They ate their lunch in silence. Rangi had left a copy of The Stage on the bench. Ross looked at it. A small paragraph at the bottom of the page caught his eye. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘This would interest Barrabell. This is the lot he went abroad with. Take a look.’

Lennox bent over the table. He read:

‘The Leftist Players are repeating their successful tour of Soviet Russia. They are now about to go into rehearsal with three contemporary plays. Ring club number for auditions.’

‘That’s the gang he went with before,’ said Ross.

‘He wouldn’t be let go. Not while nobody’s been caught.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I wonder if he’s seen this,’ said Lennox without interest.

They finished their lunch without much conversation.

Barrabell had seen it. He read it carefully and consulted his notebook for the club number.

His bed-sitting room carried the absolute negation of any personal characteristics whatever. It was on the large side, tidy and clean. Its two windows looked across an alleyway at the third-storey shutters of an equally anonymous building.

He opened his wardrobe and took out a battered suitcase with old Aeroflot labels pasted on it. On opening, some tidily folded garments – pyjamas, underclothes and shirts – were revealed and under these a package of press-cuttings and the photograph of a rather good-looking young woman.

The press-cuttings were mainly of productions that he had appeared in but there were also relics of the trial of Harcourt-Smith. A photograph. The man himself, handcuffed between two policemen, entering the Old Bailey and looking blankly at nothing, one of Mr Justice Swithering, and one of William and his mother taken in the street. There were accounts of the trial.

Barrabell read the cuttings and looked at the photographs. He then put them one by one into the dead fireplace and burnt them to ashes. He went to the bathroom on the landing and washed his hands. Then he replaced all the theatrical reviews in the suitcase and looked for a long time at the photograph which was signed ‘Muriel’. His hands trembled. He hid it under the others, shut and locked the case and put it back in the wardrobe.

Now he consulted his copy of The Stage and rang the number given for enquiries about auditions.

He made a quick calculation, arrived at the amount he owed his landlady and put it in a used envelope with a Cellophane window. He wrote her name on the outside and added: ‘Called away very unexpectedly. B.B.’

Whistling almost inaudibly, he re-opened the case and packed into it everything else that he owned in the room. He double-checked every drawer and shelf, put his passport in the breast pocket of his jacket and, after a final look round, picked up his case and left the room. The landlady’s office was locked. He pushed the envelope under the door and walked out.