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Iraqi secret police. I know, because Sophie told me.”
    “Well, I’m sure it was all completely tickety-boo and DTI-approved at the time.”
    They drank their coffee in silence for a few moments.
    “Tell me something,” said Anne, her tone exploratory. “You know Ray?”
    Perry looked at her. Ray Gunter was a fisherman who lived in the village and who kept a couple of boats and a tangle of lobster-nets on the two-hundred-yard stretch of private beach at the end of the Hall’s grounds. “I ought to, after all these years. What about him?”
    “Do we absolutely have to keep up this business of him coming and going through the grounds? To be perfectly honest, he rather gives me the creeps.”
    Perry frowned. “In what way?”
    “He’s just . . . sinister. You turn a corner and there he is. The dogs don’t like him, either.”
    “The Gunters have had boats there since my grandfather’s time, at least. Ray’s father—”
    “I know, but Ray’s father is dead. And where Ben Gunter was the nicest old boy you could hope to meet, Ray is frankly . . .”
    “Yobbish?”
    “No, worse than that. He’s sinister, like I said.”
    “I don’t agree. He may not be the world’s most sparkling conversationalist, and he probably niffs a bit, but that’s fishing for you. I think we might get into all sorts of trouble if we tried to run him off the place. The local press would have a field day.”
    “At least let’s find out what our legal position is.”
    “Why go to the expense?”
    “Why not? Why are you so . . .” She placed her coffee cup on the bedside table, and reached for her glasses. “I’ll tell you something else Sophie told me. You know the sister?”
    “The Gunter sister? Kayleigh?”
    “Yes, Kayleigh. Apparently the girl who does the Fortescues’ garden was at school with her, and told Sophie that she—Kayleigh, that is—works a couple of nights a week in a club in King’s Lynn as a stripper.”
    “Really?” Perry raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know King’s Lynn offered such lurid temptations. Did she mention the name of the club?”
    “Perry, stop it. The point I’m making is that the present generation of Gunters are not quite the simple fisherfolk their parents were.”
    Perry shrugged. “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.”
    “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
    He walked back to the window. Looked out over the shining expanse of Norfolk coastline to the east and west of them. “Times change,” he murmured, “and we change with them. Ray Gunter’s doing us no harm at all.”
    Anne removed her glasses and placed them on the side table with an exasperated snap. Perry could be wilfully obtuse when he wanted to be. She was worried, too. After thirty-five years of marriage she could tell when he was up to something—and he was up to something now.

 

    N u-Celeb Publications of Chelmsford, Essex, occupied a low modular building on the Writtle Industrial Estate to the southwest of the town. The premises were spare and utilitarian, but they were warm, even at nine in the morning. Melvin Eastman hated to be cold, and in his glass-walled office overlooking the shop floor the thermostat was set to 20° Centigrade. At his desk, still wearing the camel-hair overcoat in which he had arrived ten minutes earlier, Eastman was examining the front page of the Sun newspaper. A smallish man with neatly dressed hair of a slightly unnatural blackness, his features remained expressionless as he read. Finally, leaning forward, he reached for one of the telephones on the desk. His voice was quiet, but his enunciation precise.
    “Ken, how many of those Mink Parfait calendars have we had printed up?”
    On the floor below, his foreman looked up at him. “ ‘Bout forty thou, boss. Should be the big Christmas seller. Why?”
    “Because, Ken, Mink Parfait are splitting up.” Taking the newspaper, he held it up so that it was visible to the foreman.
    “You sure it’s kosher, boss? Not