“And who was your host?”
“A man named . . . Bartholomew.” He still didn’t feel comfortable calling him Hedger.
“English or American?”
“American, but an anglophile.”
“Thus, the port.”
“Yes.”
“How did you like the Garrick?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“They’re just about the last of the old London clubs that still bar women from membership,” she said. “I rather admire them for it; I think I enjoy going there more because it has an entirely male membership.”
“Hmmpf,” Stone said. He was drifting off.
He came to in a hurry a few minutes later, as he was thrown hard against his seat belt. He looked out the windshield to see the narrow road ahead filled with sheep. One came up to his window and briefly pressed its nose against the glass, and it was eye to eye with him. “Where are we?” he asked.
“In the middle of a flock of sheep,” Sarah replied. “They have the right of way in the country.”
“I mean, where are we?”
“Halfway there. You hungry?”
Oddly, he was. “Yes.”
“There’s a pub round the bend; we’ll have a ploughman’s lunch.” She drove on when the sheep had passed, then turned into a picturesque country pub. They went inside, picked up their lunch—bread, cheese, and sausage, and a pint of bitter each, then made their way into a rear garden and sat down.
Stone drank deeply from the pint. “There, that’s better,” he said.
“The bitter will set you right,” Sarah said.
“That’s the second time today I’ve been told that.”
“And we were both right, no?”
“Yes, you both were. What do you know about Lance Cabot?”
“I told you already—not much.”
“Remember everything you can. Anything ever strike you as odd about him?”
“Only that he seems to fit in awfully well with English people. People I know don’t even seem to regard him as a foreigner.”
“Have you ever seen him with anyone you didn’t know?”
She thought. “Once, in a London restaurant, I saw him across the room, dining with a couple—man and woman—who looked foreign.”
“What kind of foreign?”
“Mediterranean.”
“That’s a big area.”
“Turkish or Israeli, perhaps.”