She stared at him in genuine astonishment and then started to laugh. ‘You, a farmer? I’ll believe that when I see it.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

‘Name me one.’

‘You selling yourself as an old man’s bed warmer,’ he said with a brutality that stunned her into silence.

As they approached the river, they saw no other traffic and moved into an area of dark canyons flanked by great warehouses shuttered and barred for the night. Garvald braked to a halt at her direction underneath a lamp in a narrow alley beside a gate. Through the iron bars he could see the riding lights of barges moored on the far side of the river glowing through the fog, but the only sound was the lapping of water against the wharf pilings.

‘We’ll have to walk from here,’ she told him.

He got out and moved round to join her. The main gates were locked, but a small judas at one side opened to her touch and they passed through.

One or two ancient gas lamps bracketed to the warehouse walls gave some kind of light, but the fog rolling in from the river reduced visibility considerably.

They passed a door with a sign above it which read Hagen’s Wharf – General Office and continued across the black shining cobbles to the final lamp at the end of the old warehouse. Beyond that, the railings and wooden planks of the wharf disappeared into the fog and darkness of the river.

‘Damn!’ Bella said. ‘The light’s out at the end of the pier. You can’t trust these blasted watchmen for more than ten minutes at any one time.’

‘Is the boat tied up out there?’

She nodded. ‘You wait here. I’ll go back to the office for a hand lamp. I’ve got a key.’

She walked away quickly, the sound of her leather boots on the cobbles dying away almost at once. Garvald took out a cigarette, lit it and stood there staring gloomily into the fog.

By rights, he should have been feeling great because for the first time in his life he was really trying to break out of something. Instead, he felt strangely sad. The lamp above his head, the wharf in front of him stretching into darkness, seemed unreal and transitory as if they might dissolve into the fog at any moment.

The years that the locusts have eaten. As the quotation jumped into his mind, it carried with it a memory of his old grandmother, her Bible on her knee, reading on a Friday night to a boy who still had life ahead of him with all its hopes and dreams and breathless wonderment.

He heard her steps on the cobbles again and started to turn. ‘That didn’t take long.’