‘That’s it. But you’d better let me telephone her. She’ll have the police out after you, or do something silly, you know …’

‘But not where I am? For God’s sake. She’ll be here in a flash.’

‘I’ll handle it my way, leave it to me. She won’t. And I won’t tell her where you are. Just that you are all right, so on … that you’ll write: one day. Eh?’

‘One day, maybe. I’ll see.’

‘Finish your coffee and we’ll go over to the warehouse; see Georgie.’

Desmond had inherited Moviedecor Ltd from his father on demobilization from the RAF in 1946. Then just a secondhand furniture shop and junk dealer’s called simply ‘Bennett’s Bargains’, which under his careful and shrewd eye prospered into ‘Bennett’s Antiques and Second-hand Furniture’, then ‘Antiques’.

When he realized that he could make more out of renting his stock to film studios and commercial photographers as ‘props’ he enlarged his premises, changed to ‘Moviedecor Ltd’, and was justifiably proud to have it known in the business that he could supply, at short notice, anything from a stuffed hedgehog to a fully furnished Georgian pine-panelled room, a Persian lacquer pen-box, or the entire staircase from a long demolished Wyatt mansion. He travelled the country securing his ‘bits and pieces’, as he called them, and the warehouses which he acquired were jammed from floor to rafters with the products of his journeys.

Into this strange world of wood, glass, porcelain, stone and stuffed animals of every sort, Marcus settled very easily. He liked the feel of the things, the fabrics, the plaster, the smell of beeswax, the sudden calls for anything from a bed-pan to a wine glass; he loaded and unloaded the many vans, polished and dusted, washed and burnished, was shortly put on the payroll by an impressed Desmond, rented a couple of rooms which he shared with a bright youth who was an expert French-polisher, went to night school in Hammersmith, and, by the time that he was eighteen, was driving the vans himself and checking the long inventories nightly with Georgie. He had seized the odd chances offered by Desmond and had, as he had promised, taken all that was on offer ‘with both hands open’. He had never looked back and never returned to the dank Dorking cottage or set eyes on Decca who, after three or four half-hearted efforts to force him to come back, which had run the gamut from fury to grovelling, had given up and drifted completely out of his life, except when she inadvertently appeared on his television screen, at which time he calmly switched channels.

One morning he found Georgie sitting hunched over his ledgers in the cluttered cubby hole at the end of Shed Three which he called his Office.

‘The Pinewood stuff loaded then?’ said Georgie. Marcus nodded.

‘I think we’ve hit a bit of a snag here,’ said Georgie, prodding his ledger with a thumb. ‘You know if we’ve got a stuffed ‘orse, chestnut or black, rearing, and a pair of vultures? One’s got to be circling, wings open? Do you know if we have?’