We just looked at her. “You’ll have to get a visa.”

“They’ll take less notice of a woman than a man. I can say I’m his aunt. Look at me, I might be his aunt.”

Morna was dark-haired and dark-eyed and her skin was sallow with no red flush on the cheeks, she was tall and big and voluptuous, her neck and arms deeply tanned, but somehow just the same she looked like what she was, a Celt born of Irish parents in Dublin. No sensitive person would have taken her for Asian but perhaps passport-control people weren’t very sensitive. Still, her offer was too good to turn down. She was a better bet than a young blond man.

We said Andrew and Alison would be very grateful, though we weren’t really sure they would be.

“If they’ve any qualms, tell them I was the first to see Andrew Lane. I spotted him when no one knew where he was. But hadn’t I better come and see them myself first?”

We agreed and said we’d take her there. The most important thing was for her to meet Jason and, if possible, get him to like her and want to go with her. Morna agreed to Friday, produced for our pudding course a large apple crumble, and began on a long involved tale about how she had seen Lauren Bacall in Fortnum’s, but it couldn’t have been her because she’d seen a photograph of her at some Hollywood premiere the very same night.

“Maybe she can be in two places at once,” Silver said. “There’s a priest called Padre Pio that can. I read about him in the paper.”

I kept my diary quite meticulously from that day forward, noting the weather and the temperature and the comings and goings of visitors to the flat. Somehow I knew this time would be important and should be recorded. Of course, I didn’t know it would be important in a quite different way from what I had expected. The day Morna offered to go to Australia in Silver’s place was Thursday, September 16. On the 17th I was up early because I had to take our washing to the launderette—the first time either of us had gone since Silver’s discovery of Guy’s letter—and then go to work at the Houghtons’. I had just made tea when Wim came out of Liv’s bedroom. He’d already been down and brought up the newspapers.

“I’ll take her in a cup,” he said, astonishing me.