Chapter Eight

It was over a week before I found out. I went straight up to his room when I reached the wharf, and it was empty and much too tidy.

The dim teen-age secretary next door, in answer to my questions, agreed that Mr Searle wasn’t in today, and that no one seemed to know when he would be in at all or whether.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He hasn’t been in for a week. We don’t know where he’s got to.’

Disturbed, I went downstairs and knocked on Yardman’s door.

‘Come in.’

I went in. He was standing by the open window, watching collier’s tugs pulling heavy barges up the river. A Finnish freighter, come up on the flood, was manoeuvring alongside across the river under the vulture-like meccano cranes. The air was alive with hooter signals and the bang and clatter of dock work, and the tide was carrying the garbage from the lower docks steadily upstream to the Palace of Westminster. Yardman turned, saw me, carefully closed the window, and came across the room with both hands outstretched.

‘My dear boy,’ he said, squeezing one of mine. ‘My condolences on your sad loss, my sincere condolences.’

‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You are very kind. Do you… er… know where Simon Searle is?’

‘Mr Searle?’ he raised his eyebrows so that they showed above the black spectacle frames.

‘He hasn’t been in for a week, the girl says.’

‘No.’ he frowned. ‘Mr Searle, for reasons best known to himself, chose not to return to this country. Apparently he decided to stay in Italy, the day he went to Milan in your place.’

‘But why?’I said.

‘I really have no idea. It is very inconvenient. Very. I am having to do his work until we hear from him.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, my dear boy, I suppose our troubles no longer concern you. You’d better have your cards, though I don’t expect you’ll be needing them.’ He smiled the twisted ironic smile and stretched out his hand to the inter-office phone.

‘You’re giving me the sack, then?’ I said bluntly.

He paused, his hand in mid-air. ‘My dear boy,’ he protested. ‘My dear boy. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that you would want to stay on.’

‘I do.’

He hesitated, and then sighed. ‘It’s against my better judgment, it is indeed. But with Searle and you both away, the agency has had to refuse business, and we can’t afford much of that. No, we certainly can’t. No, we certainly can’t. Very well then, if you’ll see us through at least until I hear from Searle, or find someone to replace him, I shall be very grateful, very grateful indeed.’

If that was how he felt, I thought I might as well take advantage of it. ‘Can I have three days off for Cheltenham races in a fortnight? I’ve got a ride in the Gold Cup.’

He nodded calmly. ‘Let me have the exact dates, and I’ll avoid them.’

I gave them to him then and there, and went back to Simon’s room thinking that Yardman was an exceptionally easy employer, for all that I basically understood him as little as on our first meeting. The list of trips on Simon’s wall showed that the next one scheduled was for the following Tuesday, to New York. Three during the past and present week had been crossed out, which as Yardman had said, was very bad for business. The firm was too small to stand much loss of its regular customers.

Yardman confirmed on the intercom that the Tuesday trip was still on, and he sounded so pleased that I guessed that he had been on the point of cancelling it when I turned up. I confirmed that I would fetch the relevant papers from the office on Monday afternoon, and be at Gatwick on the dot on Tuesday morning. This gave me a long week-end free and unbeatable ideas on how to fill it. With some relief the next day I drove determinedly away from the gloomy gathering of relations at home, sent a cable, picked up a stand-by afternoon seat with Alitalia, and flew to Milan to see Gabriella.

Three weeks and three days apart had changed nothing. I had forgotten the details of her face, shortened her nose in my imagination and lessened the natural solemnity of her expression, but the sight of her again and instantly did its levitation act. She looked momentarily anxious that I wouldn’t feel the same, and then smiled with breathtaking brilliance when she saw that I did.

‘I got your cable,’ she said. ‘One of the girls has changed her free day with me, and now I don’t have to keep the shop tomorrow or Sunday.’

‘That’s marvellous.’

She hesitated, almost blushing. ‘And I went home at lunch time to pack some clothes, and I have told my sister I am going to stay for two days with a girl friend near Genoa.’

‘Gabriella!’

‘Is that all right?’ she asked anxiously.

‘It’s a miracle,’ I said fervently, having expected only snatched unsatisfactory moments by day, and nights spent each side of a wall. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

When she had finished for the day we went to the station and caught a train, and on the principle of not telling more lies than could be helped, we did in fact go to Genoa. We booked separately into a large impersonal hotel full of incurious business men, and found our rooms were only four doors apart.

Over dinner in a warm obscure little restaurant she said, ‘I’m sorry about your father, Henry.’

‘Yes…’ Her sympathy made me feel a fraud. I had tried to grieve for him, and had recognised that my only strong emotion was an aversion to being called by his name. I wished to remain myself. Relations and family solicitors clearly took it for granted, however, that having sown a few wild oats I would now settle down into his pattern of life. His death, if I wasn’t careful, would be my destruction.

‘I was pleased to get your letter,’ Gabriella said, ‘because it was awful when you didn’t come with the horses. I thought you had changed your mind about me.’

‘But surely Simon explained?’

‘Who is Simon?’

‘The big fat bald man who went instead of me. He promised to tell you why I couldn’t come, and to give you a bottle.’ I grinned, ‘a bottle of pills.’

‘So they were from you!’

‘Simon gave them to you. I suppose he couldn’t explain why I hadn’t come, because he doesn’t know Italian. I forgot to tell him to speak French.’

She shook her head.

‘One of the crew gave them to me. He said he’d found them in the toilet compartment just after they had landed, and he brought them across to see if I had lost them. He is a tall man, in uniform, I’ve seen him often. It was not your bald, fat Simon.’

‘And Simon didn’t try to talk to you at all?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I see hundreds of bald fat travellers, but no one tried to speak to me about you.’

‘A friendly big man, with kind eyes,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a frightful old green corduroy jacket, with a row of pins in one lapel. He has a habit of picking them up.’

She shook her head again. ‘I didn’t see him.’

Simon had promised to give her my message and the bottle. He had done neither, and he had disappeared. I hadn’t liked to press Yardman too hard to find out where Simon had got to because there was always the chance that too energetic spadework would turn up the export bonus fraud: and I had vaguely assumed that it was because of the fraud that Simon had chosen not to come back. But even if he had decided on the spur of the moment to duck out, he would certainly have kept his promise to see Gabriella. Or didn’t a resuscitated friendship stretch that far?

‘What’s the matter?’ Gabriella asked.

I explained.

‘You are worried about him?’

‘He’s old enough to decide for himself.’ But I was remembering like a cold douche that my predecessor Peters hadn’t come back from Milan, and before him the liaison man Ballard.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said firmly, ‘you will go back to Milan and find him.’

‘I can’t speak Italian.’

‘Undoubtedly you will need an interpreter,’ she nodded. ‘Me.’

‘The best,’ I agreed, smiling.

We walked companionably back to the hotel.

‘Were the pills all right?’ I asked.

‘Perfect, thank you very much. I gave them to the wife of our baker… She works in the bakery normally, but when she gets pregnant she’s always sick for months, and can’t stand the sight of dough, and he gets bad-tempered because he has to pay a man to help him instead. He is not a good Catholic.’ She laughed. ‘He makes me an enormous cake oozing with cream when I take the pills.’

No one took the slightest notice of us in the hotel. I went along the empty passage in my dressing-gown and knocked on her door, and she opened it in hers to let me in. I locked it behind me. ‘If my sister could see us,’ she said smiling, ‘she’d have a fit.’

‘I’ll go away… if you like.’

‘Could you?’ She put her arms round my neck.

‘Very difficult.’

‘I don’t ask it.’

I kissed her. ‘It would be impossible to go now,’ I said.

She sighed happily. ‘I absolutely agree. We will just have to make the best of it’. We did.

We went back to Milan in the morning sitting side by side in the railway carriage and holding hands surreptitiously under her coat, as if by this tiny area of skin contact we could keep alive the total union of the night. I had never wanted to hold hands with anyone before: never realised that it could feel like being plugged into a small electric current, warm, comforting, and vibrant, all at the same time.

Apart from being together, it was a depressing day. No one had seen Simon.

‘He couldn’t just vanish,’ I said in exasperation, standing late in the afternoon in a chilly wind outside the last of the hospitals. We had drawn a blank there as everywhere else, though they had gone to some trouble to make sure for us.

No man of his description had been admitted for any illness or treated for any accident during the past ten days.

‘Where else can we look?’ she said, the tiredness showing in her voice and in the droop of her rounded body. She had been splendid all day, asking questions unendingly from me and translating the replies, calm and business-like and effective. It wasn’t her fault the answers had all been negative. Police, government departments, undertakers, we had tried them all. We had rung up every hotel in Milan and asked for him: he had stayed in none.

‘I suppose we could ask the taxi drivers at the airport…’ I said finally.

‘There are so many. and who would remember one passenger after so long?’

‘He had no luggage,’ I said as I’d said a dozen times before. ‘He didn’t know he was coming here until fifteen minutes before he took off. He couldn’t have made any plans. He doesn’t speak Italian. He hadn’t any Italian money. Where did he go? What did he do?’

She shook her head dispiritedly. There was no answer. We took a tram back to the station and with half an hour to wait made a few last enquiries from the station staff. They didn’t remember him. It was hopeless.

Over dinner at midnight in the same café as the night before we gradually forgot the day’s frustration; but the fruitless grind, though it hadn’t dug up a trace of Simon, had planted foundations beneath Gabriella and me.

She drooped against me going back to the hotel, and I saw with remorse how exhausted she was. ‘I’ve tired you too much.’

She smiled at the anxiety in my voice. ‘You don’t realise how much energy you have.’

‘Energy?’ I repeated in surprise.

‘Yes. It must be that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t look energetic. You’re quiet, and you move like machinery, oiled and smooth. No effort. No jerks. No awkwardness. And inside somewhere is a dynamo. It doesn’t run down. I can feel its power. All day I’ve felt it.’

I laughed. ‘You’re too fanciful.’

‘No. I’m right.’

I shook my head. There were no dynamos ticking away inside me. I was a perfectly ordinary and not too successful man, and the smoothness she saw was only tidiness.

She was already in bed and half asleep when I went along to her room. I locked the door and climbed in beside her, and she made a great effort to wake up for my sake.

‘Go to sleep,’ I said, kissing her lightly. ‘There is always the morning.’

She smiled contentedly and snuggled into my arms, and I lay there cradling her sweet soft body, her head on my chest and her hair against my mouth, and felt almost choked by the intensity with which I wanted to protect her and share with her everything I had: Henry Grey, I thought in surprise in the dark, was suddenly more than half way down the untried track to honest-to-goodness love.

Sunday morning we strolled aimlessly round the city, talking and looking at the mountains of leather work in the shops in the arcades; Sunday afternoon we went improbably to a football match, an unexpected passion of Gabriella’s; and Sunday night we went to bed early because, as she said with her innocent giggle, we would have to be up at six to get her back to start work in the shop on time. But there was something desperate in the way she clung to me during that night, as if it were our last for ever instead of only a week or two, and when I kissed her there were tears on her cheeks.

‘Why are you crying?’ I said, wiping them away with my fingers. ‘Don’t cry.’

‘I don’t know why.’ She sniffed, half laughing. ‘The world is a sad place. Beauty bursts you. An explosion inside. It can only come out as tears.’

I was impossibly moved. I didn’t deserve her tears. I kissed them away in humility and understood why people said love was painful, why Cupid was invented with arrows. Love did pierce the heart, truly.

It wasn’t until we were on the early train to Milan the next morning that she said anything about money, and from her hesitation in beginning I saw that she didn’t want to offend me.

‘I will repay you what you lent me for my bill,’ she said matter-of-factly, but a bit breathlessly. I had pushed the notes into her hand on the way downstairs, as she hadn’t wanted me to pay for her publicly, and she hadn’t enough with her to do it herself.

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘It was a much more expensive place than I’d thought of.’

‘Big hotels ignore you better.’

She laughed. ‘All the same.’

‘No.’

‘But you don’t earn much. You can’t possibly afford it all. The hotel and the train fares, and the dinners.’

‘I earned some money winning a race.’

‘Enough?’

‘I’ll win another race, then it will be enough.’

‘Giulio doesn’t like it that you work with horses.’ She laughed. ‘He says that if you were good enough to be a jockey you’d do it all the time instead of being a groom.’

‘What does Giulio do?’

‘He works for the government in the taxation office.’

‘Ah,’ I said, smiling. ‘Would it help if you told him my father has left me some money? Enough to come to see you, anyway, when I get it.’

‘I’m not sure I’ll tell him. He judges people too much by how much money they’ve got.’

‘Do you want to marry a rich man?’

‘Not to please Giulio.’

‘To please yourself?’

‘Not rich necessarily. But not too poor. I don’t want to worry about how to afford shoes for the children.’

I smoothed her fingers with my own.

‘I think I will have to learn Italian,’ I said.

She gave me the flashing smile. ‘Is English very difficult?’

‘You can practise on me.’

‘If you come back often enough. If your father’s money should not be saved for the future.’

‘I think,’ I said slowly, smiling into her dark eyes, ‘that there will be enough left. Enough to buy the children’s shoes.’

I went to New York with the horses the following day in the teeth of furious opposition from the family. Several relatives were still staying in the house, including my three sharp-tongued eldest sisters, none of whom showed much reserve in airing their views. I sat through a depressing lunch, condemned from all sides. The general opinion was, it seemed, that my unexplained absence over the week-end was disgraceful enough, but that continuing with my job was scandalous. Mother cried hysterical tears and Alice was bitterly reproving.

‘Consider your position,’ they all wailed, more or less in chorus.

I considered my position and left for Yardman’s and Gatwick three hours after returning from Milan.

Mother had again brought up the subject of my early marriage to a suitable heiress. I refrained from telling her I was more or less engaged to a comparatively penniless Italian girl who worked in a gift shop, smuggled birth control pills, and couldn’t speak English. It wasn’t exactly the moment.

The outward trip went without a hitch. Timmie and Conker were along, together with a pair of grooms with four Anglia Bloodstock horses, and in consequence the work went quickly and easily. We were held up for thirty-six hours in New York by an engine fault, and when I rang up Yardman to report our safe return on the Friday morning he asked me to stay at Gatwick, as another bunch of brood mares was to leave that afternoon.

‘Where for?’

‘New York again,’ he said briskly. ‘I’ll come down with the papers myself, early in the afternoon. You can send Timms and Chestnut home. I’m bringing Billy and two others to replace them.’

‘Mr Yardman…’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘If Billy tries to pick a fight, or molests me at all on the way, my employment with you ceases the instant we touch down in New York, and I will not help unload the horses or accept any responsibility for them.’

There was a short shocked silence. He couldn’t afford to have me do what I threatened, in the present sticky state of the business.

‘My dear boy…’ he protested sighing. ‘I don’t want you to have troubles. I’ll speak to Billy. He’s a thoughtless boy.

I’ll tell him not everyone is happy about his little practical jokes.’

‘I’d appreciate it,’ I said with irony at his view of Billy’s behaviour.

Whatever Yardman said to him worked. Billy was sullen, unhelpful, and calculatingly offensive, but for once I completed a return trip with him without a bruise to show for it.

On the way over I sat for a time on a hay bale beside Alf and asked him about Simon’s last trip to Milan. It was hard going, as the old man’s deafness was as impenetrable as seven-eighths cloud.

‘Mr Searle,’ I shouted. ‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Eh?’

After about ten shots the message got through, and he nodded.

‘He came to Milan with us.’

‘That’s right, Alf. Where did he go then?’

‘Eh?’

‘Where did he go then?’

‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said. ‘He didn’t come back.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Eh?’

I yelled again.

‘No. He didn’t say. Perhaps he told Billy. He was talking to Billy, see?’

I saw. I also saw that it was no use my ever asking Billy anything about anything. Yardman would have asked him, anyway, so if Simon had told Billy where he was going Yardman would have known. Unless, of course, Simon had asked Billy not to tell, and he hadn’t. But Simon didn’t like Billy and would never trust him with a secret.

‘Where did Mr Searle go, when you left the plane?’

I was getting hoarse before he answered.

‘I don’t know where he went. He was with Billy and the others. I went across on my own, like, to get a beer. Billy said they were just coming. But they never came.’

‘None of them came?’

There had been the two grooms from the stud beside Simon and Billy, on that trip. Eventually Alf shook his head. ‘I finished my beer and went back to the plane. There was no one there as I ate my lunch.’

I left it at that because my throat couldn’t stand any more.

Coming back we were joined by some extra help in the shape of a large pallid man who didn’t know what to do with his hands and kept rubbing them over the wings of his jodhpurs as if he expected to find pockets there. He was ostensibly accompanying a two-year-old, but I guessed tolerantly he was some relation of the owner or trainer travelling like that to avoid a transatlantic fare. I didn’t get around to checking on it, because the double journey had been very tiring, and I slept soundly nearly all the way back. Alf had to shake me awake as we approached Gatwick. Yawning I set about the unloading – it was by then well into Sunday morning – and still feeling unusually tired, drove home afterwards in a bee line to bed. A letter from Gabriella stopped me in the hall, and I went slowly upstairs reading it.

She had, she said, asked every single taxi driver and all the airport bus drivers if they had taken anywhere a big fat Englishman who couldn’t speak Italian, had no luggage, and was wearing a green corduroy jacket. None of them could remember anyone like that. Also, she said, she had checked with the car hire firms which had agencies at the airport, but none of them had dealt with Simon. She had checked with all the airline’s passenger lists for the day he went to Milan, and the days after: he had not flown off to anywhere.

I lay in a hot bath and thought about whether I should go on trying to find him. Bringing in any professional help, even private detectives, would only set them searching in England for a reason for his disappearance, and they’d all too soon dig it up. A warrant out for his arrest was not what I wanted. It would effectively stop him coming back at all. Very likely he didn’t want to be found in the first place, or he wouldn’t have disappeared so thoroughly, or stayed away so long. But supposing something had happened to him… though what, I couldn’t imagine. And I wouldn’t have thought anything could have happened at all, were it not for Peters and Ballard.

There were Simon’s partners in the fraud. His cousin, and the man in France. Perhaps I could ask them if they had heard from him. I couldn’t ask them, I thought confusedly: I didn’t know their names. Simon had an elderly aunt somewhere, but I didn’t know her name either… the whole thing was too much… and I was going to sleep in the bath.

I went to the wharf building the next morning at nine thirty to collect my previous week’s pay and see what was on the schedule for the future. True to his word, Yardman had arranged no air trips for the following three days of Cheltenham races. There was a big question mark beside a trip for six circus horses for Spain that same afternoon, but no question mark, I was glad to see, about a flight to Milan with brood mares on Friday.

Yardman, when I went down to see him, said the circus horses were postponed until the following Monday owing to their trainer having read in his stars that it was a bad week to travel. Yardman was disgusted. Astrology was bad for business.

‘Milan on Friday, now,’ he said, sliding a pencil to and fro through his fingers. ‘I might come on that trip myself, if I can get away. It’s most awkward, with Searle’s work to be done. I’ve advertised for someone to fill his place… anyway, as I was saying, if I can get away I think I’d better go and see our opposite numbers out there. It always pays, you know, my dear boy. I go to all the countries we export to. About once a year. Keeps us in touch, you know’.

I nodded. Good for business, no doubt.

‘Will you ask them… our opposite numbers… if they saw Simon Searle any time after he landed?’

He looked surprised, the taut skin stretched over his jaw.

‘I could, yes. But I shouldn’t think he told them where he was going, if he didn’t have the courtesy to tell me.’

‘It’s only an outside chance’, I agreed.

‘I’ll ask, though.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll certainly ask.’

I went upstairs again to Simon’s room, shut his door, sat in his chair, and looked out of his window. His room, directly over Yardman’s, had the same panoramic view of the river, from a higher angle. I would like to live there, I thought idly. I liked the shipping, the noise of the docks, the smell of the river, the coming and going. Quite simply, I supposed, I liked the business of transport.

The Finnish ship had gone from the berth opposite and another small freighter had taken her place. A limp flag swung fitfully at her mast head, red and white horizontal stripes with a navy blue triangle and a white star. I looked across at the nationality chart on Simon’s wall. Puerto Rico. Well, well, one lived and learned. Three alphabetical flags lower down, when checked, proved to be E, Q and M. Mildly curious, I turned them up in the international code of signals. ‘I am delivering.’ Quite right and proper. I shut the book, twiddled my thumbs, watched a police launch swoop past doing twenty knots on the ebb, and reflected not for the first time that the London river was a fast rough waterway for small boats.

After a while I picked up the telephone and rang up Fenland to book a plane for Sunday.

‘Two o’clock?’

‘That’ll do me fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Wait a minute, Harry. Mr Wells said if you rang that he wanted a word with you.’

‘O.K.’

There were some clicks, and then Tom’s voice. ‘Harry? Look, for God’s sake, what is this job of yours?’

‘I work for… a travel agency.’

‘Well, what’s so special about it? Come here, and I’ll pay you more.’ He sounded worried and agitated, not casually inviting as before.

‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘Everything’s up except my planes. I’ve landed an excellent contract with a car firm in Coventry ferrying their executives, technicians, salesmen and so on all round the shop. They’ve a factory in Lancashire and tie-ups all over Europe, and they’re fed-up with the airfield they’ve been using. They’re sending me three planes. I’m to maintain them, provide pilots and have them ready when wanted.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘So what’s wrong?’

‘So I don’t want to lose them again before I’ve started. And not only can I not find any out-of-work pilots worth considering, but one of my three regulars went on a skiing holiday last week and broke his leg, the silly bastard. So how about it?’

‘It’s not as easy as you make it sound,’ I said reluctantly.

‘What’s stopping you?’

‘A lot of things… if you’ll be around on Sunday, anyway, we could talk it over.’

He sighed in exasperation. ‘The planes are due here at the end of the month, in just over a fortnight.’

‘Get someone else, if you can,’ I said.

‘Yeah… if I can.’ He was depressed. ‘And if I can’t?’

‘I don’t know. I could do a day a week to help out, but even then…’

‘Even then, what?’

‘There are difficulties.’

‘Nothing to mine, Harry. Nothing to mine. I’ll break you down on Sunday’.

Everyone had troubles, even with success. The higher the tougher, it seemed. I wiggled the button, and asked for another number, the charter airline which Patrick worked for. The Gatwick office answered, and I asked them if they could tell me how to get hold of him.

‘You’re in luck. He’s actually here, in the office. Who’s speaking?’

‘Henry Grey, from Yardman Transport.’

I waited, and he came on the line.

‘Hullo… how’s things? How’s Gabriella?’

‘She,’ I said, ‘is fine. Other things are not. Could you do me a favour?’

‘Shoot.’

‘Could you look up for me the name of the pilot who flew a load of horses to Milan for us a fortnight last Thursday? Also the names of the co-pilot and engineer, and could you also tell me how or when I could talk to one or all of them?’

‘Trouble?’

‘Oh, no trouble for your firm, none at all. But one of our men went over on that trip and didn’t come back, and hasn’t got in touch with us since. I just wanted to find out if the crew had any idea what became of him. He might have told one of them where he was going… anyway, his work is piling up here and we want to find out if he intends to come back.’

‘I see. Hang on then. A fortnight last Thursday?’

‘That’s it.’

He was away several minutes. The cranes got busy on the freighter from Puerto Rico. I yawned.

‘Henry? I’ve got them. The pilot was John Kyle, co-pilot G.L. Rawlings, engineer V.N. Brede. They’re not here, though; they’ve just gone to Arabia, ferrying mountains of luggage from London after some oil chieftain’s visit. He brought about six wives, and they all went shopping.’

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘When do they get back?’

He consulted someone in the background.

‘Sometime Wednesday. They have Thursday off, then another trip to Arabia on Friday.’

‘Some shopping ’, I said gloomily. ‘I can’t get to see them on Wednesday or Thursday. I’m racing at Cheltenham. But I could ring them up on Wednesday night, if you can give me their numbers.’

‘Well,’ said Patrick slowly. ‘John Kyle likes his flutter on the horses.’

‘You don’t think he’d come to Cheltenham, then?’

‘He certainly might, if he isn’t doing anything else.’

‘I’ll get him a member’s badge, and the others too, if they’d like.’

‘Fair enough. Let’s see. I’m going to Holland twice tomorrow. I should think I could see them on Wednesday, if we all get back reasonably on schedule. I’ll tell them what you want, and ring you. If they go to Cheltenham you’ll see them, and if not you can ring them. How’s that?’

‘Marvellous. You’ll find me at the Queen’s Hotel at Cheltenham. I’ll be staying there.’

‘Right, and oh, by the way, I see I’m down for a horse transport flight on Friday to Milan. Is that your mob, or not?’

‘Our mob,’ I agreed. ‘What’s left of it.’

We rang off, and I leaned back in Simon’s chair, pensively biting my thumbnail and surveying the things on his desk: telephone, tray of pens, blank notepad, and a pot of paper clips and pins.

Nothing of any help. Then slowly, methodically, I searched through the drawers. They were predictably packed with export forms of various sorts, but he had taken little of a personal nature to work. Some indigestion tablets, a screwdriver, a pair of green socks, and a plastic box labelled ‘spare keys’. That was the lot. No letters, no bills, no private papers of any sort.

I opened the box of keys. There were about twenty or more, the silt of years. Suitcase keys, a heavy old iron key, car keys. I stirred them up with my finger. A Yale key. I picked it out and looked at it. It was a duplicate, cut for a few shillings from a blank, and had no number. The metal had been dulled by time, but not smoothed from use. I tapped it speculatively on the edge of the desk, thinking that anyway there would be no harm in trying.