Martins said, ‘This lone rider had his best friend shot by the sheriff of a town called Lost Claim Gulch. The story is how he hunted that sheriff down – quite legally – until his revenge was completed.’

‘I never imagined you reading Westerns, Mr Dexter,’ Crabbin said, and it needed all Martins’ resolution to stop Rollo saying, ‘But I write them.’

‘Well, I’m gunning just the same way for Colonel Callaghan.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Heard of Harry Lime?’

‘Yes,’ Crabbin said cautiously, ‘but I didn’t really know him.’

‘I did. He was my best friend.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought he was a very – literary character.’

‘None of my friends are.’

Crabbin blinked nervously behind the horn-rims. He said with an air of appeasement, ‘He was interested in the theatre though. A friend of his – an actress, you know – is learning English at the Institute. He called once or twice to fetch her.’

‘Young or old?’

‘Oh, young, very young. Not a good actress in my opinion.’

Martins remembered the girl by the grave with her hands over her face. He said, ‘I’d like to meet any friend of Harry’s.’

‘She’ll probably be at your lecture.’

‘Austrian?’

‘She claims to be Austrian, but I suspect she’s Hungarian. She works at the Josefstadt.’

‘Why claims to be Austrian?’

‘The Russians sometimes get interested in the Hungarians. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lime had helped her with her papers. She calls herself Schmidt. Anna Schmidt. You can’t imagine a young English actress calling herself Smith, can you? And a pretty one, too. It always struck me as a bit too anonymous to be true.’

Martins felt he had got all he could from Crabbin, so he pleaded tiredness, a long day, promised to ring up in the morning, accepted ten pounds’ worth of bafs for immediate expenses, and went to his room. It seemed to him that he was earning money rapidly – twelve pounds in less than an hour.

He was tired: he realized that when he stretched himself out on his bed in his boots. Within a minute he had left Vienna far behind him and was walking through a dense wood, ankle-deep in snow. An owl hooted, and he felt suddenly lonely and scared. He had an appointment to meet Harry under a particular tree, but in a wood so dense how could he recognize any one tree from the rest? Then he saw a figure and ran towards it: it whistled a familiar tune and his heart lifted with the relief and joy at not after all being alone. The figure turned and it was not Harry at all – just a stranger who grinned at him in a little circle of wet slushy melted snow, while the owl hooted again and again. He woke suddenly to hear the telephone ringing by his bed.

A voice with a trace of foreign accent – only a trace – said, ‘Is that Mr Rollo Martins?’