him hard on to his back.
The giant frame seemed to pinwheel in the air for a moment and then crashed down over a crate of champagne bottles.
'Alex!' screamed Sophie again.
He sensed rather than saw the second man's rush. Grabbing a Bollinger bottle by the neck he turned and swung it with all his strength. The bottle smashed against the man's skull with a crunching, gassy sigh and in a white explosion of foam. With spectacular effect his head turned blood-red, his eyes rolled upwards and he crashed to the floor. Screams joined the spatter of broken glass and the groans of the first attacker who was writhing beneath one of the caterers' trestle tables.
The pushing started, then, and the panic. A drinks table went over, then another, and within seconds the floor was covered in spilled champagne, canapes and broken glass. Someone activated the fire alarm. Hanging over everything was the acrid stench of 'Guillotine'.
'Alex!' Sophie screamed for a third time, waving her fists at him.
'What do you think you're doing?' Around them, people were jostling for the exit.
'What do you mean?' asked Alex, dropping the smashed bottleneck.
'Did you really want those pissed-up yobs grabbing at you?'
'They were two boys who'd had too much to drink, that's all. It's you who's ruined the party!' She stared despairingly at the departing guests and then down at the fallen men.
'Could someone please ring an ambulance?' she pleaded.
'Boys?' asked Alex, amazed.
'Look at the fucking size of them. I can't believe you're siding with them.' He turned to her thoughtfully and smiled.
'But then I suppose they're your type, aren't they?'
'Don't be so stupid. You totally overreacted and you know it. You could have .. .'
She shook her head, incoherent with anger. Beside her, one of the caterers was dialling 999.
'Killed them?' Alex regarded the fallen and bloodied figures dispassionately.
The first man, still groaning, appeared to have badly injured his back and the second was unmoving and bleeding copiously from the head.
'No such luck, I'm afraid. I'd say your perfume got its publicity, though.' He sniffed the air.
'Stella was right, it is a bit fishy.'
She rounded on him, eyes blazing.
'And what the hell would you know, you... you psychopathic hoohgan?'
Alex began to laugh. He couldn't help himself.
'I'm sorry!' he managed eventually.
'Really, Sophie, I'm sorry.'
Drawing back her hand she slapped him as hard as she could across the face and marched furiously off.
Alex caught up with her.
'Please,' he said.
'I'm sorry, Sophie. Really I am. I wasn't laughing at you. It's just the whole thing.'
She shrugged him off. Her voice was shaking with anger.
'The whole thing, as you call it, has turned to shit. I open up my life to you, introduce you to my friends, and you just .. . just crap all over them. You can make your own fucking way home and you needn't bother to call me again. Find someone else's life to smash up.'
At this moment, as they stood there facing each other, speechless, the little waitress with the big bust appeared at the foot of the stairs.
'So, is this a good moment to talk about work?' she asked Sophie brightly.
Sophie glanced at her uncomprehendingly.
'No,' she said quietly.
'It isn't.'
The waitress shrugged.
'Told you she was a cunt!'
Alex watched Sophie slam the door of the silver Audi. When the snarl of her exhaust had died away he reached into his suit pocket. The safe-house key was still there.
THIRTEEN.
The first hour of the drive up to Goring in Dawn Harding's Honda was conducted in near silence. Alex had a mild hangover and was feeling a bit guilty about the way the previous evening had turned out. He shouldn't have laughed, he told himself.
The trouble was, the row had exposed all the differences that existed between them. He couldn't be bothered with most of her friends, when all was said and done, and he couldn't be bothered to obey the rules that people obeyed in her world. She considered him an unreconstructed macho dinosaur, and in return he found her spoilt, shallow and over privileged. They brought out the worst in each other.
And yet they wanted each other. Often.
The night in the Pimlico flat had been a cheerless one. A 1970s Bulgarian defector might have felt at home in the place, with its stained orange carpet and fusty, boarding-house smell, but Alex could have done with something a little less Cold War.
He should get some flowers, he told him seW present himself at Sophie's front door that evening with an apologetic face and a big bunch of roses. Would roses do the trick? They were supposed to, but then in Sophie's picky and obsessive circle roses might be considered naff.
'Do you like roses?' he asked Dawn.
She looked at him suspiciously.
'Why?'
'If someone gave you roses, what would you think?'
'A man, you mean?' she asked.
'For the sake of argument, yes.
'I'd think either he was trying to get something from me, or he was apologising.'
'Right.'
'If they were really special, though.. . I mean if they weren't just those boring, limp, half-frozen things you buy at the tube station in a twist of cellophane but properly scented old English roses grown in a garden, well, I might at least listen to what he had to say.' She glanced at him shrewdly from the driving seat.
'In trouble, are we?'
'No. Just wondering.'
'Ah. Wondering. Well, my experience is that most girls do, in fact, quite like to be given roses.' She narrowed her eyes at the road ahead.
'Even the posh ones like your Sophie.'
He nodded. He guessed he was going to have to say goodbye to any kind of private life for as long as he was working with Box.
'Can I ask what you're actually doing to locate this Watchman character?' he asked.
Her expression remained unaltered but her eyes froze over.
'Put it this way,' she said.
'We've got pictures, we've got DNA, we've got dabs, we've got handwriting, and we've got vocal and facial recognition systems in place. I think you can say that we're adequately covered.'
'And Widdowes? What are you doing to protect him?'
'George Widdowes is an experienced intelligence officer.'
'So were Fenn and Gidley. Didn't help them much when laughing boy showed up, though, did it?'
'Forewarned is forearmed.'
Alex shook his head despairingly and rubbed his eyes.
'You don't get it, do you?' he said quietly.
'Meehan will kill him. He's programmed to do it and he will do it.'
She was silent for a minute or two.
