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that you discovered the body. I bet Colonel Mustard did it in the conservatory with the lead piping.’ Her English was perfect with a faint hint of accent, more a rising and lowering of inflection than a specific style of pronunciation. Music to my ears.
    ‘Well, he might have done, but he must have melted the lead piping into bullets first.’
    ‘It doesn’t say he was shot.’ She looked surprised and tapped the paper. ‘It even gives the impression it was natural causes or suicide.’
    ‘Difficult to shoot yourself three times in the heart. The police kept that gem to themselves and I didn’t tell the Press either.’
    ‘Wow!’
    ‘What are you still doing in bed, anyway?’ I asked, lying down beside her on the duvet. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime.’
    ‘I’m not hungry.’
    ‘Fancy working up an appetite?’ I grinned.
    ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ She giggled and shrugged the robe off her slender shoulders.
    Chris Beecher, eat your heart out.
    We lay in bed for much of the afternoon, watching the racing on the television while I should have been writing up reports for clients. We decided against a walk to St James’s Park because of the incessant rain but, eventually, did huddle under an umbrella and make our way to dinner at Santini, the Italian restaurant on the corner. Marina had chicken while I chose Dover sole, off the bone.
    We contentedly shared a bottle of Chablis and caught up on the week.
    ‘Tell me more about the jockey who was killed,’ Marina asked.
    ‘He was nice enough,’ I said. ‘In fact, I spoke with him earlier.’ I remembered Huw’s message still sitting unheard on my machine.
    ‘He won the first race,’ I said. But I wondered if he should have. Had he been told to lose? Was that why he’d died? Surely not. That killing was expertly carried out. It was an assassination. As I had told the police, someone had to have come to the races with the wherewithal to commit murder in his pocket. Metal detectors were not usual at the entrances to racecourses, although Aintree used them after the Grand National was postponed one year due to a bomb scare.
    The rain had stopped by the time we walked back to the flat hand in hand – her left, my right – dodging the puddles and laughing out loud. This was why I never took Marina to the races. This was a different world, one in which I could relax and act like a teenager, one in which I was increasingly happy and near to the point where I would seek to make it permanent. We stopped and kissed at least four times during the short fifty-yard stroll and went straight back to bed.
    I had always preferred lovemaking to be gentle and sensualand it was clearly Marina’s pleasure, too. After the violence of the previous day, I found solace in her tender embrace and we both seemed hugely satisfied by the experience. Afterwards we lay in the dark, touching occasionally, close to sleep.
    As a rule, I removed my false arm prior to making love but we had been swept away with the passion of the moment so now I gently eased myself out of bed and went into the bathroom. The five or so inches remaining of my left forearm fitted snugly into the open end of a hard fibreglass cylinder built to be the same length as my healthy right. The plastic-covered steel myo-electric hand was attached to the bottom end of the cylinder. Chris Beecher had been correct, it was little more than a fancy hook. The fingers were permanently slightly bent and the hand was able to grip between forefinger and thumb by means of an electric motor that moved the thumb in and out. The motor was powered by a rechargeable battery that clipped into a recessed holder above the wrist.
    Electrodes inside the arm-cylinder were held close to my skin near to where my real arm ceased. Initially I had had to learn how to open and close the hand using impulses I had previously used for bending my wrist. Try to move back the real hand that wasn’t there and the false hand opened. Move it forward