Grudgingly, Cyril had begun to swim towards the other man, and it was only when the two spars to which they clung collided gently that the idea had come to him. Here was his chance! He could see Ernie’s pay book poking out of his breast pocket. No one was in sight; he and Ernie were alone on the face of the ocean save for the small sloop bearing down on them, and even as Ernie began to thank the man he plainly considered his rescuer Cyril made up his mind. Swiftly, he grabbed Ernie’s pay book and thrust it into his own pocket, before bringing his fist down on Ernie’s hands and tipping him, without a qualm, into the sea. Ernie Beaver had simply slid down towards the ocean bed far below, and Cyril, looking around him once more, could see no one near enough to have spotted his action. He began to grin, even to laugh, but hastily pulled a grave face as the sloop drew near and cast out a rope ladder and one of the crew leaned over the rail and bade him climb up to the deck as fast as possible. At least Cyril supposed the man said something of the sort, but since he spoke in a language Cyril could not identify his words could only be guessed at. But then another voice had been raised, speaking fractured English. ‘What happened to ze ozzer bloke?’

For a moment Cyril, almost at the top of the ladder, felt a pang of icy fear, but he said, as he landed on the deck with a thump: ‘Other bloke? What do you mean? There weren’t no one else . . .’ And then inspiration came to him. ‘Oh, you must mean Cyril Huxtable. He were dead when our spars collided and the jolt sent him into Davy Jones’s locker, I reckon.’

Lie with conviction and you’ll never be found out, he told himself. Believe you are speaking nothing but the truth. This is the moment you get the chance to be a hero, the man who almost saved Cyril Huxtable’s life, but sadly arrived just minutes too late.

He did not have long to bask in glory. The rescue sloop handed him over to a merchantman heading first for New York and then for Liverpool, so his celebrity was short-lived. The officers aboard the merchantman merely gave him the berth of a man who had been swept overboard in a storm and kept Cyril’s nose to the grindstone.

But now they were approaching Liverpool; he could see the Liver Birds through the morning mist as he stumbled up on deck to take over the watch. This would be his first arrival at his former home port in his new identity, and he just hoped that no one would hail him by his real name. But he had shaved off his beard, and to the best of his recollection no one on this side of the Atlantic had ever seen him without it, so he should be safe enough. Once he’d had a drink – several drinks – at a pub he had rarely frequented in his old life, he meant to go straight to his mother and enlist her support.