He nodded, and pushed some bread into his face. ‘I put you up for a job a couple of months ago.’

I stopped my soup spoon half-way from bowl to mouth. It was unlike Paulie to take any sort of hand in my life, never mind a helping one.

‘What sort of job?’

‘Canadian bloke. Looking for someone to do some strong arm stuff. Bodyguard, that kind of thing.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Can’t remember. Began with J, I think.’

‘ McCluskey?’

‘ McCluskeydoesn’t begin with a J now, does it? No, it was Joseph, Jacob, something like that.’ He quickly gave up trying to remember. ‘Did he get in touch?’

‘No.’

‘Pity. Thought I’d sold him on the idea.’

‘And you gave him my name?’

‘No, I gave him your fucking shoe size. Course I gave him your name. Well, not straight away. I put him on to some private dicks we use a bit. They’ve got some big blokes who do bodyguard stuff, but he didn’t take to them. Wanted someone upmarket. Ex-army, he said. You were the only person I could think of. Apart from Andy Hick, but he’s earning two hundred grand a year in a merchant bank.’

‘I’m touched, Paulie.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘He’d come to see Toffee, and I got roped in.’

‘Toffee being a person?’

‘Spencer. The guv’nor. Calls himself Toffee. Don’t know why. Something to do with golf. Teeing-off, maybe.’

I thought for a while.

‘You don’t know what he was seeing Spencer about?’

‘Who says I don’t?’

‘Do you?’

‘No.’

Pauliehad fixed his gaze somewhere behind my head and I turned to see what he was doing with it. The two men at the door were standing now. The older one said something to themaitre d’,who aimed a waiter in the direction of our table. A few of the other lunchers watched. ‘Mr Lang?’

‘I’m Lang.’

‘Phone call for you, sir.’

I shrugged at Paulie, who was now licking his finger and picking crumbs off the tablecloth.

By the time I reached the door, the younger of the two followers had disappeared. I tried to catch the eye of the older one, but he was studying a nameless print on the wall. I picked up the phone.

‘Master,’ said Solomon, ‘all is not well in the state ofDenmark.’

‘Oh, what a shame,’ I said. ‘And things were going so nicely before.’

Solomon started to answer but there was a click and a bang, and O’Neal’s reedy tones came on the line.

‘Lang, is that you?’

‘Yup,’ I said.

‘The girl, Lang. Young woman, I should say. Have you any idea where she might be at this moment?’

I laughed.

‘You’re askingmewhere she is?’

‘Indeed I am. We are having problems locating her.’ I glanced at the follower, still staring at the print.

‘Sadly, Mr O’Neal, I can’t help you,’ I said. ‘You see, I don’t have a staff of nine thousand and a budget of twenty million pounds with which to find people and keep track of them. Tell you what though, you might try the security people at the Ministry of Defence. They’re supposed to be very good at this kind of thing.’

But he’d hung up half-way through the word ‘Defence’.

I left Paulie to pay the bill, and hopped on a bus toHollandPark. I wanted to see what kind of a mess O’Neal’s lot had made of my flat, and also to see if I’d had any more approaches from Canadian arms dealers with Old Testament names.

Solomon’s followers got on to the bus with me, and peered out of the windows as if it was their first visit toLondon. When we got to Notting Hill, I leaned over to them.

‘You may as well get off with me,’ I said. ‘Save yourselves having to run back from the next stop.’ The older one looked away, but the younger one grinned. In the event, we all got off together, and they hung around on the other side of the street while I let myself back into the flat.

I’d have known that the place had been searched without being told. I hadn’t exactly expected them to change the sheets and run a hoover over the place, but I thought they might have left it in better shape than this. None of the furniture was in the right place, the few paintings I had were skewed, and the books on the shelves were in a pathetically different order. They’d even put a different CD in the stereo. Or maybe they just felt that Professor Longhair was better flat-searching music.

I didn’t bother moving things back to how they were. Instead, I walked through into the kitchen, flicked on the kettle and said in a loud voice, ‘Tea or coffee?’

There was a faint rustle from the bedroom. ‘Or do you fancy a Coke?’

I kept my back to the door while the kettle wheezed its way towards boiling, but I still heard her as she moved into the kitchen doorway. I dumped some coffee granules into a mug and turned round.

Instead of the silk dressing-gown, Sarah Woolf was currently filling a faded pair of jeans and a dark-grey cotton polo-neck shirt. Her hair was up, tied loosely back in a way that takes some women five seconds, and others five days. And as a colour-matching accessory to the shirt, she wore a Walther TPH.22 automatic in her right hand.

The TPH is a pretty little thing. It has a straight blowback action, a six-round box magazine and two-and-a-quarter-inch barrel. It’s also utterly useless as a firearm, because unless you can guarantee hitting either the heart or the brain first time, you’re only going to annoy the person you’re shooting at. For most people, a wet mackerel is the better choice of weapon.

‘Well, Mr Fincham,’ she said, ‘how did you know I was here?’ She sounded the way she looked.

‘Fleur de Fleurs,’ I said. ‘I gave some to my cleaning lady last Christmas but I know she doesn’t use it. Had to be you.’ She threw a sceptically-raised eyebrow over the flat.

‘You have a cleaning lady?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Bless her. She’s knocking on a bit. Arthritis. She doesn’t clean anything below the knee or above the shoulder. I try to get all my dirty stuff at waist height, but sometimes…’ I smiled. She didn’t smile back. ‘If it comes to that, how did you get in here?’

‘Wasn’t locked,’ she said.

I shook my head in disgust.