SUMMONED by the commissionaire, Diana was waiting at the kerb as Sheikh Zahir emerged from the hotel. This time he was not alone, but accompanied by a chisel-featured younger man blessed with the kind of cheekbones that could slice cheese.

Since he was the one carrying the laptop, he was, presumably, like her, a member of the ‘bag-carrying’ classes. Although, by the cut of his suit-and his hair-he outranked her by a considerable distance.

There was no mishap this time, probably because Top Hat was on hand to do the honours with the door and no one-not even a small boy-would have dared get in the way of his impressive figure.

The minute her passengers were settled she eased smoothly into the traffic, heading for the South Bank, managing, for once in her life, to remain ‘politely anonymous’.

She had barely finished congratulating herself on this rare accomplishment when Sheikh Zahir said, ‘Metcalfe, this is James Pierce. He’s the man who makes everything work for me. You may, on occasion, be required to ferry him to appointments.’

‘Sir,’ she said, taking his tone from him. She was doing really well until, waiting for the lights to change, she made the mistake of glancing in the mirror and looking straight into his eyes. They did not match his voice. And his expression suggested that he wasn’t fooled for a minute by her lapse into formality and her traitorous mouth let her down and smiled at him.

A mistake.

James Pierce, alerted by her response to the fact that she was not Jack Lumley, said, ‘This is outrageous.’ And he was looking at her when he said it.

Actually it couldn’t just be the voice.

She didn’t have one of those cut-glass BBC accents, but her mother had been a stickler for good diction and, apart from the occasional lapse, her speech could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as ‘outrageous’.