‘Like I said, I had some trouble when I was younger.’

‘What sort of gifts? Chocolates? Flowers?’ Marko is not disguising his disbelief.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you get lunch? You want something to eat?’ I ask.

Frank waves a hand and says he’s fine, but his face says he’d love to eat.

‘We’ve got some curry. It’s not bad. Go on.’

He doesn’t respond, so I get out a bowl, fill it and put it in the microwave. When it is hot I shove a fork into it, and pass it to him. He eats like it is a long time since he has.

Frank finishes, and passes the bowl back to me. ‘That was delicious. Thank you. Sorry — I’m not used to not having a takeaway place on hand. I was too early to have breakfast in town, and I’ve been driving around for hours with no food, and no shops in sight.’ We have crossed some sort of social threshold whereby he is now talking to me like we met in a pub or a service station.

‘You going to give him a tank of fuel now?’ Marko is derisive, but now it’s an act.

‘Had you heard of Tito Slade before?’

‘No. Don’t know a thing about him.’

‘Ever seen a reference to my address anywhere before?’

‘No.’

I tell them the things Elaine told me, and everything that has happened at Elaine’s and at my place, except for the deliveries of the boxes.

Marko is open-mouthed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this, Dave?’

I say something meaningless, and then Frank says, ‘So maybe it was the Vasiliev family that was blackmailing Tito.’

It seems like a reasonable link.

‘What would the Vasiliev family want from a bloke who does pottery and lives in the country?’ Marko has given up on the act. The intrigue has got the better of him.

‘I guess they’d want him to make pottery.’

‘Which means they’d want him to put something illegal in the pottery: it has to be drugs.’ And now Marko is talking as if he is a fictional detective, several steps ahead of us, the case already solved.

I tell him I had the same thought. ‘But the police kind of laughed at me.’

‘But …’ Frank is thinking out loud. ‘I saw an article on the net where this guy made crockery out of …’

‘I know. I saw something about that, too. I think the police probably did as well.’ I explain to Marko, and he looks like he’s not sure whether to laugh or be horrified. The fictional detective is back in the book. His face changes, and he asks, ‘So, the note suggested to you that Tito might know where your brother was buried?

Frank nods. ‘Stupid, I suppose, but I didn’t have anything else.’