘They came strictly of their own accord. In my opinion.’
    ‘You’re sure of that?’ – becoming more Scottish and persistent.
    ‘I saw the whole thing happen. Mark had made a pass at me that I didn’t need, so I stomped up to the