necessary just to confirm the likeness. Then, clearly thinking better of commenting one way or the other, he returned the paper and said, ‘I am Fayad al Kuwani, Miss Hamilton.’ And he held out a visiting card—as if they couldn’t be printed off by the dozen in any name you cared to dream up by anyone with a computer.
Except that this wasn’t a do-it-yourself job, but embossed on heavy ivory-coloured card.
If he was from the finance company, he certainly wasn’t one of the foot-soldiers.
The front of the card gave no hint, but contained only his name: Fayad al Kuwani. Unusual enough. She turned it over. The back was blank. No address, no phone number.
Obviously this was a man whose name was enough for those with the wit to recognise it. Which did not include her.
‘Nice card,’ she said. ‘But a trifle shy of information.’
‘The Ras al Kawi Embassy will vouch for me.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then,’ she said. Her friends would have recognised sarcasm. He apparently did not, but merely nodded. Good grief, he was serious…
Ras al Kawi? Where was that?
‘I need to talk to you about a khanjar that I believe is in your possession,’ he said. ‘It is possible that it once belonged to my family.’
‘Oh?’ Then, realising that he’d come to demand it back, ‘It’s amazing how fast good news spreads.’
‘You have no idea. Perhaps I should wait in my car while you…?’
He made the vaguest of gestures, resolutely looking at her face, avoiding her bare legs, the shabby bathrobe that had a tendency to gape at the neck. It made no difference. Every inch of her skin tingled.
‘Dress?’ she offered, lippy to the last. Except that the word didn’t come out quite as she’d intended, but thick and throaty. More to avoid those eyes than because she was interested in his choice of trans port, Violet looked past him.
A black Rolls-Royce was parked at the kerb. The little green and gold flag on the bonnet stirred in the breeze.
She barely stopped herself from letting slip an expression that would have brought her a rebuke from her grandma.
Her breathless, ‘Who are you?’ wasn’t a whole heap better.
‘If your story is true, Miss Hamilton, then your great-great-grand mother, Princess Fatima al Sayyid, was once married to my great-great-grandfather.’
At which point she did let slip a word that she used only under the most extreme pressure.
She would have been embarrassed about that, but a scream from rear of the house—Sarah’s scream—obliterated the sound.
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