The bus completed its descent and with a following cloud of dust began to travel across the plateau. Against some distant region of cloud a system of mountains revealed glittering spear upon spear. One would have said that these must be the ultimate expression of loftiness but soon the clouds parted and there, remote from them, was the shining horn of the great peak, the cloud piercer, Aorangi. The passenger was so intent upon this unfolding picture that he had no eyes for the road and they were close upon the forks before he saw the sign post with its two arms at right-angles. The car pulled up beside them and he read their legends: ‘Main South Road’ and ‘Mount Moon’.

The air was lively with the sound of grasshoppers. Its touch was fresh and invigorating. A tall young man wearing a brown jacket and grey trousers, came round the car to meet him. ‘Mr Alleyn? I’m Fabian Losse.’ He took a mail bag from the driver, who had already begun to unload Alleyn’s luggage and a large box of stores for Mount Moon. The service car drove away to the south in its attendant cloud of dust. Alleyn and Losse took the road to Mount Moon.

‘It’s a relief to me that you’ve come, sir,’ said Losse after they had driven in silence for some minutes. ‘I hope I haven’t misled you with my dark hints of espionage. They had to be dark, you know, because they are based entirely on conjecture. Personally I find the whole theory of espionage dubious, indeed I don’t believe in it for a moment. But I used it as bait.’

‘Does anyone believe in it?’

‘My deceased aunt’s nephew, Douglas Grace, urges it passionately. He wanted to come and meet you in order to press his case but I thought I’d get in first. After all it was I who wrote to you and not Douglas.’

The road they had taken was rough, little more than a pair of wheel tracks separated by a tussocky ridge. It ran up to the foothills of the eastern mountains and skirted them. Far to the west now, midway across the plateau, Alleyn could still see the service car, a clouded point of movement driving south.

‘I didn’t expect you to come,’ said Fabian Losse.

‘No?’