Joe responded to his sister’s unexpressed anxiety. ‘I’ll be fine, Lyd. Don’t worry about me. Big boy these days. And it’s not as though it’s an interview I’ve been called up for. There’s nothing much riding on this, you know. I’ve already got the job – had it for two years now. They just want to check I can drink my soup without slurping and get through dinner with a selection of rabid old fire-eaters without poking one in the eye with a fish knife. I shall keep smiling, tell a few tall stories, sing baritone in the after-dinner choruses round the grand piano and shoot a commendable but not showy number of birds.’

‘What are you using for guns?’

‘Pa’s old pair. I’ve sent them ahead. Respectable but nothing flashy. Now if we were going for real game, I could have impressed them with the Holland & Holland Royal I used in India. Sir George insisted on giving it to me. Not many charging buffalo offering themselves as targets on Exmoor, though.’

‘You used it in India? Joe, you don’t like shooting animals.’

‘True. But the animals in question were tiger. Man-eaters both. With hundreds of deaths on their rap sheets!’

‘Both?’

‘I shot two of them, in as many minutes. One male, one female. They were hunting as a pair.’

Lydia laughed. ‘You’re having me on. Sounds like the beginning of a good yarn, though, for when the port starts to circulate.’

‘Oh, if I were vandal enough, I could carve two grooves on the glossy French walnut stock of the Royal. It saved my life. But I prefer to carry my grooves concealed.’ With a sister-baiting grin of mischief, Joe pushed up his right sleeve to show her two raking claw marks, well healed by now. He enjoyed her squeal of horror. ‘I had the luck to be treated by an English doctor who’d studied ancient Indian medicine. Lord only knows what he poured into the wound but it worked a treat. Wounds can go rotten faster in India than they did in Flanders.’

Lydia shuddered. ‘Well, watch your back, little brother. I’ve sneaked a look at the guest list you’ve popped behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Impressive and surprising. Something’s brewing. And I think I can guess what – I read the papers! And I get Marcus to repeat the political gossip he comes by at his club. He can’t always make sense of it but he’s worth hearing. England’s not been standing still while you’ve been living it up in India, you know – it’s started rolling downhill. Joe, the men you’re meeting are not only running the country – they’re a ruthless, manipulative bunch.’

‘Oo, er … I shall think of them as the Gratton Gang.’

Lydia was not to be diverted. ‘These men aren’t going to be the slightest bit interested in your table manners and your small talk. In fact, I do rather wonder what exactly they might be wanting from a minnow like you.’

She squashed the suggestions he was about to make. ‘Well, you’re getting a reputation for defusing a crisis, Marcus says. “Defusing” – in my dictionary that spells danger. Don’t let these grandees use you for a cat’s paw while they skulk in safety behind the barricades, Joe. You know what you’re like for leading the charge.’

Sensing a sisterly assessment of his character about to be fired in his direction, Joe employed a diversionary tactic. ‘Lyd, why don’t you open up one of those boxes – you know you’re dying to. Pop on one of your new hats and I’ll take you out to dinner.’

Chapter Two

Scotland Yard

In his office on the third floor, Joe was putting the finishing touches to a frantic hour of desk work before leaving to catch his train to the west country. He picked up a fountain pen and signed the six letters remaining on his desk. The signature was in black ink, and unaccompanied by any flourish. He gathered the typed pages together into a neat pile, replaced them in a folder and ran a satisfied eye over the shining and – at last – clear surface of his desk.

He rang for his secretary.

‘Ah, Miss Jameson. All done. It just remains for me to apologize for the last-minute bustle, thank you for your stalwart assistance and say – I’ll see you again on Tuesday.’

‘Not quite all done, sir. You’d forgotten this. The latest assassination attempt.’

With an arch smile, she placed a file in front of him. ‘They’ve just sent it up. It’s the one you requested from Special Branch. I had to ask for it three times … they would keep trying to tell me it wasn’t for our eyes.’ Miss Jameson raised elegant brows to convey her disbelief at such lack of respect. ‘I have to say, Commander, I don’t much care to do business with those gentlemen.’ Her voice frosted the word lightly with distaste. ‘They are not the most congenial of people to deal with.’

‘I rather think that’s the whole point of them,’ Sandilands said drily. ‘Thugs – I quite agree. Upper-class thugs, but thugs all the same. And a law unto themselves, they’d like us to believe. So very well done to have wrung it out of them.’ He opened the file and began to flip through the pages, frowning, instantly absorbed by what he read.

‘I had to threaten to go down there and fetch it myself,’ she persisted.

Joe sensed that he hadn’t sufficiently acknowledged her tenacity. He looked up and gave her a questioning smile. ‘Down there, Miss Jameson? Bold of you to plan a frontal assault! You’re not meant to know the location of their HQ.’

‘Oh, sir! Everyone knows they’re holed up in that little wooden hut on the island in St James’s Park. Duck Island, I believe they call it. It’s just beyond Horse Guards – a minute or two away. I’d have gained access if I’d had to swim across their moat!’

He believed her.

For a moment he savoured the vision of Miss Jameson arising from the water, clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful – and crowned in duck weed – ready to challenge the doughty lads of the anti-terrorist squad and he smiled. He glanced across at the confident woman who thought nothing of taking on, single-handed, the Special Irish Branch. Should he tell her that her target had relocated some years ago? That ‘the Branch’ had moved into Whitehall and were even now beavering away not so very far from where she sat at her typewriter? No. She was happy with the folk story. And the élite squad were fanatical about preserving their anonymity. An anonymity that, in his recently acquired covert role at the Met, the commander was honour-bound to respect.

‘Just keep an eye on them for us, will you, Sandilands?’ He’d been briefed almost as an afterthought by a superior. And he’d realized, with a sinking heart, that he’d been handed a poisoned chalice. In addition to the CID role that went with his job, he’d been landed, since his return, with an ill-defined responsibility for this other clandestine and self-reliant branch of the British police force. Deliberately ill defined? Joe suspected as much.

‘They won’t give you the runaround, young man! Still full of beans and raring to go, I observe.’ This compliment, from a survivor of the Boer War with yellowing moustache and matching teeth, was never likely to turn Joe’s head. ‘Try to understand them,’ the advice flowed on, ‘with your background of skulduggery that shouldn’t be too hard. Takes one to handle one, eh, what? Make it your business to find out what these boys are up to. They’re on our side, of course – and we thank God for that mercy! – but an occasional reminder that they report ultimately to the Police Commissioner at the Yard mightn’t come amiss. They will try to ignore that.’

Sandilands had shrugged and smiled his acquiescence. His sister was right – he was never able to turn down a challenge. With the reins of the CID in one hand and the Branch in the other, however, he’d found himself in charge of a spirited and ill-matched pair. Steady hands, though. So far he’d avoided landing arsy-tarsy in the ditch. But his secretary would have been disturbed to know of the chain of command that ran from the political branch down below right up to his own desk. Chain? Thread would be more accurate, Sandilands thought. A fragile thread he’d already had to put a knot in twice since his appointment.