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her concerns.
    ‘The man wants real information—things that could get people killed if Mark talks. I think it’s dangerous and irresponsible, even if it is just training.’
    ‘And Stevie, where in God’s name are you?’
    ‘I have absolutely no idea. Somewhere on the moor—my phone just says “Bodmin” which isn’t very helpful. I took their jeep and now I’m driving around, looking like a mad woman in my thermal underwear . . .’
    There was a long pause. Then Rice came on again, ‘Head north, you’ll come to a village. Check in at the local pub and wait for someone to collect you.’ And with that he was gone.
    It turned out that the bulldog, having overheard Mark’s tales in the pub, had jumped at the chance to do some old army friends a favour by getting the name of the whistleblower at the source of Mark’s story. A full report of what happened on the hostile environment training course was requested by Hazard. As a result, David Rice began training staff and clients in-house, mock-kidnappings were struck from the training books, and Stevie Duveen found a letter in her college pigeon hole a week later offering her a job at Hazard as a regional security analyst.
    That had been eight years ago. Hazard was her world now and she was good at her job. The family connection only drew Stevie closer to her boss, who was barely ten years younger than her father would have been, had he lived. Sometimes Stevie thought Rice felt it too, the bond. He was her anchor in a floating world.
    ‘So, how are you?’ Rice asked, still as stone, waiting for an answer.
    He could be quite disconcerting when he wanted to know something that Stevie didn’t want to tell. She could rarely hold out long with him. She excused herself by remembering that he was, after all, a trained interrogator.
    ‘I’m fine.’
    That silence.
    ‘I’ll be thirty-one next month.’
    Nothing.
    It would be easier to give in now and get it over with. She took a large gulp of her gin.
    ‘To be honest, it’s been a little difficult because of the publicity. He’s on every newsstand with Norah Wolfe, all the headlines about how fabulous they are, how extraordinary his talent. It would be easier not to be reminded.’
    Stevie couldn’t shut the memory out. She had been deeply in love with Joss Carey. Nothing could change that fact. He had been an unlikely choice for her—although perhaps it was Joss who had chosen Stevie. He was a painter, enormously and romantically good looking—beautiful, in fact—the fifth son of a prominent family, the misunderstood misanthrope with the frayed collar, the paint-flecked hands, the gentle eyes. His was a very different world to Stevie’s—creative and sensuous, with padded edges and bleeding lines.
    In Joss’ world, time did not move in a straight line, if it moved at all; life was lived in rumpled bed sheets at noon, on an old velvet sofa in a crumbling studio, surrounded by jam jars of flowers and the overwhelming smell of linseed oil and turpentine. His world was everything Stevie’s wasn’t.
    She had met him through her friend Charlie at a party, in a strange old house off Eaton Square. Joss had sat with her on a window ledge full of red geraniums and talked to her about the capriciousness of the muse. Stevie had just returned from a week on an oilrig supply ship in the Caspian Sea and the contrast had charmed her. She’d never met anyone like Joss Carey.
    As he leaned in and lit her cigarette, his large eyes had fluttered like brown moths over her face until they came to rest on hers. He gazed at her for a long time before he spoke. ‘You have the most extraordinarily luminous quality about you. I find your face fascinating.’
    Stevie blushed and laughed; compliments were not a thing she was particularly used to.
    ‘I’d like to paint you. Would you do me that honour? I need to see if I can capture your essence on canvas—if it’s possible. Which I don’t know yet. Will you agree to sit for