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  Thoughtfully, his eyes scanning the room for any jarring note – for anything or anyone that shouldn’t be there – he raised a glass of mineral water to his lips.

  And held it there.

  Something out of the ordinary was happening. Grace Litvinoff’s hand was delicately – but very definitely – exploring his thigh. They were sitting in a corner beneath a tall, white-curtained window and she was leaning forward and confiding to him that what she really wanted — what she really badly wanted and wasn’t prepared to wait any longer for – was for him to take her back to the flat and undress her and fuck her hard for the whole of the afternoon.

  ‘Can we go now, Neil?’ she whispered, her long fingers closing over him. ‘Can we just pay the bill and get the car and go? I just can’t wait any longer.’

  Slater felt himself stiffening. His professional resolve evaporated before the need in her long green eyes. You can’t blame a compass for pointing north, he told himself.

  Her husband, he knew, was in Milan until Wednesday.

  ‘Excuse me!’ Grace Litvinoff waved breezily to one of the waitresses. ‘We have to go.’

  The waitress looked at the table, at Grace’s fully charged glass of Krug Champagne, at their barely touched Lobster Newburg. ‘Is everything all right, Mrs Litvinoff?’

  ‘Everything’s perfect,’ she smiled, giving Slater an encouraging squeeze. ‘We just have to go. It’s kind of urgent.’

  She dropped her napkin and stood up. Slater wondered if he dared do the same.

  In the silver Lexus, as usual, she sat in the back while Slater sat in front with the driver. No word passed between the three of them. Grace Litvinoff, as she liked to do, chatted to friends on her Nokia, while Slater attempted to squash down the bulge in his trousers and went through the motions of monitoring the surrounding traffic.

  The entrance to the Litvinoffs’ building was in Mayfair Place, behind Piccadilly. Dismissing the chauffeur, Grace Litvinoff waited as Slater carried the dozen or so shopping bags into the hallway. In the lift, which was operated by a uniformed porter, she appeared to ignore him, but as soon as the gates closed behind them on the eighth floor she turned her face to his.

  ‘Wait,’ he told her, and unlocking the door to the penthouse apartment quickly disarmed the intruder alarm. Behind him she slipped the chain over the latch.

  ‘I didn’t get a chance to finish my Champagne,’ she whispered. ‘Would you be an angel?’

  In the kitchen, Slater found a bottle of cold Dom Pérignon and a single crystal glass. She was waiting for him in the terrace room – a cool, light-filled space dominated by the view over Green Park. She took the glass, drank from it, and placed it on the mantelpiece. Then, wrapping her arms delicately around Slater’s neck, she kissed him. The kiss took a long time. Closing his eyes, Slater surrendered to the soft urgency of her mouth and the pliancy of her slender body beneath his hands. He had never in his life held a woman as impossibly exotic as this, never tasted a scent quite like her scent, never felt skin quite like her skin.

  ‘You’re so quiet, Neil,’ she said, slipping her long fingers beneath his shirt. ‘You hardly say anything.’

  ‘I’m not so much of a talker,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘I’m more of a doer.’

  ‘And are you going to . . . do me?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I am, yes.’

  ‘Call me by my name,’ she said, drawing her nails softly down his back. ‘Look into my eyes and say, “Grace, I’m going to fuck you.”’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ he asked, undoing the silk loops of her mandarin-collared shirt.

  ‘That’s what I want,’ she breathed.

  ‘In that case,’ said Slater, moving his mouth to her breasts, feeling the dark nipples harden beneath his lips and against his tongue, ‘you should wait and see what happens.’

  ‘No words of love?’ Her mouth was against his hair.

  ‘No words.’

  They undressed each other and he carried her through to one of the bedrooms. ‘Wait!’ she said, snatching up her handbag.

  In the mirror he watched her rise and fall over him. The whole scene – the tall, white room, the sunlight at the windows, the slight, gasping figure straddling him – had an air of impossibility, of unreality.

  ‘Grace,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me, darling,’ she said quietly. ‘Talk to me. Tell me how much you want me.’ Her eyes were closed now.

  ‘You know how much,’ he said, moving his hips in time with hers. ‘You know how much I want you. How much I’ve wanted you since the first second I saw you.’

  ‘When did you want me most?’

  ‘This morning, in the shop. That was . . .’

  ‘Would you have liked those girls to watch us?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have cared.’

  She leant over him, let her hair fall in his face. ‘Do you love me, Neil?’

  His hesitated for less than a moment, felt the slick, hard insistence between her legs. At that moment he would have told her anything. ‘Yes. I love you.’

  ‘Tell me that you do. Use my name.’

  He reached for her hips, pressed them against him. ‘I love you, Grace. You’re the most . . .’

  Her nails dug into his shoulders. ‘Go on!’

  ‘You’re the most beautiful . . .’

  ‘Go on, Neil!’ she gasped, biting her lower lip. ‘Tell me how . . .’

  But Slater was beyond words. Flipping her on to her back, taking her rhythm for his own, he drove into her with a lost, desperate abandon. Beneath him he felt her tauten, cry like an animal, tear at his shoulders with her nails until at last they were riding the wave together.

  Mouthing each other’s names, laughing with disbelief at the unexpectedness of it all, he fell exhausted to her side, watched the white room reform around them. She lay like a cat, eyes closed, and tentatively he drew his tongue across her breasts. What the hell am I doing here? he asked himself. What the hell have I done?

  Smiling, she drew him to her.

  ‘Do you really love me, like you said? If I was to get a divorce from David, would you . . . still want me? Would you still look after me?’

  He looked at her, kissed the soft hollow beneath her ear, felt the coolness of her blue-white diamond stud earring against his mouth. ‘Yes,’ he said. His brain felt totally disconnected from his body. ‘Yes to everything.’

  That evening he accompanied her to a reception at the Tate Gallery. As he patrolled the crowd, mineral water in hand, he wondered if he was completely insane. If Duckworth got to hear that he’d spent the afternoon in bed with one of his best clients – or to be precise with the wife of one of his best clients — then his bodyguarding career was over. He’d committed the cardinal sin.

  But it would have been worth it. God, but she was beautiful. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought he would ever see such an exquisite creature curled beside him, hear her whisper his name, beg him to make love to her again. And again. She was a tiger, green-eyed and insatiable.

  Drained, drowsy with sex, they’d showered and dressed at six o’clock. He’d discovered he was ravenous, and raiding the fridge had discovered a pot of Astrakhan caviar, a mango, and a bottle of Japanese beer. Grace Litvinoff had recharged her batteries with a tiny cube of sushi, which to Slater’s eyes looked as if it would barely sustain a weasel. ‘You should eat more!’ he told her, patting her flat little stomach.

  ‘Then I’d look like everybody else,’ she answered. ‘And my clothes wouldn’t fit. And you wouldn’t want me.’

  She looked at him, watched him wash up the plates and cutlery that they’d used. ‘Neil, when did you last . . . sleep with anyone?’

  ‘It’s been quite a long time,’ he admitted. ‘I was a bit . . . out of things for a while. And that side of my life pretty much closed down.’

  ‘Were you ill?’

  ‘Something like that. I had a bad tour of duty across the water.’

  ‘In the USA?’

&n
bsp; ‘In Northern Ireland. And by the end of it things had come on top.’

  ‘I came on top a couple of times this afternoon,’ she said. ‘It’s not such a bad place to come!’

  ‘Funny girl.’

  They’d agreed on the ground rules. In public – anywhere except in the flat – they would behave as client and bodyguard. Not so much as an intimate look would pass between them. Slater would do his job exactly as before – given her husband’s vast wealth the possibility of a kidnap attempt remained a real one. Meanwhile they would communicate using text messages on their mobile phones.

  The paintings at the reception were very large, and showed hugely enlarged parts of the human body. There was a vast and filthy fingernail, an arsehole the size of a dustbin-lid, a weeping appendectomy scar, and several square metres of acned buttock. For the most part the 200 or so guests were standing with their backs to these paintings, although each new arrival gave the exhibition a cursory glance. To Slater’s eye they were a creepy, vampiric bunch – especially the men, with their too-short hair and their tight-lipped, puritanical expressions. Grace, as he watched, was greeted by two of them – zombies in their mid-forties with plucked eyebrows and the over-pink faces of habitual amyl nitrate users. Having discussed her outfit in detail – an outfit Slater had helped choose – they took an arm each and steered her from exhibit to exhibit.

  ‘Are you having a good time?’

  At first Slater was unaware that the voice was addressed to him.

  ‘Lost for words, are we?’

  Slater nodded, and turned away. The speaker was a carefully groomed man in his fifties with a goatee beard.

  ‘Do you like the paintings, then?’

  ‘Not a lot. At least I wouldn’t hang them on my walls, if that’s what you mean. Not that they’d fit on my walls.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Well, it’s a small place. Not bad though, for the money.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry to hear you don’t like the paintings. What do you put on your walls?’

  Slater frowned and pretended to consider. ‘Well, you know that poster of the tennis girl scratching her arse?’

  The other man raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, indeed I do.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘Well, I must be circulating.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Slater called after him. Wanker, he added mentally.

  A soft, familiar voice behind him. ‘Neil, I’ll be another half hour or so, OK?’

  It was Grace, with her two hangers-on.

  Slater nodded. ‘Sure. No problem.’

  ‘Did I just see you talking to Daniel Sweeting?’ she asked, indicating the departing man.

  ‘He asked me if I liked the paintings.’

  ‘And you told him?’

  ‘I said I didn’t.’

  The hangers-on looked at each other, their eyes widening in horror.

  Grace smiled. ‘He’s the artist. He’s also a friend of mine, so try not to give him too hard a time if you run into him again.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Slater levelly.

  ‘Neil looks after me,’ Grace told her two companions. ‘He keeps me safe. He’s my desert island luxury.’

  They looked him up and down. Particularly down.

  ‘I suppose this must all seem very strange to you,’ said one.

  ‘I’ve seen stranger,’ said Slater, his eyes moving around the room.

  ‘So where did you train?’ said the other. ‘Is it like a social work thing?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Slater. On the other side of the room Salman Rushdie and Geri Halliwell were walking arm-in-arm. Seeing Slater, the novelist raised a hand in greeting.

  ‘Neil knows everyone,’ said Grace.

  She left him alone after that, and Slater tried not to stare too intently after her. Already he wanted her again, and more badly than he could begin to put into words. He was grateful to his job for having enabled them to meet, but Andreas’s crack about bodyguarding being a service industry still reverberated in his mind. These people regarded him as being of lower status than themselves, he mused, and even though they met as equals in bed, Grace surely felt the same. Her husband paid for him to be delivered to her door every morning, after all.

  Was this really how a former SAS soldier should be occupying himself? As a glorified male escort? He thought of Dave Constantine cleaning lavatories and unblocking plug-holes in Wormbridge. Dave was probably in Africa by now, sweating out the last two years’ alcohol and cursing himself for having walked out on Linda. But he was also doing the thing that he’d been born to do – the thing that they’d all been born to do.

  ‘You’re a Minerva BG, aren’t you?’

  Slater snapped out of his reverie. The questioner was of about the same age as himself – a tough-looking man with a crewcut and a closely controlled moustache.

  ‘Yes,’ said Slater. ‘You too?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m looking after Mr Rushdie. How long have you been working for Duckworth?’

  The two men compared notes. Tab Holland was a former Military Policeman, and like Slater was not greatly impressed by the antics of some of the moneyed classes. He’d spent the last week looking after a pop group, and described how he’d had to carry tampons with him at all times – the lead singer’s cocaine habit had caused her to haemorrhage from the nose on a daily basis.

  Holland was interested to hear that Slater had been in the SAS. ‘Did you see the Evening Standard?’ he asked, and Slater shook his head.

  ‘A bunch of your guys lifted Radovan Karadjic. They’d been watching his place in Bosnia – some farm, I think — and followed him when he and some of his guys were driving towards the border into Montenegro. Bloody great firefight, apparently – thousands of rounds expended – and at the end of it, after losing six guys, the Serbs came out with their hands in the air. Next stop the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Fucking brilliant result!’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Slater, raising his mineral water. Shit, he thought, that would have been a good one to be on. The lads’ll be pissing it up tonight, that’s for sure. He felt a hot stab of jealousy and regret.

  ‘Who dares wins, eh!’ said Tab Holland.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Slater. ‘I guess that’s about the long and the short of it.’

  He looked around him. Precious little daring here. Precious little winning. And then he saw Grace Litvinoff, caught her eye for a second as she air-kissed Geri Halliwell, and his heart went into free-fall.

  Four hours later, after a seemingly endless dinner for twelve at the River Café – he and Tab Holland had been consigned to a table of their own by the door, where they picked at spaghetti carbonara and swapped war stories – Slater was walking her to the car.

  ‘Were you very bored?’ she asked him, her voice slurring slightly.

  ‘I was fine,’ said Slater. He dropped his voice. ‘Shall I stay tonight?’

  ‘I haven’t got you tomorrow, have I?’

  ‘No. I’ve got some Indian family to take to the zoo.’

  ‘Stay, then. I can’t wait till Friday.’

  When they reached the Lexus, Slater climbed in front with the driver.

  ‘Drop you home, mate?’ the driver asked when they reached Mayfair Place. The pattern on other nights had been that Slater accompanied Grace Litvinoff up to the flat and then the driver, who lived in Walthamstow, gave him a lift up to Highbury.

  ‘Not tonight, thanks,’ answered Slater. ‘I’ve got to go on somewhere.’

  ‘Right, mate. Sure,’ the driver replied. ‘See you Friday, then.’

  From the man’s faint smile, Slater could see that he had guessed the score.

  ‘See you Friday.’

  Expressionless, Slater walked round the silver bonnet of the Lexus and opened the door for his principal.

  In the flat they started undressing each other the moment the heavy Banham latch clicked shut behind them. A trail of clothes described their erratic progress to the bedroom.

  By 1pm the next day,
Slater’s mood was beginning to fray. He had arrived at the Chabbrias’ Bayswater Road apartment at nine, after an early morning dash home from Mayfair for a change of clothes. The idea was that he should accompany the three Chabbria children to the zoo, but by 11am there was no sign that this was going to happen. One of the children, a pale, overweight twelve-year-old named Sweetie, had refused to get out of her nightie until her Xena, Warrior Princess video was finished, eight-year-old Lallu had installed himself in front of his Playstation and announced his intention to play Mortal Kombat all day, and the youngest – Chunky – was still throwing his breakfast at the Norland nanny. None of them paid Slater the slightest attention except the nanny, a West Country girl named Alison, who managed to break away from feeding Chunky for long enough to make him a cup of tea.

  ‘Nice, unspoilt children,’ murmured Slater.

  ‘Couldn’t you just eat them up?’ agreed Alison with a wan smile.

  Brief excitement was caused by the arrival of the post, and with it several mail-order catalogues. Sweetie put Xena on pause and Lallu halted his game and both children then placed several orders for CDs and computer games on their mobile phones. ‘Are you sure you’ve got Mummy’s Visa number right this time?’ asked Alison. ‘We don’t want any more lost tempers, do we?’

  Mummy, bleary with sleep, made an appearance shortly after midday. Like Sweetie, she was dressed in a nightie and a quilted nylon dressing gown. Her make-up had not weathered the night well.

  ‘Where’s the cook?’ she demanded abruptly of Alison.

  ‘It’s her day off, Mrs Chabbria. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No,’ she yawned. ‘God, so lazy these people – they just come and go without a care. Nightmare, this servant thing. Who’s this fellow?’

  ‘I’m . . . I’ve come to take the children to the zoo,’ said Slater. ‘Or wherever they want to go.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Bodyguard, yaar?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK, make yourself useful. Go out and get me a Slush Puppie and a Family Bucket of KFC. Any of you kids want anything?’