Not all heads had turned at the sound of the exploding jug.

Shirley Novello’s gaze had remained fixed on the black moustached man at the edge of the lawn.

As the jug shattered, she saw his head jerk back and his hand go up to the headphones.

‘Gotcha,’ she said.

Now she turned her attention to the Fat Man’s table and watched the pantomime of Dalziel apologizing to everyone in hearing distance and making ineffectual attempts to dry his lunch date down. In no time at all, Pietro was on the scene, directing operations. Novello wondered idly if he were as efficient in everything as he clearly was in his job. He had the glass cleared, the table re-laid, and Dalziel and the blonde re-seated in just a couple of minutes.

Down on the lawn, the listener seemed to have got over his shock. He was back in his former mode, standing looking vacant, his head nodding as if he were mesmerized by some disco beat. But he had a mobile phone in his hand and, as she watched, he slipped the headphones off one ear and started speaking into the mobile.

She let a couple of minutes pass till the corner table was no longer a focus of interest, then took up her phone once more and thumbed in the Fat Man’s number.

‘Hello?’

‘I was right,’ she said. ‘You’re bugged.’

‘Grand. I’ll sort it.’

‘What do you want me to do now?’

He thought a moment then said, ‘Stick to the bugger. But don’t get close.’

‘I’m on him.’

The bugger had his headphones back on. Then something happened; nothing as violent as the shattering of the jug, but enough to make him remove the ’phones and give them a shake. Service interrupted, guessed Novello. When the Fat Man said he’d sort something, it usually got sorted.

The bugger gave up on the ’phones but now he had his mobile to his ear again, receiving this time, not calling. So he wasn’t a loner, he must have back up. Would he continue as an observer now he could no longer listen in?

Her view was blocked by Pietro, who set an open prawn sandwich and a glass of white wine before her. This guy really was efficient.

‘You serve table as well as clean up?’ she said, smiling up at him.

‘Depends on the table,’ he said.

‘I didn’t order any wine.’

‘On the house. To make up for the disturbance.’

‘So everyone will be getting a glass?’

‘Only the sensitive ones. Any news of your friend?’

‘Definitely not coming,’ she said indicating her mobile. ‘That woman, at the table where the jug got broken, has she been on telly or something? I’m sure I’ve seen her.’

‘Mrs Wolfe? Don’t know. She’s certainly got the looks, but I don’t watch too much telly. I prefer real life.’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘She’s a hotel guest, is she?’

‘That’s right. And the guy with her’s some sort of cop. Mr Lee, the manager, was around when she asked if she could book a table overlooking the garden, and I told her, Sorry, those tables are all taken. And she said, My guest, Superintendent Dalziel, will be disappointed. And suddenly Mr Lee got in on the act and told me he was sure there must be a table available. So I looked again, and there was.’

‘Theirs, was it?’ said Novello, glancing at Hook-nose and his partner. At least the exploding water jug seemed to have distracted them from their heavy petting. Maybe it had reminded them of their stolen table. Whatever, they were now deep in conversation.

‘Shush! Don’t want to start him on at me again,’ said Pietro.

His wish wasn’t granted. The couple rose and headed for the hotel entrance. As they passed Pietro, Hook-nose said, ‘After cocking up our table, the least I expected was efficient service. We’ll find somewhere decent to eat.’

They moved on. Pietro made a face at Novello and said, ‘Better cancel their order. Enjoy your prawns.’

‘Oh, I will,’ said Novello.

But even as she spoke she realized she wouldn’t.

For as Pietro moved away opening up her sightline to the lawn again, she realized to her horror that the man with the ’phones had vanished.

Gwyn Jones sank back on the sofa and felt the voluptuously soft leather upholstery embrace his naked flesh.

Life was good. Back home in the sleepy Mid-Wales township of Llufwwadog they would probably still be in the chapel now, perched on pews as narrow and hard as a cliff ledge, listening to an interminable sermon that started at hwyl and built up to hysteria, and made the hell it threatened seem like a welcome deliverance.

Outside it would be raining. He knew the Met Office had declared that there was an anti-cyclone stationary over the British Isles, guaranteeing the continuation of the Indian summer right into the middle of October, but as all natives of Llufwwadog knew, such fair-weather forecasts did not apply to them. When the wind was in the east it pushed the rain clouds over the Black Mountains before they burst, and when it was in the west, it punctured them as they reached the foothills. He supposed there must have been days when the Welsh sky was as perfectly blue as the one he could see now backing the topless towers of Canary Warf, but his memory seemed to have scrubbed them all.

What it hadn’t scrubbed was his waking resolution from an early age-birth, it seemed like now, but that was probably pushing it-to get out of Llufwwadog as quickly as he could. The conventional exit routes for a growing hogyn of sport, art and education were closed to him. He was hopeless at rugby, couldn’t sing or act, and had very little academic ability. So it was either the army or journalism. He had gone for the latter on the grounds that you didn’t have to get up so early in the morning and there was less chance of being shot at.

It had been a happy choice. The disadvantages of a dreadful prose style and an excitable stutter were negated by a huge natural curiosity, a complete insensitivity to rebuff, and an acuity of eye, ear, and nose that took him places others did not care to tread.

After an apprenticeship on his local rag, he had moved to Cardiff, where he rapidly made a name for himself by pulling the lid off a little pot-pourri of financial and sexual improprieties in the Welsh Assembly. This it was that got him his move to London, where six years later he was established as one of the Daily Messenger’s famous team of investigative journalists, his particular remit remaining the political scene.

He was well paid but not well enough to be able to even dream about a pad in Marina Tower, one of the most exclusive developments on Canary Wharf. To do that you needed an editor’s screw, or, failing that, you needed to screw an editor. If she had a bit left over from an extremely profitable divorce, that didn’t do any harm either. This combination of qualities came together in the person of Beanie Sample, the driving spirit behind Bitch!, the glossy mag which for eighteen months now (a long time in magazine life) had contrived to win the hearts, titillate the senses, and open the wallets of readers of both sexes and all ages from eighteen to thirty-eight.

Beanie, known both eponymously and epithetically as the Bitch, had a reputation for devouring young journalists, then dumping them when she’d had enough. Gwyn Jones had no problem with this. As he told his friends, why would a virile youngster want a long-term relationship with a woman twenty years his senior? Nonetheless, since moving into her Docklands apartment, he’d come to the conclusion that maybe long term wasn’t so bad. A man could put up with a lot of this luxury. Also it was within a fit man’s strolling distance of Canary Tower, which housed the Messenger offices. Compared to this, his own flat above a dry-cleaners in Bromley seemed like a particularly remote and ascetic monk’s cell.