Dillon switched off his phone. Got up, went to the kitchen, found a half bottle of Krug champagne in the icebox, thumbed off the cork, took two glasses, and returned to his seat. He filled one glass and handed it to Miller, then filled the other.

"Are we celebrating something?" Miller asked.

"Not exactly, It's just that champagne always concentrates my mind wonderfully. Drink up, and we'll decide who's going to call Roper."

Roper listened with considerable calm, under the circumstances. But, then, as the man constantly at the center of the storm at the Holland Park safe house communications center, he had long since stopped being surprised at anything.

"So one prayer card is certainly interesting, and two, more than a coincidence."

"Exactly," Dillon said. "And three would be enemy action."

"George Langley's doing the postmortem now on Pool, so Ferguson's still at Rosedene. I'll give him a call and ask him to have a look in Pool's wallet. I'll be back."

"There you go," Dillon said to Miller. "Mystery piles on mystery."

"We'll wait and see," Miller told him. "What about a little shut-eye?"

"On a plane? Never." Dillon rose and picked up the empty half bottle of Krug. "I'm sure there was another half bottle in the kitchen. I'll go and see."

At Rosedene, Maggie Duncan, the matron, a no-nonsense Scot, produced Pool's ravaged and bloodstained suit in the anteroom next to the operating room where Professor George Langley was performing the postmortem on the corpse of the unfortunate chauffeur. She wore latex gloves, as did Ferguson, and gingerly emptied the pockets and laid the contents on a towel spread on a table.

A half-empty pack of cigarettes, a plastic lighter, what looked like house keys on a ring, a comb, a car key with a plastic black-and-gold tab with a telephone number on it but no name.