When he tried to call back there was no reply. He was about to dial again when the managing director came in with the newspaper’s lawyer.

“You’ve got something on Garmony you didn’t tell us about.”

“Absolutely not, Tony. Obviously, something’s floating around and he’s panicked. Someone should check if he’s served on any of the others.”

The lawyer said, “We have. He hasn’t.”

Tony was looking distrustful. “And you know nothing?”

“Not a thing. Bolt from the blue.”

There were more suspicious questions of this sort and more denials from Vernon.

As they were leaving, Tony said, “You won’t do anything without us, now, will you, Vernon?”

“You know me,” he said, and winked. As soon as the two had gone he reached for the phone. He was just beginning on Clive’s number when he heard a commotion in the outer office. His door was kicked open and a woman came running in, followed by Jean, who rolled her eyes heavenward for the editor’s benefit. The woman stood in front of his desk, weeping. In her hand was a crumpled letter. It was the dyslexic sub. It was hard to make sense of everything she was saying, but Vernon could discern one repeated line.

“You said you’d stand by me. You promised!”

He could not know it then, but the moment before she entered his room was the last occasion he would be alone until he left the building at nine-thirty that evening.

Molly used to say that what she loved most about Clive’s house was that he had lived in it so long. In 1970, when most of his contemporaries were still in rented rooms and several years away from buying their first damp basement fiats, Clive inherited from a rich and childless uncle a gigantic stuccoed villa with a purpose—built two-story artist’s studio on the third and fourth floors whose vast arched windows faced north over a mess of pitched roofs. In keeping with the times and his youth—he was twenty-one—he had the outside painted purple and filled the inside with his friends, mostly musicians. Certain celebrities passed through. John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent a week there. Jimi Hendrix stayed a night, and was the likely cause of a fire that destroyed the banisters. As the decade progressed, the house calmed down. Friends still stayed over, but only for a night or two, and no one slept on the floor. The stucco was restored to cream, Vernon was a lodger for a year, Molly stayed for a summer, a grand piano was carried up to the studio, bookshelves were built, oriental rugs were laid over worn-out carpets, and various pieces of Victorian furniture were carried in. Apart from a few old mattresses, very little was ever carried out, and this must have been what Molly liked, for the house was a history of an adult life, of changing tastes, fading passions, and growing wealth. The earliest Woolworth’s cutlery was still in the same kitchen drawer as the antique silver set. Oil paintings by English and Danish impressionists hung in proximity to faded posters advertising Give’s early triumphs or famous rock concerts—the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight, the Rolling Stones at Altamont. Some of the posters were worth more than the paintings.

By the early eighties this was the home of a youngish, wealthy composer—by then he had written the music for Dave Spieler’s hit movie, Christmas on the Moon—and a certain dignity (so Clive considered in his better moments) seemed to fall from the gloomy high ceilings onto the huge lumpy sofas and all the stuff, not quite junk, not quite antique, that had been bought in Lots Road. The impression of seriousness was furthered when an energetic housekeeper started to keep order. The not-quite-junk was dusted or polished and began to look antique. The last of the lodgers departed and the silence in the house was workmanlike. Over several years Clive seemed to race through two childless marriages relatively unscathed. The three women he had known closely lived abroad. The one he was with now, Susie Marcellan, was in New York, and when she came over it was never for very long. The years and all the successes had narrowed his life to its higher purpose; he was becoming not quite zealous, but cagey, about his privacy. Profile writers and photographers were never invited in these days, and the time had long passed when Clive snatched hours between friends or lovers or parties to write a sudden daring opening, or even a complete song. The open house was no more.

But Vernon still took pleasure in his visits, for he had done a lot of his own growing up here and had only fond memories of girlfriends, hilarious evenings with various drugs, and working through the nights in a small bedroom at the rear of the house. Back in the days of typewriters and carbon copies. Even now, as he left his taxi and mounted the steps to the front door, he experienced again, though only vestigially, a sensation he never had these days, of genuine anticipation, the feeling that anything might happen.

When Clive opened the door, Vernon saw no immediate signs of distress or crisis. The two friends embraced in the hall.

“There’s champagne in the fridge.”

Clive fetched the bottle and two glasses, and Vernon followed him up the stairs. The house had a closeted atmosphere, and he guessed that Clive had not been out for a day or two. A half-open door revealed the bedroom to be in a mess. Clive sometimes asked the housekeeper not to come in when he was working hard. The state of the studio confirmed the impression.

Manuscript paper covered the floor; dirty plates, cups, and wineglasses were strewn around the piano and the keyboard and MIDI computer on which Clive sometimes worked out his orchestrations. The air felt close and damp, as though it had been breathed many times.

“Sorry about the mess.”

Together they cleared books and papers off the armchairs, then sat with their champagne and small talk. Clive told Vernon about his encounter with Garmony at Molly’s funeral.

“The foreign secretary actually said ‘fuck off’?” Vernon asked. “We could have used that in the paper.”

“Quite. I’m trying to keep out of everyone’s way.”

Since they were on Garmony, Vernon gave an account of his two conversations that morning with George Lane. It was just the kind of story to appeal to Clive, but he showed no curiosity about the photographs and the injunction and seemed to be only half listening. He was on his feet as soon as the story was over. He refilled their glasses. The silence that announced the change of subject was heavy. Clive set down his glass and went to the far end of the studio, then paced back, gently massaging the palm of his left hand.

“I’ve been thinking about Molly,” he said at last. “The way she died, the speed of it, her helplessness, how she wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Stuff we’ve talked about before.”

He paused. Vernon drank and waited.

“Well, the thing is this. I’ve had my own little scare lately…” He raised his voice to forestall Vernon’s concern. “Probably nothing. You know, the sort of thing that gives you the sweats at night and by daylight seems like stupidity. That’s not what I want to talk about. It’s almost certainly nothing, but there’s nothing lost by what I’m going to ask you. Just supposing I did get ill in a major way, like Molly, and I started to go downhill and make terrible mistakes—you know, errors of judgment, not knowing the names of things or who I was, that kind of thing. Fd like to know there was someone who’d help me to finish it … I mean, help me to die. Especially if I got to the point where I couldn’t make the decision for myself, or act on it. So what I’m saying is this. I’m asking you, as my oldest friend, to help me if it ever got to the point where you could see that it was the right thing. Just as we might have helped Molly if we’d been able…”

Clive trailed away, a little disconcerted by Vernon, who stared at him with his glass raised, as though frozen in the act of drinking. Clive cleared his throat noisily.