Now his fingers found the dough and kneaded while I talked to him. He was quiet, mostly. I tried to work back to how I’d found him, before the Bengali turned up. I wanted to understand how he had ended up senseless on his floor with a starving dog and a cracked head but, as always, he told me I had misread the situation and it was nowhere near so dire. I waited after that, chose my moment.

‘Are we going to talk about this…ridiculous idea?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he grunted as he worked the dough. He spread his hands on the floured table. ‘We may discuss it, but there is no question about the matter. I must go.’

I looked at him in disbelief: he looked near the rafters somewhere.

‘Papa, your poor head misleads you. This is work for a government cutter. You investigated a shipwreck once, many years ago, and it did not end well. It would be idiocy to dabble in this.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Idiocy?’ His voice lost its warmth. ‘Is that how you address your father?’

I took his hands—they were tacky with dough. ‘You are old now. You have suffered enough: you haven’t been on a ship for many years…do I need to go on?’

‘…and tell me a blind man is no use to anyone? Is that it?’

I said nothing.

‘What Srinivas wants is beyond small matters like sight.’ He waved an irritable hand. ‘The having of eyes or ears or even clear wits is of no importance. Surely you can see what the lascar is trying to do, Eliza. He is giving me an opportunity. The taking of that ship of his? It can be the work of one man only, and he is a man who will easily evade a government cutter, if that is what he wants to do.’

‘Then why doesn’t Srinivas go and do it, if he’s so sure it’s this man behind it all?’

‘You heard him.’ My father had taken on a tone one would use with a recalcitrant child. ‘He’s been trying for years. Figge toys with him, evades him with ease, because it is not the lascar that he’s seeking. He will reveal himself to me. Only to me.’

I felt a weariness come over me. My father was hopelessly fixated upon a man who had wronged him thirty-three years ago. He would be as old as my father now and quite likely just as enfeebled.