In the days that followed, I monitored the newswires for anything that might indicate whose death I had been witness to. I waited for Walt to get in touch. I even made discreet enquiries about Big D’s in Belize City. It was a brothel, army approved, and favoured by the British soldiers stationed at various posts along the border. It was a place where a person could keep their secrets, and where anything could be bought or sold. It wasn’t mentioned in connection with any accidents on the international news pages. And nothing on the radio broadcasts spoke of a crash involving an American, a Brit and a Spanish-speaking woman.

Walt never asked for the recording. He didn’t even say goodbye. A fortnight after that night in the crypt, word reached me that his unit was being wound up and that Walt had either quit or been given his marching orders. Nobody really understood what he’d done wrong but the presumption was that he’d simply pissed off the wrong people one too many times. I was transferred to a new posting almost immediately. It was weeks later that one of the Deck of Clubs tracked me down and gently enquired whether I knew what Walt had been up to in his last few days in his post. Had he, by any chance, asked me to listen in to a recording? I denied it, of course. Then I went home to destroy the transcript. I don’t think I could tell you why I decided not to burn it. Perhaps it was the use of the word ‘Father’. It represented the last words of three people in their last moments of life. Who was I to put a flame to it? So I put it inside one of my battered old textbooks from university and shipped it up, along with two other crates of dog-eared paperbacks, to the increasingly dilapidated Gilsland house. It was the sort of place that welcomed secrets.

Walt didn’t ask about the recording when we met in the cemetery. I don’t know who took the recording from beneath the tomb in the intervening years. It wasn’t there last night, I know that. I popped back after Walt had vacated the place and rummaged around in the dark. The blanket was still there, soggy and almost rotten away. But the recording was long since gone.

I gripped the lighter. Thought again about the man on the train and those scars on his neck. He’d served in Belize. Walt’s network utilized a brothel in Belize City. And now Walt was back in my life and I was being set up as a potential subversive. There had to be a link but I couldn’t make the pieces fit.