His friend, realizing the rarity of a Sophia, reluctantly agreed. The deal was done and they ran off downstairs to look for hubcaps. I compared a number with the address that Tamworth had given me and rapped on a door covered with peeling peach-colored paint. It was opened cautiously by a man somewhere in his eighties. He half-hid his face from me with a wrinkled hand, and I showed him my badge.

“You must be Next,” he said in a voice that was really quite sprightly for his age. I ignored the old joke and went in. Tamworth was peering through some binoculars at a room in the building opposite and waved a greeting without looking up. I looked at the old man again and smiled.

“Call me Thursday.”

He seemed gratified at this and shook my hand.

“The name’s Snood; you can call me Junior.”

“Snood?” I echoed. “Any relation to Filbert?”

The old man nodded.

“Filbert, ah yes!” he murmured. “A good lad and a fine son to his father!”

Filbert Snood was the only man who had even remotely interested me since I left Landen ten years ago. Snood had been in the ChronoGuard; he went away on assignment to Tewkesbury and never came back. I had a call from his commanding officer explaining that he had been unavoidably detained. I took that to mean another girl. It hurt at the time but I hadn’t been in love with Filbert. I was certain of that because I had been in love with Landen. When you’ve been there you know it, like seeing a Turner or going for a walk on the west coast of Ireland.

“So you’re his father?”

Snood walked through to the kitchen but I wasn’t going to let it go.

“So how is he? Where’s he living these days?”

The old man fumbled with the kettle.

“I find it hard to talk about Filbert,” he announced at length, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “It was so long ago!”

“He’s dead?” I asked.

“Oh no,” murmured the old man. “He’s not dead; I think you were told he was unavoidably detained, yes?”

“Yes. I thought he had found someone else or something.”

“We thought you would understand; your father was or is, I suppose, in the ChronoGuard and we use certain—let me see—euphemisms.”

He looked at me intently with clear blue eyes staring through heavy lids. My heart thumped heavily.

“What are you saying?” I asked him.

The old man thought about saying something else but then lapsed into silence, paused for a moment and then shuffled back to the main room to mark up videotape labels. There was obviously more to it than just a girl in Tewkesbury, but time was on my side. I let the matter drop.

It gave me a chance to look around the room. A trestle table against one damp wall was stacked with surveillance equipment. A Revox spool-to-spool tape recorder slowly revolved next to a mixing box that placed all seven bugs in the room opposite and the phone line onto eight different tracks of the tape. Set back from the windows were two binoculars, a camera with a powerful telephoto lens, and next to this a video camera recording at slow speed onto a ten-hour tape.