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of him after they left for Cambridge in the autumn of 1975, though no return to the Island was complete without at least one visit to the old man. He never accused them of neglecting him. Somewhere, Eusden had a photograph taken by Gemma of the three of them – Richard, Marty and Clem – standing together on the Parade in Cowes, with the QE2 visible out to sea, cruising up the Solent towards Southampton. Clem had just passed ninety then, but looked as spry as ever.
    Eusden remembered borrowing a photographic history of the Island from Newport Library once in an attempt to imagine the Cowes of Clem’s youth. The town had a pier then; women wore long dresses and wide-brimmed hats; the men boaters and high-collared jackets with waistcoats. The sun seemed always to be shining, pennants fluttering from the massed yachts on regatta days, watched by parasol-twirling ladies. Ironically, Eusden would need an equivalent volume for more recent decades to re-imagine his own youth now: the ice-cream days of summer, when he and Marty took buses to distant parts of the Island, supplied with sandwiches and orange squash by their mothers, free to roam and explore. Alum Bay, Tennyson Down, Blackgang Chine, Culver Cliff: the places were all still there; but the times were gone, beyond recall.
    Over the years, Eusden’s visits to the Island had become fewer and farther between. His sister Judith still lived there. She and her husband ran a garden centre at Rookley. Physically, his mother was still there too, vegetating in a nursing home at Seaview; mentally, though, she had left long since. Judith occasionally rebuked him for neglecting his nephew and niece. He found it impossible to explain to her just how painful it was for him to return to the sights and sounds of his childhood and adolescence. ‘When you went off to Cambridge, I thought you’d be back for Christmas,’ she said to him in a soulful moment after their father’s funeral. ‘But you know what, Richard? You never did come back. Not really.’
    When Clem Hewitson died, in the summer of 1983, aged ninety-six, Marty was in the Middle East. He did not attend the funeral. Neither did Eusden. He had often regretted his absence, though he doubted Clem would have held it against him. The old man was as hard to offend as he was toforget.
    As the train drew out of Waterloo station, Eusden gazed up at the attaché case lodged in the luggage rack above his head. The mere sight of those initials – CEH – had plunged him into helpless reminiscence. This had made him wonder if Marty wanted whatever the case contained to reconcile himself to his past in some way; to make peace with the times and the places – and the people – he had effectively fled from. It was hard to conceive of any other reason why he should be so eager to retrieve it. But there might be such a reason. Eusden realized that. And in two and a half hours, he would find out whether there was or not.

BRUXELLES

FIVE
    The Belgian countryside and the outskirts of Brussels had looked grey and bleak through the train window. But there was nothing to be seen of the outside world on the concourse of Bruxelles-Midi station. Eusden was in a man-made realm of platform buttresses and garishly lit retail units: fast food and quick fashion amidst the tidal swash of travellers. There was nothing to be seen of Marty either, at the spot where he had told Gemma he would be waiting: Sam’s Café, adjacent to the escalator down from Eurostar Arrivals. This did not worry Eusden unduly. The train had got in ahead of schedule and Marty had never been on time for anything in his life. Eusden changed a tenner into euros at the Western Union next to the café, bought himself a coffee and sat down at one of the tables out front.
    Ten minutes later, he was beginning to grow a little anxious. Marty was not a well man. It was easy to imagine some disaster had overtaken him. Eusden decided to check the arrivals screen for trains from