Last time: "The thing is, I'm expecting to be murdered tomorrow."

Well, he'd gotten their attention.

The tall young man, shocked but accepting, had his incident forms almost pulled out, and the veteran had put down his mag, when what Poole assumed to be the station chief appeared from behind the half-wall, swinging a bit awkwardly around the supporting jamb. Chief Superintendent Graham Poole would have been blistering – the man was a mess: dark blonde hair in no particular style, rumpled casual jacket, no tie, practically goggling blue eyes, towering over them both.

"Sorry?" the man demanded. "You expect to be –? How? I mean . . ."

Two pairs of strange eyes on him, soon to be three with the veteran getting out of his chair, and Poole's book was tapping itself on the counter again in a desperate effort to distract attention. "Yes, well, the whole thing sounds fantastic now," he blustered, instantly regretting the aggressive edge he heard in it. He swallowed a breath and went on, striving to sound sane. "But, well, I'd rather someone knew the story before I go up there."

The veteran, a lifer constable, fit and fashionably stubbled and as cool as his mate, was staring between the two taller officers quizzically, his lips resting open in a slight gawk. In a moment he had snapped his mouth shut and rolled his eyes not too sarcastically at the man in the rumpled jacket. "Chief?"

The young officer paused for a fraction of a moment, then began stowing the forms away under the counter. "You'd better come in," the rumpled jacket told Poole.

He backed off and the constable with him, as the sergeant swung the board up and Poole went through. The place was a range of colors impossible in a London business: sunflower-yellow walls, patches of deep blue carpet over dark wood floors, mismatched filing cabinets and accessories of all periods and tints on the walls, obviously unused but somehow spic-and-span. It was one room, with a pretense of a galley kitchen ranged in the far corner and three battered pedestal desks crowding the floor. There was a glimpse of holding cells beyond beaded curtains in the back, on the other side of the alcove whence the rumpled jacket had appeared. All this was under the beadboard ceiling with trusses that seemed to be the required building code here. Poole's professional brain began automatically racking up costs of materials, licensing fees, construction estimates . . .

In the center of the squad room, standing beside the third desk, was a second plain-clothes officer (though she was certainly not plain), in a dark blue sleeveless shirt and shorts, with legs and a mass of dark curls and exotic gorgeous . . .

He stopped it, right there. None of his business how the British territorial police allowed their female detectives to dress. He focused instead on the station chief, swallowed once and stuttered "Right, um, Richard Poole, Faithful and Gould."

He went into his inside jacket pocket, palming the book while managing to pull out a business card with two fingers, and gave it to him. "Graduated in Economics from Cambridge, '94. There were five of us, you see, at Cambridge: Angela Birkett in Law, Roger Sadler in Management, Sasha Reed in Modern Languages and James Moore with me in Economics. He was with Sterling North and I'm a quantity surveyor. It's a Useful Occupation," (he instantly regretted the capital letters he always managed to put on those two words) "and I travel, sometimes –"

"Sorry?" The station chief had glanced at the card, then began flapping it, uselessly. "Excuse me, is this relevant?"

Poole braked, again. The young sergeant and the veteran were hovering nearby, giving space to the female officer who was approaching. He felt her nearing presence like an extra heat source, coming up beside him. "Well, it, ah, it is, actually, because that's where it started."

He would have turned then, searching for any extra space in this sweatbox, but his sensible, solid, actuarial self refused to even glance in her direction. "If we could –? I don't suppose there's an interview room . . ."

...

There was an interview table, of sorts, beyond the female officer's desk and halfway into the galley, which Poole suspected doubled as the break room. He found himself placed there, back to the cells, facing the two front desks where Officer Myers, the grizzled veteran, and Sergeant Best, the tall young one, had resumed their desks and their duties, ostensibly. Poole could see they were hanging on every word they could catch across the sweltering room, and he reckoned that was pretty much all of them.

The station chief, Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, had pulled out the chair from the third desk and placed it for the female officer, Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey. Goodman now sat hunched over his clasped hands on the table, staring at Poole earnestly. Sergeant Bordey, having slipped like the most graceful sort of nymph into her chair, was staring as well, casually fondling one long strand of her hair as she did so.

Poole left the book on the table to scrub his palms against his trousers – surreptitiously, he hoped. He was not registering the facts that the sergeant facing him couldn't be more than her early thirties, was slender and toned, with beautiful dark eyes and a delicately curved nose, full lips and a sweet, square chin. He was not being aware once more of what a waste of space he must appear to her, and how embarrassingly lame his story was going to sound.

"That group I mentioned before, at Cambridge, all of my year, um . . . after graduation we split up, most of us. Sasha and James married in '95 and went to live in the Midlands. Angie went into practice in Bristol, Roger's in estate sales in Kent, and there's me, in London. We never really kept touch, or I didn't, except a few months ago, Angie started trying to arrange a reunion, here. She'd confused it with Saint Lucia, I think. Not that Saint-Marie isn't nice," he added hastily, "as tropical islands go, but Angie is a muddler, and . . .

"Any rate," he went on, switching his attention away from the sergeant back to the inspector after a brief pause, "I thought of not going, just –" as you always do, Poole, whenever a party's mentioned, he added in thought. Out loud he tacked on, "as you do, but HR has been rather insistent lately I take time off, and so it – was arranged.

"I thought then I'd better find out what had happened to them all." He paused, just a moment, to marshal the research he had done, and unconsciously, the ramrod-straight back and shoulders he had walked in with began to relax forward, just a bit, and his stern expression melted, just a bit, as his mind began to chuckle again over how the pieces had fit together, one by one.

"Roger and Angie, well, no story there; but James and Sasha, now. When she married Sasha inherited some money, something like twenty thousand pounds. In 1999, on James' advice (I said he was with Sterling North), Sasha bought out a small IT firm, SciTech. Next thing anyone knew they were selling it, James and Sasha, for eighteen million pounds."

"Impressive." That was Sergeant Bordey, and of course her voice was just as intriguing as the rest of her: low, soothing like warm treacle, with a thick French accent. Poole resolutely kept his focus on the inspector; not that he was more pleasant to look at, but still . . .

"Yeah, so," he shifted a bit and plunged on. "Just after that, there was a road accident, and Sasha booked into a clinic in Saint Lucia for some plastic surgery. Then she and James bought a place in Spain, and that became their base of operations until this reunion thing happened.

"Five days ago, I met Angie and Roger in that airport, over there on that other island –"

"Guadeloupe," said Sergeant Bordey. She arched perfect eyebrows at him, and her lips curved upward, just slightly. "Probably Les Abymes, on Grande-Terre?"

Um, yeah, Poole thought, and put his attention back on the DI. "Thank you, yes, Sergeant. And – we take the ferry to Saint-Marie, and our hotels. James and Sasha arrive on the evening ferry and we're all to meet up at the Palm Court restaurant for lunch (do you know it? Yes, of course you do), and it's then, suddenly, I see it – well, I could hardly notice before, could I, what with not seeing her in twenty-five years and with the plastic surgery . . ."

He was speaking to the Sergeant again, and she was listening with a focus he had rarely experienced from a woman before. Pulling himself out of her dark eyes with a stern inner warning that this was not happening again, he turned back to the Inspector, who was looking at him in a hopeless sort of way.

Very deliberately and clearly, Goodman spoke. "Who is it you expect to murder you?"

"Sasha. Only it isn't," Poole told him.

"Who isn't?" The Inspector was leaning even farther over his hands on the table. Officers Best and Myers were absolutely still, waiting. Poole didn't dare look to see what Sergeant Bordey was doing.

He swallowed and said it. "Sasha. Isn't Sasha. I think she must be Helen."