Gibraltar Road

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The summons had come by telephone, early, just as Shaw was finishing breakfast in his West Kensington flat, and he’d known what it was before he’d picked up the receiver. This was partly because he had slept badly the night before, and had dreamed that the bullet had come for him out of the dark, with a flash and a hint of a woman’s laughter and the tail-end of a well-remembered scent; and partly because the only person other than Carberry likely to ring him so early was Debonnair, and she’d had to hop across to Paris on business on behalf of Eastern Petroleum for a couple of days, so almost certainly it wasn’t her. The sudden ring had made him start, and afterwards he’d had to mop up the coffee which had split all over the bachelor-bare table, with its marmalade-pot all sticky, the Demerara sugar in the blue packet, damply clinging, the butter still in its wrapper on a dish… Shaw wasn’t lazy, but he had too much on his mind, and he just couldn’t be bothered with the prosaic details of looking after himself properly.

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