‘Who is she?’ asked Quinn.

‘Don’t you know?’ said Macadam.

‘An actress?’ Quinn knew as he asked the question that she could be nothing else.

‘She’s more than an actress, sir. She’s a star. She’s Eloise.’

‘She has beautiful eyes,’ observed Quinn.

His two sergeants nodded in agreement, but said nothing.

‘She is … French?’ asked Quinn.

‘Yes.’

Quinn thought back to his last case. He had believed the girls working as professional mannequins at Blackley’s department store to be attractive. Certainly they were youthful and bold and female enough to thoroughly discomfit him. But not one of them, he saw now, could hold a candle to this Eloise. Except perhaps the girl whose death had sparked that last investigation. He could not say for sure, however, because by the time he got to see her, she was beyond such considerations. Ironically, she had been French too, the only one of Blackley’s fashion mannequins who really was.

He wondered whether Eloise would turn out to be genuinely French. This was a business based on illusion and pretence. It was possible that no one was who they seemed to be.

The thought brought him back to the reason they were there. ‘All right, you men. Time to find our Germans, if they’re here.’

But neither sergeant could take his eyes off the actress.

There was some mute buffoonery with a stout man whose deep-set eyes gave his face a mournful but slightly seedy cast. The crowd responded with far more hilarity than the dumb show warranted. Quinn understood that their laughter was not for the mournful comedian. It was for her, Eloise, to reciprocate the generosity of her smile. She brought out the best in them.

Quinn studied the rapt expressions of some of those watching. Mouths open, hanging on every gesture: for there were no words, as if the actors really were mutes, and it was for that reason that all the films they appeared in were silent. But, of course, what they were doing was playfully showing their commitment to their chosen medium. They were bringing the voiceless world of the film out into the lively bustling clamour of Leicester Square. And in so doing, they were beginning the enchantment.

As Quinn scanned the faces, he had a premonition that he would see someone else that he recognized. A moment later, he caught sight of Lord Dunwich, standing to one side of the group of film people.

It was an electrifying discovery.

Quinn tracked Dunwich’s gaze back towards the troupe of performers. In among them, he spotted a couple who seemed strangely awkward and ill at ease considering they were presumably actors. They stood slightly back from the play-acting, distancing themselves from it. Their expressions of hilarity were disengaged and forced. Perhaps they were simply bad actors, amateurs essentially, who had been roped in to take on walk-on parts as servants or bystanders. Or perhaps they were the sort of people who had more ambition than talent, and had been drawn into the motion picture business because they thought it would be an easy way to make their fortune. Whatever the reason, they seemed to be connected, in their shared contempt for the activity in which they were engaged.

The girl – a brunette in her twenties – was pretty enough, but of course she suffered in comparison to Eloise. There was something affecting about her face, a kind of frailty, but he realized that it was just as likely to make you despise her as love her. It seemed put on. A delicate, gossamer mask covering a hard-faced egotism. He couldn’t quite believe in her, and certainly didn’t trust her.

As for the man, if Quinn had been forced to make a snap judgement of his character based on this first impression, he would have said lazy and selfish. He might even have gone further than that. There was a ruthless quality to his undoubted good looks, something cruel as well as calculating. It was clear that he approved of his own handsomeness, and valued it considerably, but only for what it brought him, for the doors – and purses – it opened.

If he was not a gigolo, then he was a pimp. And that was not to exclude many other unsavoury things that he might also be.

Of course, Quinn accepted that he might well be doing them both a great injustice. And really they were nothing to him, and he should not have let himself become distracted by them. Except … except that he detected that they were somehow interested in Lord Dunwich. He had noticed subtle glances pass between them, indicative of some dark purpose regarding his lordship. He did not think it boded well for Lord Dunwich that they had him in their sights.

But really, he was not here to babysit the man from the Admiralty. ‘Get on with it, you two. If Hartmann is here, I want to know.’

Quinn watched Macadam and Inchball milling through the crowd. Despite the differences in their characters, evident in their distinctive gaits, it had to be said that Quinn had never seen two men who were more obviously policemen. If the crowd had not been so intent on the brilliant creatures who were cavorting in front of Porrick’s Palace, his sergeants would not have escaped its wary attention.

Quinn turned back to the group of film people. Eloise, of course, drew his gaze. But he found that the man with the eye patch, Waechter, also interested him. The mere knowledge that he had taken a life once suggested that he could do so again. Whether one called it manslaughter or murder, it was the ultimate crime. A man capable of that could reasonably be considered capable of anything.

Waechter directed a few urgent – possibly angry – words towards a man holding a Yorkshire terrier. Quinn was momentarily distracted by the dog, so he did not immediately recognize Porrick. But the fellow’s overcoat gave him away. A third man was drawn into the discussion, a dark-complexioned individual, of excessively short stature, and with the look of an indigenous South American. He nodded eagerly as if to reassure the others of something. The dog joined in with a few bad-tempered yaps of his own for good measure.

The exchange had no impact on the actors, who maintained their good-natured rapport with each other and the audience. At least this was the case with Eloise and the stout comedian with the mournful expression. The other couple he had picked out, the ones who had taken an interest in Lord Dunwich, followed the discussion with greedy eyes, as if they suspected that there was profit to be made from whatever might fall out from it.

But the altercation petered out. The reassurances of the South American played a part. So too did the intervention of a large, imperious-looking woman with a spreading bosom who spoke sharply and decisively to the man with the dog.

Quinn looked back to where Lord Dunwich was, and was surprised to see him in conversation with another man he recognized, Harry Lennox, the Irish proprietor of the Clarion. He supposed it shouldn’t really surprise him that Lennox was here. If he himself had been considered enough of a celebrity to be invited, then the publisher of one of the most widely read newspapers in the country would surely have merited an invitation. But he found it troubling all the same. It was not so long ago that he had been investigating the case in which Lennox had been indirectly involved. He had no wish to be seen by Lennox, or more specifically by his daughter Jane, whom he now noticed was there with her father. She was dressed in an eye-catching gown that seemed to be made entirely of black sequins and black-dyed ostrich feathers attached directly to her skin. Presumably she was in mourning. But she could not mourn discreetly, of course. Being who she was, the spoilt and savage child of a millionaire, she had to mourn fashionably.

The group of film people began to wave and make their way back inside Porrick’s Palace. But just as they were doing so, an ugly scene broke out.