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preliminary discussions in a week or two. First stop Barbados.'
    There was a short silence. Cy Fredericks was clearly remembering that he himself had just rented a luxurious villa on that very island and wondered whether Jemima was aware of that fact. (She was: his secretary had told Cherry, who had told Jemima.) Cy solved the problem in his usual galvanic fashion.
    'Jem, my dear Jem,' he murmured, leaning across the vast desk and grasping, with some difficulty, her hand. 'We've been too much out of touch lately. We need to talk, really talk. Miss Lewis!' he suddenly shouted in a voice of great agitation, dropping the hand and gazing rather wildly round him. 'Miss Lewis! Are you there?'
    There was an acquiescent noise from the outer office. Although Cy had in fact a perfectly efficient intercom, he never seemed to have the necessary leisure to master it.
    'Miss Lewis! When am I next free for lunch?'
    Miss Lewis, a neat young woman in a silk shirt, check skirt and well polished brown boots, entered hastily, bearing a leather diary which she deposited in front of her employer. Cy gazed at it for a moment with an expression of outraged disbelief and then, in silence, proceeded to score out a number of entries with great violence. Finally he looked up and beamed at Jemima.
    'So! For you, Jemima, I drop everything. We shall have our heart to heart. Exchange of souls. Lunch on February the twenty-eighth.'
    'I can't wait,' said Jemima.
    Negotiating the white Mercedes once more out of the Megalith car park that afternoon, Jemima was wearily aware that the chances of her not spending a few cold winter weeks in and around Oxford University to say nothing of the other equally unpleasing (to Jemima Shore) haunts of the young and rich, were rapidly diminishing. To console herself, and while away the time in the heavy traffic she put on a tape of Arabella and waited for her favourite song beginning: 'Aber der Richtige .. .' 'The man who's right for me, if there is one for me in all this world'. But the thought of the right man coming along put her uncomfortably in mind of Cass Brinsley: did he think she was the right woman . . . Could anyone, even a lawyer, be quite so detached? It was to distract herself from these -essentially unprofitable - thoughts that Jemima jumped out of the car in a traffic block and bought an evening paper.
    At the next lights she glanced down at the headlines, particularly glaring this evening, accompanied by a large photograph. The next moment she found herself staring, the car still in gear, her neck still craning down. It took some frantic hootings all round her to tell Jemima Shore that the lights had turned green and that the heavy crocodile of lorries, trucks and cars was supposed to be rattling forward once more up Holland Park Avenue.
    The newspaper photograph showed a handsome young man, very young and very handsome: the flash bulb had perhaps exaggerated the dramatic effect of the wide eyes and high cheekbones, the thick hair, apparently black, a lock falling across the forehead. Even so the looks were sufficiently startling to make Jemima suppose for a moment she was gazing at the face of a pop star. And the rather wide mouth and well-formed lips confirmed the impression of a pop star to a generation brought up on the ultimate pop-star looks of Mick Jagger, although this young man was more distinguished, less roguish-looking than Jumping Jack Flash. His clothes too were more deliberately Byronic: he was wearing something which looked like a white stock above a ruffled shirt. It was not, to Jemima at any rate, a very sympathetic face. Or perhaps the expression of arrogance was, like the contrast in the looks, purely the creation of the flash bulb.
    A pop star in trouble. For the young man in question had been photographed leaving some court or other. It was the caption which corrected Jemima's error, and the text beneath it which caused her to stare and stare again at the newspaper.
    OXFORD BLOOD SAYS