At this moment, there was a ring on the doorbell and Ross, assuming that this announced the arrival of his patient, tried as hard as he could to put his thoughts about Jane from him entirely – but did not entirely succeed. When a knock on his door came, he stood up and composed his features into the calm and benign alignment he’d perfected in all his years of doctoring. But it was not his patient who came in, it was Becky.

Dropping her grudging little obeisance, she held out a crumpled small package towards him and said: ‘Letter, Sir. Your servant brought it down from Edgars Buildings. He said it looked important.’

Ross took up the letter and saw that it was stained and torn and criss-crossed with the faded stamps of authority from postal offices in Singapore, Aden and Southampton and sealed with a blob of what looked like animal faeces flecked with chaff. For a moment, his heart was lifted by the thought that here, at last, was a letter from Edmund, but he saw directly that it was not Edmund’s writing on the paper.

He dismissed Becky. He sat down at his desk, his mind now gone from Jane and travelling towards the possibility that some catastrophe had befallen his brother. His hands shook as he broke the crusted seal. He peered at a few lines of almost illegible writing and read:

Dear Dr Valentine Ross of 31 Edgars Buildings,

Please hear our prayer. Your brother, Mister Edmun, has fallen captured. He is prisoned by a Dyak tribe. This people take human heads. They ask me for silver in ransom. But I do not have what they ask. Send please money for release of Mister Edmun. They ask five hundred shillings. I am Malay Chief in this region and only I can speak to Dyaks. Please send to me and I will bring this brother to be free. Send to me, Chief Leon at Savage House, Kuching, in Borneo.

Ross read the letter several times. Each time, two conflicting thoughts asserted themselves, almost simultaneously. The first was that what had been written here did indeed describe some terrible crime that threatened to be inflicted upon Edmund; the second was that a trick was being played upon him – upon ‘Dr Valentine Ross of 31 Edgars Buildings’ – and that any silver paid in ransom would go straight into the pocket of Leon, the letter writer. These two interpretations kept sliding up and down in Ross’s mind, as if on some complex moral vector, where nothing remained fixed. Where was the truth?

And he saw that however long he stared at the paper, however long he examined the marks which crowded it and the dirty crumbs which had broken away from the seal, he would get no nearer to any certainty. Yet what he also knew was that the fate of his brother – in the recent delirious times strangely absent from his thoughts – must now be brought back into the forefront of his mind.