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growing old," I suggest, enlarging on his thesis for him.
    Nevertheless I have a lump in my throat, I can't deny it. I would put my hand on his shoulder, which is trembling and hot with sweat, except that it is not our way to touch each other.
    "Listen," I say to him. "Are you listening? You're thirty miles from Honeybrook. You can come every Sunday for lunch and tea and tell me how bloody it all is."
    It is the worst invitation I ever extended to anyone in my life.
    Bryant was talking to his notebook, which he held before his face while he taunted me with the record of Larry's phone calls.
    "Mr. Cranmer-sir also features on the incomings, I see. It's not all your funny foreigners. An educated gentleman, always very polite, more like the BBC than human, is how the landlady describes you. Well, that's exactly how I'd describe you myself, no disrespect." He licked a finger and gaily flipped a page. "Then all of a sudden you turn round and cut off the Doctor without a shilling. Well, well. No more incomings, no more outgoings, for three whole weeks. What you might term a radio silence. Slammed the door in his face, you did, Mr. Cranmer-sir, and me and Oliver here were wondering why you did that to him. We wondered what had gone on before you cut him off and what stopped going on once you did. Didn't we, Oliver?"
    He was still smiling. If I had been taking my last walk to the gallows his smile would not have altered. My anger against Merriman swung gratefully towards Bryant.
    "Inspector," I began, gathering heat as I went. "You call yourself a public servant. Yet at ten o'clock on a Sunday night, without a warrant and without an appointment, you have the impertinence to barge your way into my house—two of you—"
    Bryant was already on his feet. His facetious manner had fallen from him like a cloak. "You've been very kind, sir, and we've overstayed our welcome. We got carried away by your conversation, I expect." He slapped a card on my coffee table. "Give us a call, sir, won't you? Anything at all. He rings, he writes, he turns up on your doorstep, you hear something from a third party which could be of assistance in locating him ..." I could have knocked his insinuating smile through his head. "Oh, and in case the Doctor surfaces, would you be so kind as to give us your new telephone number? Thank you."
    He scribbled to my dictation while Luck looked on.
    "Nice piano," Luck said. He was suddenly too close to me, and too tall.
    I said nothing.
    "You play, do you?"
    "It's been known of me."
    "Your wife away?"
    "I have no wife."
    "Same as Pettifer. What branch did you say you were? Of the civil service? I forget."
    "I didn't mention a branch."
    "So what were you?"
    "I was attached to the Treasury."
    "As a linguist?"
    "Not especially."
    "And you didn't find that too negative? The Treasury? Cropping public spending, pegging pay-rounds, no more money for the hospitals? I think that would get me down." Again I disdained a reply. "You should keep a dog, Mr. Cranmer. A place like this. Crying out for one."
    The wind had dropped dead. The rain had ceased, leaving pall of ground mist that made autumn bonfires of the geot's headlights.
    TWO
    I AM NOT given to panic, but that night I came as near to it as I had ever come. Which of us were they pursuing—Larry or me? Or both of us? How much did they know of Emma? Why had Checheyev visited Larry in Bath and when, when, when? Those policemen weren't looking for some fringe academic who had gone walkabout for a few days. They were on a trail, smelling blood, hunting someone who appealed to their most aggressive instincts.
    Yet who did they think he was—Larry, my Larry, our Larry? What had he done? This talk of money, Russians, deals, Checheyev, me, socialism, me again ... How could Larry be anything except what we had made him: a directionless English middle-class revolutionary, a permanent dissident, a dabbler, a dreamer, a habitual rejecter; a ruthless, shiftless, philandering, wasted,