On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer and Vernonis editor of the newspaper 'The Judge'. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorius right-winger tipped to be the next prime minster