He didn't have to specify what he meant by all this.

"I have no idea," Sam said. "All I know is what it says here." She took out her invitation, which read:

MISS Samantha Akehurst,

You are hereby invited to attend a gathering which may lead to a proposition advantageous to yourself.

Your personal circumstances are known to me.

Your opportunity to seek redress has arrived.

The invitation was unsigned. A date, location and suggested travel arrangements were printed on the reverse. A cheque to cover costs — generously — had also been enclosed in the envelope.

"Yeah," said Ramsay. "Fancy, huh? I had to look up 'redress' in the dictionary. I thought maybe it had something to do with drag queens."

No, you didn't, Sam thought. You're a damn sight smarter than you're letting on.

"Tweaked my curiosity all the same," he went on. "I thought, if nothing else, it's an all-expenses trip to merrie olde England, why not go? Do this, then pop down to see Stonehenge and maybe pay the Queen a visit at Bucking-ham Palace."

"So you're not the sort who normally responds to anonymous, vaguely worded invitations that drop on your doormat?"

"As a rule, no. And neither, I would guess, Sam Akehurst, are you. And yet here we are. What's that say about us, I wonder."

"No life?"

Ramsay gave a husky chortle like rainwater gurgling down a downpipe. "Ain't that the truth."

2. ON BLEANEY ISLAND

Bleaney Island was a low-lying hump of land like the corpse of some vast, ancient leviathan, lying dead in the water. Between outcrops of bare black rock there were stretches of grass and gorse, and the remnants of dry-stone walls could be seen, still parcelling up the ground decades after the last inhabitants had left. A concrete jetty jutted out from a steep shingle beach, and a small man hunched inside a large puffy parka was waiting at the end of it to greet the boat and the new arrivals.