Kim has invited her to Martha’s Vineyard for the house-warming in July, but she is dreading telling her that she is living with Bryce. Also she wonders how Julian will take the news. It’s not dignified: Bryce was Julian’s employee. She loves Bryce and she won’t go to Martha’s Vineyard without him. Bryce has a quality she has never encountered: he is completely content – bien dans sa peau. He makes few demands and he says that having an ankle-biter will be totally awesome. He foresees no difficulties. In fact he seems to have no idea of futurity. She has only been to Antibes once, just before the memorial service, and it was then that she met up with Bryce again. Simon has been living in the villa temporarily: he is off to Bhutan soon, at the invitation of the King, to look for the yeti. The King has a personal yeti-finder; this man searches assiduously. He has made a photographic record of unexplained footprints, and collected some fur.

Fleur marvels at the way things turn out. What Artair said to her has, improbably, proved to be right: she has found someone to love whole-heartedly and without reservation.

There are beginnings and there are ends, and there are also many ways of telling the same story.

Alan39 was given an eight-month sentence, half of it suspended. It turned out that he was indeed one of the hedge-fund managers, as Julian guessed; he had learned, months before he was fired, how to hack into the system. He was bitterly angry because he believed he was cheated of a bonus owed to him by the bank. He claimed in court that he had sold the information to First Federal Bank to help them in their bid for Tubal and Co., but no credible evidence of this claim was produced by his barrister. The barrister also said that his client had had contact with an unnamed person acting for First Federal Bank of New York and he had given this unnamed person the printouts in return for $150,000. He was paid in cash. It was this individual’s idea that he should leak the information to the press. The Serious Organised Crime Agency’s counsel said that the defendant, Mr Patrick Carpenter – Alan39 – had been unable to produce evidence of this transaction. The agency had seized his computer in a raid and obtained all his phone records without finding any connection to First Federal. Nor was there evidence of any bank deposits that could have related to the supposed $150,000. He appeared to have been motivated entirely by a desire for revenge.