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conflict.
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    A man lying in the gutter may comfort himself by looking up at the stars. For your man in a Madrid gutter, a layer of dust excludes the stars. He lies where he has thrown himself as fighter planes swoop over a street of cafés andshops. They fly in triangular formation, Heinkel fighter aircraft of the German Condor Legion, strafing the pavements with machine-gun fire, blowing out glass, raising chips the size of gaming dice from the road. The noise is past deafening and humans dart like terrified mice beneath raptor shadows.
    The din becomes unbearable until, suddenly, they are gone. They don’t come in plain day any more,thanks to the presence of fighter aircraft provided to Spain’s left-wing government by its Soviet allies—
    Jean-Yves, Comte de Charembourg, glanced up in irritation as a cough from the doorway broke into his reading. His secretary stood with a letter pinched between thumb and finger, his expression conveying its unsavoury nature.
    ‘You will wish to see this at once, M. le Comte.’
    Shaking hisnewspaper in half, Jean-Yves made a mental note to come back to that article later. Whoever ‘V. Haviland’ was, he’d obviously rolled in the dust of Spain. The
News Monitor
had been Jean-Yves’s weekday reading when he’d lived in London and he’d been pleased to discover it could be bought in Paris from a vendor near the British embassy, if a day or two late. There was a French-language version,but it tended to pussyfoot around international sensitivities. Three decades spent in London had not made an Englishman of the Comte de Charembourg, but it had taught him the value of a press that colludes with its readers rather than with those in power. ‘Second post, Ferryman?’ he asked his secretary.
    ‘It came by hand, Monsieur.’ Jolyan Ferryman always addressed him as ‘Mon-sewer.’ The boy’sFrench, though textbook correct, came with an excruciating English accent. To be in Ferryman’s presence was to wince more than was comfortable or dignified.
    ‘Just put it on my desk. Who’s it from?’
    ‘The personage declined to give his name and I felt it unseemly to ask. It was a working type of person.’
    Jean-Yves got the subtext. His gentleman-secretary resentedperforming tasks more fittedto a footman. Tough. This household couldn’t run to footmen. In fact, if prices kept increasing, Jean-Yves doubted he would run even to a secretary much longer. Now, that would be a tricky conversation to have with his wife. When it came to their style of living, Rhona de Charembourg aspired to the grand ways of her English girlhood. Aisleby Park, with fifty indoor staff and an estate ten miles round,was Rhona’s pattern of respectable living. Had she known she’d end up ruling a household of four domestics and a part-time gardener … undoubtedly she wouldn’t have married him.
    Jean-Yves dismissed Ferryman and tore open the letter, extracting a sheet that reeked of cigarette smoke. Without doubt, a worker’s brand.
    The click of the garden gate took him to the window in time to see his wife anddaughters leaving the house. Each woman wore a suit of fine Prince of Wales check. His two daughters each held a dog lead with a white Pomeranian on the end of it. Rhona, Christine and Ninette with Tosca and Figaro, taking the air on Boulevard Racan. A charming ritual that wouldn’t last much longer. Christine was marrying this June and the family circle would be cut by one.
    Better read that letter.DE CHAREMBOURG was written across the top. He absorbed what followed and the blood faltered in his veins.
    He sat down. Forced himself to breath evenly. He’d sufferedchest trauma in the Great War and, though only fifty-six, he sometimes rasped like a spent hackney horse. He reread the letter in silence:
    On 21 st December 1903, you slew Alfred Lutzman. Time to pay. There are witnesses living.Meet my terms or I will tell your dirty secrets
.
    I can hurt someone you love
.
    His gaze flew towards the