Behind him, a voice said, ‘You like it?’

Wexford got up on to his haunches. The man who had spoken was older than he, skinny and wrinkled and tough-looking. He had a walnut face, a dry smile and surprisingly good teeth. He wore a sailor’s cap and a blue and white striped tee-shirt, and Wexford recognized him as one of the taxi boatmen.

He replied slowly and carefully, ‘I like it very much. It is pretty, beautiful.’

‘The shores of your country were like this once. But in the nineteenth century a man called Gosse, a marine biologist, wrote a book about them and within a few years collectors had come and divested the rocks of everything.’

Wexford couldn’t help laughing. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon, but I thought . . .’

‘That an old boatman can say “please” and “zank you” and “ten dinara”?’

‘Something like that.’ Wexford got up to stand inches taller than the other man. ‘You speak remarkable English.’

A broad smile. ‘No, it is too pedantic. I have only once been to England and that many years ago.’ He put out his hand. ‘How do you do, gospodine? Ivo Racic at your service.’

‘Reginald Wexford.’

The hand was iron hard but the grip gentle. Racic said, ‘I do not wish to intrude. I spoke to you because it is rare to find a tourist interested in nature. With most it is only the sunbathing and the food and drink, eh? Or to catch the fish and take the shells.’

‘Come and have a drink,’ said Wexford, ‘or are you working?’

‘Josip and Mirko and I, we have a little syndicate, and they will not mind if I have a half an hour off. But I buy the drinks. This is my country and you are my guest.’

They walked towards the avenue of stout palm trees. ‘I was born here in Mirna,’ said Racic. ‘At eighteen I left for the university and when I retired and came back here after forty years and more, those palm trees were just the same, no bigger, no different. Nothing was changed till they built the hotels.’

‘What did you do in those forty years? Not run a boat service?’

‘I was professor of Anglo-Saxon studies at the University of Beograd, Gospodin Wexford.’

‘Ah,’ said Wexford, ‘all is made plain. And when you retired you took up with Josip and Mirko to run the water taxis. Perhaps they were childhood friends?’

‘They were. I see you have perspicacity. And may I enquire in return what is your occupation?’

Wexford said what he always said on holiday, ‘I’m a civil servant.’

Racic smiled. ‘Here in Yugoslavia we are all civil servants. But let us go for our drinks. Hajdemo, drug!’

They chose a cluster of tables set under a vine-covered canopy, through which the sun made a gentle dappling on cobbles. Racic drank slivovic. The fiery brandy with its hinted undertaste of plums was forbidden to Wexford who had to watch his blood pressure. He even felt guilty when the white wine called Posip which Racic ordered for him arrived in a tumbler filled to the brim.