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strip-club, and the walk was short enough and the girl uninterested enough that he did not have to do much more than smile and nod from when the old queen introduced them until after the girl locked the door of her room behind them and switched on a two-bar electric fire. “You got a name, honey?” she asked, not looking round as she unbelted her coat.
    â€œYou could call me boss,” suggested Vanderbilt.
    She looked at him then, eyes saucering whitely. There was nothing you could do to a white South African accent that a black South African would stay fooled for long. Anyway it was time for her to know. There were occasions when pussy-footing round got you what you wanted, but this was not one of them. To tell him what he wanted to know Suzanne Lavalle, née Suzy Kop, would have to be very frightened indeed, and she might as well start now.
    Vanderbilt left forty minutes later, alone, quietly locking the door behind him. In due course, he supposed, when she did not return to work, somebody might get irritated enough (rather than concerned enough) to force the door. But there had been no noise to annoy the neighbours, even had they been normally alert neighbours rather than the deaf, dumb and blind variety preferred by hookers, and Miss Lavalle would not be capable of making herself heard for some hours yet. Vanderbilt thought he was probably in the clear until morning, and even then he was not worried about official complications. Wherever she turned when she recovered sufficiently to tackle the five pairs of nylon tights presently securing her to the bedstead, it would not be the police.
    She might try to contact Shola, if she was thinking straight enough by then. Or she might find it harder than he would. She had been unable to give Vanderbilt either a telephone number or an address, only the name Shola used in England and the name of a Mickey Mouse newspaper up north for which he occasionally wrote. She was not in contact with him; she had seen him only once in this country, when he got her a job with an African charity. She gave it up after a couple of months: the strip-club paid more, and was more fun. She had heard of Joel Grant but had never met him; she did not know he was in England too.
    Vanderbilt was not interested in her life-story, though he did wonder in passing what it was about her that could have appealed to a man of Nathan Shola’s physical, intellectual and political prowess; not appreciating that for such a man a fondness for silly women might be less a weakness than a strength. But just now all that interested Vanderbilt was how little she could do about protecting, or even warning, Shola. The most she could do, if she would not go to the police, was call the newspaper and ask them not to give out any information about him, which an English newspaper probably would not have done anyway. That did not matter: Vanderbilt had no intentions of asking for it. By the tone Kop was able to contact the paper, he expected to have everything
    it was capable of yielding.
    He returned to his car and searched out the signs for the Ml.
    Liz Fallon found herself lying awake, with no knowledge of what had wakened her. She was well enough used to broken nights, her sleep fractured by another person’s dreams, but that was different, and familiar. After fourteen months the signal pattern of his moaning, tiny animal whimpers growing over a period of two or three minutes to full-throated yells if she did not get to him first, was to her as routine a call to duty as, for example, the pipping of his bleeper to a doctor or the howl of a siren to a factory worker. She had installed the baby alarm so that she could wake him before he reached screaming pitch. Grant had not liked it but she had made no effort to mollify him. She made it a matter of policy not to protect him from life’s little harshnesses, only from the big one.
    She lay still in the dark room, breathing softly, listening to silence.