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girl had arrived precisely on time the next morning, pulling up outside Number Nine, Downing Street in a black Triumph Mayflower that neatly complemented her jacket, skirt and nylons.
    ‘Back in the good old days of public executions,’ I continued, ‘when Jack Ketch was dangling felons from Tyburn Tree, the Mob would regularly break out into the most glorious displays of drinking and fighting and, most especially, fornicating.’
    ‘Eeh, I never knew that,’ she said, opening the front door onto the suitably funereal rain lashing the street. ‘Sounds indecent.’ She opened a large umbrella and, shielding my path to the car, thrillingly hooked her arm through mine. Her red nails were bright as winter berries against the sober cloth of my coat.
    ‘Indecent is just the word,’ I said, clambering into the back of the car. ‘It’s the wonderful notion, you see, that one is not yet inside the box oneself that creates an unnatural and naughty high.’
    ‘Not sure about that, Mr Box,’ said Miss Beveridge, stuttering the car into life. ‘Last spring, we sent me Nan up the crematorium chimney and had to spend a good half-hour brushing her off our Gannexes.’
    I laughed. Miss Beveridge was a find. Her eyes crinkled in the narrow reflection of the driving mirror.
    She turned the car round and we sliced through the puddles onto Whitehall, the view through the windscreen peppered with pollen and smeared into greasy triangles by the action of the wipers.
    The journey took us about half an hour, by which time the rain was thudding down onto the cemetery’s broad-leafed horse-chestnuts and running off the noses of weeping angels, making them look clammy as wet clay.
    I got out of the car, straightened the Windsor knot on my tie and set off, the girl holding the umbrella over us. Many of the graves we passed were neglected, their stone borders breached, grisly green marble chippings spilling out onto the muddy path. Dead flowers had been stuffed into wire dustbins.
    I stopped briefly as I spotted a grand building standing at the centre of a confluence of pathways. It was an old, black-doored chapel, filthy with age–and I realised with a start that I’d once, long ago, driven a hansom cab into it. That was during the complicated business of the Vesuvius Club when Christopher Miracle and I had both been young…
    Oh, poor Christopher.
    There were only a handful of brolly-bearing mourners grouped around the churned-up red earth, their wizened faces rendered blank and emotionless by the surfeit of burying that comes with old age. I nodded to acquaintances, fellow survivors of a shattered generation. Unbidden, images flickered through my mind. That first meeting with Miracle at one of Maudie Risborough’s Chelsea crushes back in the Naughty Nineties. I was the ingénu dauber, pale, skinny, almost innocent. Miracle was the lionised portraitist, glowing, strapping, beautiful. He could have demolished me and my fragile reputation with a single gesture or a well-placed bon mot . But he’d shown me such kindness that dizzying afternoon that we’d soon become firm friends.
    Not quite as firm as I would have liked, alas, but then Miracle had never shared my egalitarian proclivities. Occasional flashes of his startlingly classical physique in the Wigmore Street steam rooms had had to suffice until Time (and regular encounters with a priapic Scots guardsman on Rotten Row) had cured me of the pash.
    Then, shortly after I’d frustrated the insane schemes of Victoria Wine and her deadly manservant Oddbins, Miracle had finally cottoned on to my by-line in espionage. I’d been forced to tell him all about the Royal Academy and my scandalous adventures–after which, sometimes unwillingly, he’d assisted me on many a hair-raising adventure–as you might recall from The Case of the Insecure Syrup .
    Then had come the Great War, the Franco-Swiss mission to Lit-de-Diable and the injuries from which that wonderfulblond boy had never wholly