The giant appeared behind her, a lowering presence. She turned to him and spoke in French. ‘Flavius, my guest will hand you his revolver. House rules,’ she confided. ‘I see you still carry one on your right hip, Mr Dodgson.’
Joe traded steely gazes with Flavius as he handed over his Browning. The man’s head was the size of a watermelon and covered, not in skin, but in hide. Cracked and seamed hide, stretched over a substructure of bone which had shifted slightly at some time in his forty years. Wiry grey-black hair sprouted thickly about his skull but had been discouraged from rampant growth by a scything haircut. It was parted into two sections along the side of his head by an old shrapnel wound. Or a bayonet cut. His hands resembled nothing so much as bunches of overripe bananas. Joe wondered what pistol had a large enough guard to accommodate his trigger finger.
‘Thank you, that will be all, Flavius,’ said Alice daintily. ‘I’ll call you if we need to replenish the champagne.’
‘Or adjust the doilies,’ said Joe.
‘May I just call you, as ever – Joe?’ she said, switching back to English when her guard dog had stalked off on surprisingly light feet. She held up the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with a peacock’s feather poking out from the pages as he remembered it on her shelf in Simla. The hat maker in the rue Mouffetard had been puzzled and amused by his request that morning and had refused payment for such a small piece of nonsense but it seemed to have worked. Alice was still laughing. ‘Do you know, I never did get further than the page marker! I got quite bogged down in the middle of a mad tea party.’
‘The reason most of us leave India,’ Joe suggested.
‘Yes indeed! But, as you know, it wasn’t boredom that drove me away! I was having a happy time. It was Nemesis in the shape of a granite-jawed, flinty-eyed police commander who chose to delve too deeply into my business affairs.’
Joe decided to bite back a dozen objections to her light summary of a catalogue of murder, theft and fraud. ‘Not sure I recognize him. Shall we just say something came up and you had to leave India in a hurry?’
‘You came up, you toad! And here you are again, doing what toads do! Now the question is – shall I step on you and squash you or invite you inside and give you a kiss?’
‘I think it’s frogs that are the usual recipients of oscula-tory salutations,’ he said cheerfully.
Alice groaned. ‘Still arsing about, Sandilands? Can’t say I’ve missed it! But come in anyway.’
He followed her trim figure along the corridor. Dark red cocktail dress, short and showing a good deal of her excellent legs. Her shining fair hair, which had been the colour of a golden guinea he remembered, was now paler, with the honey and lemon glow of a vin de paille. It was brushed back from her forehead and secured by a black velvet band studded with a large ruby over her left ear. Had her eyes always had that depth of brilliant blue? Of course, but in the strait-laced society of Simla, she had not dared to risk the fringe of mascara-darkened lashes. She still had the power to overawe him. He found himself looking shiftily to left or right of her or down at her feet as he had ever done and was angry with his reaction.
‘Joe, will you come this way?’ She turned and, stretching out her right hand, invited him to enter a salon. Distantly, sounds of the jazz band rose through the heavily carpeted floor and he realized they must be directly over the jazz café. She closed the door and they were alone together.
‘Champagne? I was just about to have a glass of Ruinart. Will you join me?’
‘Gladly.’
She went to a buffet bearing a tray of ice bucket and glasses and began to fill two of the flutes, chattering the while.
‘Cigarette? I’m told these are good Virginian . . . No?’ She screwed one into the end of an ebony holder and waited for him to pick up a table-lighter and hold the flame steady while she half-closed her eyes, pursed her scarlet mouth and drew in the smoke inexpertly. Joe read the message: English vicar’s daughter, fallen amongst rogues and thieves and ruined beyond repair, yet gallantly hanging on to some shreds of propriety. He was meant to recall that, for someone of her background, smoking was a cardinal sin. He smiled. He remembered her puffing away like a trooper at an unfiltered Afghan cigarette in Simla.
‘Five years?’ she asked, her thoughts following his, back into the past. ‘Can it really be five years since we said goodbye to each other on the steamer? You’re doing well, I hear. And I hear it from George of all people. We met at the theatre the other day. Did you know he was in Paris?’