He went to his desk. He retrieved a small key and opened each drawer in turn and went through its contents, pulling items out and, with a rapid appraisal, studying each and every one: parliamentary papers, old speeches, drafts and notes for speeches never given, correspondence with constituents, with secretaries, with other parliamentarians, with family members now long dead. There were scrawled notes, envelopes, bills, dockets, tickets, invitations, personal and ministerial diaries going back a decade and more, the original documents and plans for the house, his marriage certificate, a studio portrait of his mother and father—yellowed and mottled with age. And when he had gone through each drawer he started on the polished walnut bookshelves that lined two walls, floor to ceiling, and that contained volumes of parliamentary records and constitutional law and political biographies, and in among them old maps of the colony, school-era Latin and Ancient Greek texts, even some old sea charts and his worn and much-annotated copy of Watkin Tench’s explorations. He pulled out each book, searching inside their covers and behind them.

Nothing. There was nothing.

He stood in the centre of the room. The sweat glistened on his forehead and pooled on his upper lip and at the back of his neck, his shirt was damp and clung to his skin but his body felt cold. Clammy.

He would not panic. Alasdair Dunlevy, Secretary for Public Monies, was not that sort of man, yet it was hard to ignore the myriad hectic thoughts darting about like tiny fish in a pond inside his head, and he could not catch a single one nor make sense of them singly or collectively.

He went to his dressing room and rummaged through each trouser pocket, each coat pocket—but it was absurd! Anything left in his clothing would have long ago been found by the maid and, if not her, then by the laundry.

If he had left something in a pocket …