“Suppose the person or people who took me hadn’t taken me back? I often wonder what made them take me back. After all, they might have got away with it. Andrew and Alison have. Or they have for seven months. When we’ve got them out of the country they’ll have got away with it for good. It would be easier for me to understand my own situation if the police had burst into wherever it was and arrested whoever it was and restored me to my sorrowing parents. But she—he—whoever—took me to that little beach, precisely under the cliff where I was taken from, and left me there. I was three. What kind of a person leaves a child of three alone on a beach, in a cove, with the tide coming in?

“Suppose instead they’d kept me and I’d never been found. What would they have done for me? How would I have been brought up? And where would I be now? A fatalist would say everything would have been the same in the end, because that’s my destiny, to be walking along Torrington Gardens, W9, at ten-thirty on September third, come what may. But I don’t believe that. I think maybe I’d have grown up in Cornwall or south Wales or even America with a different name and different parents and different siblings too. Now I’d be at the University of Cardiff or New York University and I’d never have walked on the roofs.”

I waited for him to say that he’d never have met me, but of course I was disappointed in that. He spoke not another word until we got to the end of the street where the house on its own stood amid its shadowy garden of evergreens and fading roses. Then he said, quite abruptly, that he wasn’t coming back with me but going straight to Holloway to hand the photographs over to Jonny and tell him the passports were to be for Gerald and Pamela Rogers and James Desai.

I’ve been with Darren and Junilla and his children to Disneyland, Paris, on the Eurostar. We stayed overnight and came back the next day with carrier bags full of wine and packs of cigarettes for him and Lysander. Both children were with us so that Campaspe could have a weekend with her new man.