No means of knowing. Pure speculation on my part.

The other thing that struck me for the first time from the obituaries was a coincidence of dates. Nineteen eighty-six. A lot of things seemed to have happened in 1986. It was then that Ingrid Richards and her cameraman Phil Dickie had been injured by shrapnel from the car bomb. It was also in 1986 that Niall Connor had achieved the career-changing coup of rescuing Paul McClennan from Hezbollah. Which placed both of Alexandra’s parents in Beirut at the same time.

Was it stretching conjecture too far to think that might have been when their daughter had been conceived?

Alexandra herself might be able to confirm that but I didn’t feel inclined to ring her. I hadn’t yet sorted out in my head where she and Walt stood in the suspect stakes.

But, of course, there was one other person who had maybe witnessed events in Beirut in 1986. The cameraman, Phil Dickie.

I had no idea even whether he was still alive. None of Ingrid Richards’ obituaries confirmed that, though the implication was that he’d certainly survived the injuries received from the car bomb. But there was no other reference to him. Phil Dickie seemed to have vanished off the radar. Though sharing the same risks, cameramen don’t have the kind of profile that reporters do.

When it comes to tracking people down, there’s probably never been a better time in human history. I started with social media. I’m not very keen on it as a concept, but I need a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn for professional reasons. SpaceWoman gets quite a lot of enquiries and bookings that way. Mind you, I’ve never posted anything personal. I only share my life with people I want to share it with. And, though I’m far from reclusive, there are few of those.

Several Philip Dickies listed on Facebook, but none fitted the profile. Though it was entirely possible that the cameraman had moved to Cincinnati or Rolleston, New Zealand, those two candidates were far too young to have been filming in Beirut in 1986.

So, I moved on from social media to a general search. As is so often the case when you go online, the initial results were not promising. The juxtaposition of the two words ‘Philip’ and ‘Dickie’ yielded a surprising number of the results about Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten of Burma, uncle of Prince Philip.

Then I got entangled in a stream of references to the science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick.

After a good few more false leads, I did eventually find something. ‘Philip Dickie Family Films’ said the website. It gave a studio address in Dorking, Surrey. The company offered a service converting cine film to DVD and other media. ‘Preserve Those Memories and Play Them Back at Will with the Latest Technology.’ They did editing, too. ‘Package your Past into a Professional Standard Documentary to Delight Family and Friends.’

It wasn’t a lot to go on, but at least it was related to film. Presumably, the technology had changed considerably from what a cameraman might have been using in 1986, but it was the kind of work that someone invalided out of more active filming might be able to do. It was worth a punt.