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the two men “helping” him were Chinese. Sensing something was amiss, the station chief jumped back into his car and followed the sedan for hours, all the way to the harbor at Casablanca.
    Armed guards at the foot of the gangway made intervention impossible, and he’d watched helplessly as the unconscious man was hauled up the gangplank of the Star of Shanghai. He’d called Langley immediately. His suspicions were confirmed. The drunk was likely one of their own all right, due out of China a week ago and presumed dead.
    Feeling much rejuvenated (driving at speed also worked wonders), Alex Hawke found himself grinning foolishly after only an hour or so behind the wheel. The sun was shining, his recently restored C Type was screaming along the Grand Corniche straightaway at 130 mph, and, for the moment, all was right with his world. His two hands firmly positioned at quarter to three, Hawke relished the notion that he was officially back in the game.
    A sign marker flashed by: Ste. Tropez. Only a few hours from his destination, the old resort at Cannes. Executing a racing change down into second gear, going quite quickly into a built-up S-bend, Hawke inhaled deeply.
    Provence was delightful in June. Glorious. Somewhere, bees were buzzing. He’d always felt a certain kinship with bees. After all, were they not similarly employed? Zipping around all day, doing the queen’s work, ha?
    Indeed.
    Spring itself was in the air. Not to mention the scented vapors of hot Castrol motor oil wafting back from one’s long, louvered bonnet. Good stuff. The feeling of raw power as one smashed one’s shoe to the floorboard and, whilst exiting a descending-radius curve, hearing the throaty roar of the naturally aspirated 4.4-liter XK Straight-Six responding beautifully. He’d been listening to the newly rebuilt motor carefully all day and had yet to hear any expensive noises.
    Nor did he, until he arrived in Cannes and checked into the fabled Carlton and heard the chap at Reception say how much his bloody seaside suite would cost him per night.

Chapter Two
Hampstead Heath
    AMBROSE CONGREVE LAVISHED A DOLLOP OF TIPTREE’S LITTLE scarlet strawberry preserve onto his warm toast and held it up for closer inspection. Satisfied, he contemplated the two three-minute eggs in their Minton blue china cups with unbridled relish and a shudder of warm satisfaction. Songbirds trilled outside his sunny windows and the teapot was whistling merrily on the Aga. To say that Ambrose was enjoying his early breakfast in the sunny conservatory of his new house would be gross understatement.
    It was pure, unadulterated bliss.
    Moments precisely like this one, the legendary New Scotland Yard criminalist reflected, had been the stuff of keen anticipation for lo these many months.
    Just as there had been times, shivering with damp cold in his drear little Bayswater flat of many years, that he’d never dared dream these happy domestic circumstances might ever come to pass.
    His present situation, newly acquired, was a lovely brick-and-stone cottage in Hampstead Heath. The house proper, and some of the outbuildings, had been bombed almost into extinction by the Nazis during the Blitz. It had been the property of his late aunt, Augusta. The dear woman had spent the last half of the century in a loving restoration of house and gardens completed just a few short months before her sudden death at age ninety-seven. Augusta had died peacefully in her sleep. Ambrose, standing at the graveside, had hoped this exit method ran in the family.
    Attending the reading of the late Mrs. Bulling’s last testament at her solicitor’s drab offices in Kensington High Street, Ambrose’s remorse had been tempered by the vain hope that he might inherit. There was, after all, a complete set of Minton china she’d promised him decades earlier, and he sat there feigning composure, hoping she’d not forgotten him.
    She had not.
    Rather, from the cold grave, Aunt Augusta had stunned