Knee

‘Don’t you?’ He looked her up and down, her jeans, her caramel velour jacket and the pretty paisley scarf she’d wound round her neck. She wore no make-up but her hair was loose and riotous enough to drive any man to want to run his hands through it, he thought with some irony. ‘We need to talk, Irene.’

‘I don’t think we need to talk at all. I mean—’ she attempted a smile, but it came off as a sketchy affair at best ‘—I have nothing against talking to you—’ She stopped and her eyes widened as a smart little yellow van with ‘The Travelling Locksmith’ stencilled in red letters on it pulled in behind the Bentley.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I know you only have to snap your fingers for people to come running, but this is—amazing!’

He turned and raised his eyebrows at the van. ‘It’s not a case of snapping my fingers, it’s all Diane’s wizardry, but—’ he smiled wryly ‘—that’s fast, even for her.’

In the event, as the locksmith explained, he’d just finished a job a block away when the ca