The former joint CEO of Tubal and Co., Nigel Stafford, said in the course of his evidence that the bank had put in place a new and sophisticated program which scanned and analysed every attempt to access the system and grouped the results automatically. Surprisingly quickly, patterns emerged which pointed to Mr Carpenter, who had been let go after the collapse of the Lion Fortress Hedge Fund.

I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.

Estelle has spent the last few months at her cottage in the grounds of the villa. She finds ministering to Sir Simon Trevelyan-Tubal fulfilling. He seems to have taken over Harry’s role in her life. He makes demands, but they are the demands of an innocent child. For instance, he likes Ovaltine beside his bed at night, and he has a very complex regime relating to his bowels. Sometimes, if his bowel function has been poor, he asks for muesli in the middle of the afternoon. He attributes this problem to his travels and the strange things he has eaten. He has sacrificed his bowels to his curiosity.

Estelle misses the Matisse that hung in the hall. Although Harry gave it to her, she is happy to have exchanged it for membership of the family. She is slowing down and she finds that some days she confuses Sir Simon with Sir Harry. Simon looks very much as Harry did when she first worked for him. For his turtle-dove-serenaded and rosemary-scented passeggiata around the garden, he has taken to wearing Harry’s plum-coloured trousers and his Lock’s panama. When his trip to Bhutan is postponed – the yeti hunter has died of pneumonia after too many arduous nights in the service of his king in remote and freezing high-altitude mountain valleys – she finds that she is pleased. They have settled down into a domestic routine: she is his lost mother.

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

Melissa is on the train on the way down to see her parents. As she reads, Flann O’Brien becomes a mantra, in time with the regular, repetitive music of the wheels on the track.

The train is approaching the Tamar. She has told her parents that her blog has won a prize of £5,000, the free-sheet is doing well, and she has been commissioned to write a children’s book. But she has not yet told them that her new boyfriend – it is not a coincidence – is also the editor who has commissioned her to write the book. She doesn’t go straight home to see her parents, although she knows they are waiting eagerly, the fatted calf lowing apprehensively, but takes a taxi to see Mr MacCleod. The estuary is calm today and avocets are fussing on the shoreline.

Artair comes out of the lifeboat station to greet her. His ravaged face is alight.