‘Do they have what we’re looking for?’ he asked, joining her.

‘Who knows?’

As she went to ask for help from an assistant, Diana was desperately wishing she’d gone for the obvious shopping destination instead of trying to be clever. In Knightsbridge she would have had to stay with the car to fend off the traffic warden while he ‘shopped’ all by himself.

‘If they have any they’ll be with the novelty items.’ Her imitation of the assistant’s couldn’t-be-bothered gesture, made without looking up from whatever she was finding so gripping in the magazine she was reading, was meant to be ironic. ‘Over there, apparently.’

Maybe Sheikh Zahir didn’t ‘get’ irony because he turned to the woman behind the desk and said, ‘We don’t have a great deal of time…’he paused to check out her name tag ‘…Liza. Would you be kind enough to show us exactly where we can find what we’re looking for?’

She turned a page and said, ‘Sorry. I can’t leave my desk.’

Big mistake that, Diana thought, warmed by his ‘we’.

‘I can’t’, as she’d already discovered for herself, did not impress him one bit.

‘The sign above your desk says “Customer Service”,’ he pointed out and then, as she sighed and finally looked up, he smiled at her.

Diana watched, torn between outrage and amusement as, without another word, the assistant leapt to her feet and scurried round the desk.

‘This way,’ she said, switching on a smile of her own. One of the hundred watt variety.

‘We seem to have beaten the system, Metcalfe,’ Sheikh Zahir said as, with a gesture, he invited her to follow the woman.

‘Nice work,’ she said, ‘but somehow I don’t think that technique would work for me.’

That earned her a smile of her own. Rather less than he had used on the assistant, but at the same time more, she thought.

Less teeth. More eyes.

‘You use what you have,’ he said with a shrug.