“Nice of you to tell me.”

I wasn’t angry. It didn’t seem to be all that important any more and I was interested in the next move.

“No more wars, Sean?” I asked. “What about the Biafrans? Couldn’t they use a good commando?”

“They couldn’t pay in washers. In any case, I’ve had enough of that kind of game – we all have.”

“So Sicily is the only chance?”

It was obviously the moment he’d been waiting for – the first real opening I had given him.

“The last chance, Stacey – the last and only chance. One hundred thousand dollars plus expenses…”

I held up my hand. “No sales talk. Just tell me about it.”

God, but I’d come a long, long way in those six years since Mozambique. Little Stacey Wyatt telling Sean Burke what to do and he took it, that was the amazing thing.

“It’s simple enough,” he said. “Hoffer’s a widower with a stepdaughter called Joanna – Joanna Truscott.”

“American?”

“No, English and very upper-crust from what I hear. Her father was a baronet or something like that. She’s an honourable anyway, not that it means much these days. Hoffer’s had trouble with her for years. One scrape after another. Sleeping around – that kind of thing.”

“How old is she?”

“Twenty.”

The Honourable Joanna Truscott sounded promising.

“She must be quite a girl.”

“I wouldn’t know – we’ve never met. Hoffer has business interests in Sicily. Something to do with the oilfields at a place called Gela. You know it?”

“It was a Greek colony. Aeschylus died there. They say he was brained by a tortoise shell dropped by a passing eagle.” He gazed at me blankly and I grinned. “I had an expensive education, Sean, remember? But never mind. What about the Truscott girl?”

“She disappeared about a month ago. Hoffer didn’t notify the police because he thought she was off on some binge or other. Then he got a ransom note from a bandit called Serafino Lentini.”