‘You shouldn’t be carrying so much cash around with you,’ whispered Woody. ‘Why isn’t this in the bank?’

Nguyen shrugged. ‘I not trust bank. Many people have money in bank when Americans leave Vietnam. They would not give money back. They steal. I take care of my own money. This all I have. I want paper to use it as reward. Can do?’

Woody pushed the bag across the table. ‘I’m sorry, no. My paper wouldn’t do that sort of thing. And I don’t think that any newspaper would.’

The old man looked pained by what he’d been told and Woody felt as if he’d just slapped him across the face. He stood up and waited until Nguyen did the same, the bag of money held tightly in his left hand. He offered the right hand to Woody and this time he took it and shook it. He felt intensely sorry for the old man, sorry for what he’d been through and sorry that there was nothing that could be done for him. He heard himself say: ‘Look, why don’t you give me your phone number and if I can think of anything I’ll call you?’

Nguyen smiled gratefully and told Woody the number, repeating it slowly and checking as he wrote it down. Woody didn’t know why but he had a sudden urge to help the old man, to make some sort of gesture to show that he really did care and wasn’t just making polite noises. He wrote down his home number on another sheet of paper and ripped it from the notebook. ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Call me if . . .’ He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, because he knew there was nothing tangible he could offer. Nguyen bowed his head and thanked Woody and then left. Woody watched him walk down the road, a small man in a duffel coat with eleven thousand pounds in a plastic bag. ‘And I thought I’d seen everything,’ he said to himself.

O’Reilly walked up the steps to the main entrance of the police station and turned round so that he could push open the door with his shoulder. He was using both hands to carry a large cardboard box. The box was new and the lettering on it said that it contained a Japanese video recorder. A housewife with a crying child in a pushchair held the door open for him and he smiled boyishly at her.

He took the box over to the enquiries desk and placed it in front of an overweight uniformed constable who looked at him with bored eyes.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ the policeman asked unenthusiastically.

‘I found this in my back garden this morning,’ said O’Reilly, nodding at the box. ‘It’s a video recorder.’

‘You surprise me,’ said the policeman. He opened the flaps at the top of the box and looked inside. He saw a black video recorder, still in its polythene wrapping. There was a blank guarantee card and an instruction booklet.