Back to business. Lily went to reception and began to make notes. She’d overheard Fitzwilliam booking a table for four at one o’clock. Lily rang down to the desk and requested a lunch table for herself at 12:30. She would be already in position when his guests arrived and could always linger over coffee if she needed to prolong her surveillance. Joe was going to get his money’s worth. This Fitzwilliam was troubling her boss in a way that was a mystery to her. Not such a mystery to Joe, she had concluded, and wondered what he was deliberately hiding from her.

NO WONDER AT all that Special Branch had been bored out of their skins keeping a watchful eye on this bird, Lily reckoned. His three guests were respectability itself. A Tory grandee with a finger in every financial pie in Westminster, his glum wife and, last to arrive, to make up the numbers, Lily guessed, a lady who by her looks could be no other than Fitzwilliam’s younger sister. Tall, slender, dark and fashionably though not showily dressed, she moved easily into her place in the group. After a loving exchange of kisses with her brother, she was presented to the other two. “You haven’t met my sister Margaret, who is in her other life Mrs. Hubert Hawkes? She’s so often travelling the world these days I don’t have a chance to see much of her.”

Lily recognised the name of an English conductor about to perform in the forthcoming Promenade Concerts. Margaret, or Meggie, as her brother called her, proceeded to keep the table entertained with a flow of conversation that skilfully drew out the rather silent wife while flirting innocently with her elderly husband, Lily noticed. A useful sister for a man like Fitzwilliam.

What was she to make of her target on this showing? Confident, amusing, attentive. She was not close enough to catch much of the conversation but he appeared to be exuding a happiness she had no way of accounting for. His happiness extended to the dull political pair and they appeared flattered and warmed by it. It had, for a brief moment, reached out and touched the dumpy, deaf old lady from the provinces he’d met in the lobby. As she watched, a young waiter allowed a fork to drop to the floor from the plate he was clearing. He stood, astonished to see Fitzwilliam leap to his feet, pick up the offending utensil and replace it on the plate with a wink and a grin. Next he’d be tap-dancing down Piccadilly. A man who was “on something”? He was definitely experiencing euphoria of some sort. In Lily’s experience there could be only one possible cause for such relentless jollity. Could she be right? Lily felt a sudden need for a second opinion.

Otherwise, so uneventful was the luncheon party that Lily, who’d brought her notebook to the table in a defiantly eccentric gesture, found that between the soup and the dessert she’d sketched out the first chapter of her first anti-historical novel.

Lily decided she’d had enough. If this man was hiding himself away, he had a strange way of going about it. Here he was hosting lunch in plain sight of London society, in the company of three unimpeachable people. Lily’s research had revealed he was not even lying about his name. Rowley and Fitzwilliam were his middle names. He had a perfect right to both of them. This was the simple device of a man in the public eye needing to avoid the attentions of a press who combed through guest lists these days and bribed hotel clerks to divulge the names of their famous clients. A single man, he probably had a club close by and chose to entertain mixed couples in the more relaxed atmosphere of a good hotel. Women generally did not appreciate the kind of hospitality on offer in the world of gentlemen’s clubs even in those ones who were prepared to acknowledge the existence of the other sex.

Joe had sent her on a wild goose chase.

She left the dining room the moment she’d finished her coffee. On her way out she paused to bother the maître d’hôtel with a fussy old-lady question. Her arthritic left knee had detected a draught at the table she’d just vacated. Could she be certain of a seat somewhere less exposed for dinner on Saturday night? When he politely referred to his plan, she bossily peered over his shoulder and pointed. “There I am!” She’d actually been taking in the information that Fitzwilliam was booked to have dinner discreetly at the far end of the room. “You’ve put me in the same place but there’s a much better one for me right here,” she said, indicating a table that had a strategically better outlook on the pair she needed to watch. “I should like to be there, well away from the door, if it’s no trouble. Oh, and could you possibly set a second place? I’m expecting a friend to join me.”

The adjustments were duly made and Lily hobbled off to the lift. The Saturday night dinner was the only meal apart from today’s lunch that she’d heard her target making a booking for. She quite expected him to disappear into London for the rest of the time and she would not follow him. It was not in her brief and Joe had told her that his movements about town had been thoroughly vetted by the Branch. She was to stay at her post and report on whomever he met.

The whole business pivoted on his single guest tomorrow night, Lily reckoned. It could be anyone from a visiting Head of a Nation to a lady on the end of a telephone. In the lift she took out her London diary to check whether there was something she’d missed, some special occasion or event that might have drawn him here on this date.

Saturday the 24th of June, it said, Midsummer’s Day. New moon. Feast of St. John.

Academic term’s end. Racing at Ascot.

Lily’s romantic streak interpreted these dry facts with some licence. It must be the time of year. In the green depths of an English summer—that’s where they were poised. In that moment when young things found themselves set free from constraints of timetable and corset, their limbs and hearts suddenly open to the sun and new experiences. Nowadays, they jumped on a ferry and made off for Paris or Monte Carlo. In earlier times they’d have been gathering boughs in English woods and leaping bonfires to ward off evil spirits. St. John’s Eve was a time of mystery and fraught with delicious danger: witches walked abroad on mischief bent, egged on by sprites and goblins. Shakespeare had staged the battle between the King and the Queen of the Fairies this evening. Beltane, god of the Celts, chose Midsummer as his moment to pay court to the Great Goddess. Gods, humans and supernatural beings, all were possessed by the same joyous urge to celebrate the return of fertility. Even in the city, all unaware of the deeper meaning, school children still danced around maypoles in June, wearing white for Whitsuntide. With a wreath of lilac blossom on her head, Lily had done this herself in happily pagan East London as a child. Her playground games, some only half understood, had crept into the city from the country and flourished like the yellow St. John’s Wort in the cracks in every causeway-side. Beneath her sophisticated, street-wise exterior, a Celtic undertow ran deep and unquestioned in her blood.

There was something intoxicating and ancient about the very word “midsummer.” Lily found her mind, so recently alerted to an author’s sensibilities, supplying a following alliterative: “madness” or “mischief” or “malice.” She searched for a word less baleful and found none.

CHAPTER 9

Joe couldn’t repress a shout of laughter when Hunnyton drove up to collect him at the Garden House after breakfast on Friday morning. He walked around the dark red open-topped sports tourer expressing his approval of the motorcar and his admiration for the driver. Hunnyton was suitably dressed in waterproof cape, cloth cap with earflaps and tinted driving goggles.