I came up yesterday. I cleaned the cottage, fastened all the windows – unnecessary since it was possible to walk in through the walls – and really raced that Cortina up the hill. I had the radio turned up full blast and I sang along with it, keeping my eyes fixed on the road in front of me, not choosing to look at the sea which was rising like a flood to my left, nor at the picturesque cob dwellings which were receding in my rear view mirror. I didn’t get very far though, only half-way round the second hairpin bend, before I saw Harry Vilbert in the road, his right thumb out and a scrap of cardboard saying LONDON hanging round his chest. I had no option. I had to stop. He looked to be at death’s door, for one thing. And for another I now saw him as a fellow victim. He wasn’t troubled by remorse or compunction either. He was another one to whom it had all just happened.

As I’ve already mentioned, I had only let Harry engage me in conversation once since the day he looked after me in his office at the Museum. And we didn’t discuss much then except the superiority of men to women when it came to longevity of devotion. I would have liked to make it a condition of my getting him safely to LONDON that he sit in total silence throughout the journey, but I didn’t want to upset him. If he died in my car before we were out of Cornwall then I’d never reach Finchley. So I had to let him ramble on about eggs in baskets, water under bridges, ill winds and manilla envelopes. He clearly felt that he had some apologizing to do, because he talked a lot about manilla envelopes; and it was only when we were just outside Exeter that I realized he really was talking about them in the plural. ‘Your memory’s going, Harry,’ I told him. ‘You only gave me one envelope. I remember that clearly. You kept it from me for six hours.’

But there had been another envelope. A bigger one. Harry had no doubt about that. In his excitement at the time he had forgotten to give it to me, and when he went back inside the Museum to fetch it he lacked the courage to come out again, so alternately angry and distressed did I appear. He had brought it up to the cottage later, had not been able to raise me – I was flat out, that’s why; flattened, plastered, and prostrate – and not being able to fit the envelope through the letter box either, he had popped it under the doors of the wooden shed that abutted the cottage. He was surprised that I pumped him for so many details. We were going back eight or nine months. ‘Do you mean you’ve not found it yet?’ he asked.