Or perhaps he was dead, and this was all that was left of him.

Liz gazed at the array of relics and records. Her bell buzzed. Her first patient would be waiting for her. She could not look more closely now. But, as she left for her consulting room, she locked her study door. She did not want the Filipino cleaning lady to see Stephen’s bones.

‘A finger bone?’ echoed Alix Bowen, Liz’s first confidante, with disbelief, impressed.

‘That’s right. Well, two finger bones really. The two middle joints of a little finger, I think. They’re too small to be Stephen’s. He had quite long hands, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he did.’

They had both fallen, instantly, into the habit of speaking of Stephen in the past tense. Wordlessly they acknowledged this and decided to strive against it.

Liz continued, into her new cordless telephone, to describe to her friend Alix the other varied contents of the package. The prose manuscripts, the attempts at a play, the diary notebooks, the postcards, the sketches.

‘Sketches of what?’ Alix wanted to know.

‘Oh, all sorts of bits and pieces. Buildings. Temples. Styles of oriental architecture, labelled. Straw huts. A monkey. A cooking pot resting on three stones. A butterfly. A skull. A boat.’

‘I didn’t know Stephen could draw,’ said Alix.

‘He can’t,’ said Liz, restoring him to life. ‘Or not very well. But he’s had a go.’

‘And there’s no message, no instructions about what you’re supposed to do with all this?’

‘Nothing at all. Or not that I’ve found yet. There may be something hidden away in there. But I’m going to have to go through it all very carefully to find out. Why ever did he send all this stuff to me?’

Alix was silent, wondering the same thing. She had been responsible for introducing Liz to Stephen, and had at one stage hoped and feared that a middle-aged romance might blossom, but they had remained Good Friends. Not such good friends, however, as Alix’s husband Brian and Stephen had been. Brian and Stephen had been buddies, comrades in arms, comrades of letters. Brian would surely have been a more fitting receiver of literary goods. Why had Stephen selected Liz? Should Alix and Brian feel offended, excluded?

Both Liz and Alix appreciated, without mentioning it, the element of sexual innuendo in the sending of a bone. This might in some way be an act of courtship. Stephen would surely not have sent a bone to Brian Bowen.

‘Maybe, of course,’ said Liz, ‘he didn’t select me at all. Maybe somebody else did. The wording of the message to me is ambiguous. Maybe they just happened to come across my address.’

‘Maybe,’ said Alix, mollified.