“I was saying how we left everything behind and how we’d only told Gordon and, up to a point, our cleaner. We knew someone who had a trailer on a site near Orford in Suffolk. We’d been there in the summer and we still had the key. We reasoned that no one would be there in February and we were right.”

But the bitter cold of that North Sea coast in winter had been too much for them, that and the fear that the very unlikelihood of anyone’s wishing to live in a holiday trailer at that season and in that weather would draw attention to them. They had already aroused the suspicions of the caretaker who made the rounds of the place a couple of times a week. Ironically, among all the false sightings by people with active imaginations, this man who had had a true sighting and who probably knew it told no one. They went by bus, a train, a tube train, another train, and another bus to a place near Guildford and into an hotel. All this, of course, was an adventure to Jason. The hotel was a place people went to to play golf. In the winter the few guests played bridge. Andrew, who had been a keen bridge player some years before, joined in, mainly not to draw attention to himself. He had shaved off his beard and Alison had managed to buy a brunette wig in Ipswich from a shop near the station while they had an hour-long wait for the London train. Only Jason eluded disguise and this frightened them.

The hotel was comfortable and warm, the food good, and no one seemed suspicious. But it was too expensive. They had no income now, only capital to live on. They moved into a cheaper place, a B-and-B in Bognor Regis, one of the few open in winter. By this time it was the beginning of March. Alison kept in touch with her half-brother by phone. When she and Andrew were thinking of moving on again, Jason attracting too much attention from the woman who ran the B-and-B—she was always asking about him, where did he come from, he couldn’t be their child with that coloring, did he come from “one of those places out East”—Alison got a letter from Gordon. He had spoken to Louis Robinson about their plight, pretty sure he could trust him, but saying nothing of their whereabouts or the name they were using.

“Okay, but who is Louis Robinson?” Silver asked. “An old family friend or something?”

“His wife and my mother were at school together, it goes that far back. She died and he went to live in the house they had in France. He’s quite old, about seventy. This house is where they used to live.”