I actually found the chapel some time before I found Mr Osmonde. He was hard to locate, partly because he owned and serviced personally over thirty apartments on the seafront, and partly because he’d become a slave to the walkie-talkie system he’d installed to improve efficiency. When I finally reached him he was running in two directions at once across a forecourt, a portable telephone pressed to his ear, a three-foot aerial sticking out of the back pocket of his baggy jeans. He took me into his office to write me out a receipt for the rent he preferred that I gave him in advance. It was clear that he was anxious to improve his fortunes. A bound volume of Think and Grow Rich was open at page twenty on his desk, and on the floor I noticed a pile of Entrepreneur Magazine. Other books in the process of being worked through included Increase Your Wealth and How to Get Rich in Mail Order by Melvin Powers. The moment he learnt that I lived in London he asked me if I’d ever had any dealings with a certain firm of business consultants. He had recently sent them out fifty pounds for an advice package on estate management and was beginning to worry that he’d never hear from them again. I was surprised that he didn’t consider himself a rich and successful man already, with over thirty holiday apartments to his name, but like all Midlanders he was constitutionally incapable of self-satisfaction. To be born within a fifty-mile radius of Wolverhampton is a stain that no amount of laundering, not even a regular dip in the bracing waters of Glenelg, can ever remove. Shame sat enthroned in his soft Selly Oak eyes, even though every two or three minutes business bleeped in his back pocket.