On an island? In Corsica? At Monte Carlo watching the croupier spinning his roulette wheel? A house in the country? All sorts of places. And he had been there, and someone else. Yes, someone else. It all tied up with that. He was getting there at last. If he could just…He was interrupted at that moment by the chauffeur coming to the window with the garage mechanic in tow behind him.

‘Won’t be long now, sir,’ the chauffeur assured Mr Satterthwaite cheerfully. ‘Matter of ten minutes or so. Not more.’

‘Nothing seriously wrong,’ said the mechanic, in a low, hoarse, country voice. ‘Teething troubles, as you might say.’

Mr Satterthwaite did not cluck this time. He gnashed his own teeth. A phrase he had often read in books and which in old age he seemed to have got into the habit of doing himself, due, perhaps, to the slight looseness of his upper plate. Really, teething trouble! Toothache. Teeth gnashing. False teeth. One’s whole life centred, he thought, about teeth.

‘Doverton Kingsbourne’s only a few miles away,’ said the chauffeur, ‘and they’ve a taxi here. You could go on in that, sir, and I’d bring the car along later as soon as it’s fixed up.’

‘No!’ said Mr Satterthwaite.

He said the word explosively and both the chauffeur and the mechanic looked startled. Mr Satterthwaite’s eyes were sparkling. His voice was clear and decisive. Memory had come to him.

‘I propose,’ he said, ‘to walk along the road we have just come by. When the car is ready, you will pick me up there. The Harlequin Cafe, I think it is called.’

‘It’s not very much of a place, sir,’ the mechanic advised.

‘That is where I shall be,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, speaking with a kind of regal autocracy.

He walked off briskly. The two men stared after him.

‘Don’t know what’s got into him,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Never seen him like that before.’

The village of Kingsbourne Ducis did not live up to the old world grandeur of its name. It was a smallish village consisting of one street. A few houses. Shops that were dotted rather unevenly, sometimes betraying the fact that they were houses which had been turned into shops or that they were shops which now existed as houses without any industrial intentions.