‘Don’t mean to upstage you, love, but I got offered a job for two hundred grand per today.’

Glen put down her fork with a load of whitebait on it. ‘Doing what?’

‘Eat,’ I said. ‘You’ve been skipping meals again. I can tell. You look hungry but you’re out of practice at eating.’

She took a forkful of fish. Glen half-likes, half-hates her job, works too hard at it and runs herself ragged. She feels guilty about not being an operational police officer, the result of a bullet wound in the arm that still sometimes troubles her. She thinks she’d like to do something else but doesn’t know what. She’s not interested in having children-just as well since I’d be the world’s worst father. We have a good time but she worries about the future. We ate; I drank more than my share of the wine and told her about O.C. and the casino.

‘Bet you didn’t take it,’ she said.

I said, ‘How’d you guess?’ and wiped up the oil with a piece of bread.

‘Can’t see you going off to work in a three-piece suit. Besides, it’d be a seven day a week job.’

‘I work seven days a week now.’

‘When you work. You were right to knock it back. It wouldn’t suit you.’

‘The money’d suit me. We could go to the Greek islands and Turkey. I want to see the Crimea and Gallipoli.’

‘Bloodthirsty bastard. Anyway, they’re all crooked, those casinos-money launderers, tax-dodgers, you know the form.’

‘They seemed to be on the up and up.’

Glen poured herself some more wine, surprised to see that I hadn’t emptied the bottle. ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Come on, Cliff, they were romancing you. Who’s behind them? And who’s behind them? And so on. It’ll be dirty somewhere, that’s for sure.’

‘The government’s happy, apparently.’

‘Hah!’

I let it go, she was probably right and there was no point in arguing over my slight degree of doubt.