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closed behind me. I wasn’t sure, but there could have been an unpleasant expletive included in there somewhere as well. There was certainly a little bark of muffled laughter from his friends.
    The atmosphere in the Antelope was altogether more welcoming. For a start, Jerry was standing at the bar, a pint of wallop in his hand; there was the reassuring click of dominoes being laid down triumphantly and the phlegmy chuckle of the victor; and big Mickey Morgan was over at the dartboard, looking for someone to trounce. I smiled and shook my head when he waved the arrows at me and made my way through the blue-grey fug from a dozen Woodbines over to Jerry.
    â€˜Tony, my friend,’ he said expansively, ‘what are you having?’
    I looked up at the big clock behind the bar, set ten minutes fast. It was saying ten to seven. Obviously, this wasn’t Jerry’s first pint, but he couldn’t have sunk all that many in forty minutes.
    â€˜I’ll just have a lemonade, thanks,’ I said, thinking of the whisky still roiling about in my guts.
    â€˜You heard the man,’ Jerry said to Henry, the cadaverous barman who had silently materialized as I’d approached the bar. Henry sniffed, put his cigarette down on the scarred wood and reached down for a glass and a bottle.
    â€˜So,’ I said to Jerry, ‘you coming to Pete’s Place?’
    â€˜You paying?’ he said.
    â€˜No,’ I said, ‘this is pleasure, not business. I’m not babysitting young Philip tonight, thank God, so I’m not on exes.’
    â€˜Pity,’ he said. He took a pull at his pint. ‘She’s good, this singer, is she?’
    â€˜Yeah,’ I said, ‘very.’
    â€˜All right, then.’ He lifted his glass again. ‘By the way, a package arrived for you in the four o’clock post.’
    I raised my eyebrows. No one sent me packages.
    â€˜Addressed to “Antoine”,’ he said. ‘So I’m guessing that it might just have come from a certain lady in gay Paree.’ He paused and sipped beer. ‘And that policeman, Rose, phoned. He said to tell you he was still on the case, following up a new lead.’
    I groaned. It was obviously a coincidence, but the two things were related. The package was, as Jerry guessed, almost certainly from Ghislaine. And, although I hoped he didn’t know it, she was who Inspector Rose was looking for. Since the two men whose premature demise she had been responsible for had been giving a damned good imitation of strangling me at the time – well, I’d certainly been convinced of the authenticity of their performance, and Daff’s chicken soup had been all that my bruised oesophagus could cope with for nearly two weeks – I was more than a little grateful to her and intended to do everything I could to keep her out of it. This mainly involved keeping my mouth shut and playing ignorant, both of which came very easily to me. I told myself that Rose calling on the same day as a package arrived from Paris really was just coincidence. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t even know about her. He couldn’t. He was just winding me up.
    Very successfully.
    I drained my glass.
    R. White’s finest tasted flat, bland and unappealing. Mind you, ever since the first time my mother had made citron pressé for me, when I was five, I’d found English commercial brands of lemonade disappointing and had always suspected that their relationship to lemons was tenuous at best. So maybe the image of Inspector Rose thoughtfully, and very irritatingly, filling his pipe with Golden Virginia and puffing contentedly on it for a few seconds before quietly asking some pertinent question that I didn’t want to answer hadn’t been responsible. Maybe.
    Jerry looked at me with raised eyebrows. At first, I thought he might have been wondering what was bothering me, but then I noticed that his glass was