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day.'
    I had nothing further to say, at least until I'd thought about it all some more, which Damian seemed to understand and did not wish to challenge. He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. 'I'm going to bed now. I haven't been up as late as this for months. You will find the list in an envelope in your room. If you wish, we can discuss it some more tomorrow morning before you go. At the risk of sounding vulgar, as you would say, you'll also find a credit card, which will cover any expenses you care to charge on it during your enquiries. I will not question whatever you choose to use it for.'
    This last detail actively annoyed me as it was deliberately phrased in a manner designed to make me think him generous. But nothing about this commission was generous. It was a hideous imposition. 'I haven't agreed yet,' I said.
    'I hope you will.' He was at the door when he stopped. 'Do you ever see her now?' he asked, confident that I would require no prompting as to the object of his enquiry. Which was correct.
    'No. Not really.' I thought for a painful moment. 'Very occasionally, at a party or a wedding or something. But not really.'
    'You aren't enemies?'
    'Oh, no. We smile. And even talk. We're certainly not enemies. We're not anything.'
    He hesitated, as if he were pondering whether to go down this path. 'You know I was mad.'
    'Yes.'
    'But I want you to understand that I know it, too. I went completely mad.' He paused, as if I might come in with some suitable response. But there wasn't one. 'Would it help if I said I was sorry?' he asked.
    'Not terribly.'
    He nodded, absorbing the information. We both knew there was nothing further to add. 'Stay down here as long as you like. Have some more whisky and look at the books. Some of them will interest you.'
    But I wasn't quite finished. 'Why have you left it until now?' I said. 'Why didn't you make enquiries when you first got the letter?'
    This did make him pause and ponder, as the light from the hall came through the now open door and deepened the lines of his ravaged face. Presumably he asked himself the same question a thousand times a day. 'I don't know. Not completely. Maybe I couldn't bear the thought of anyone feeling they had a claim against me. I didn't see how I could find and identify them without giving them some power. And I'd never really wanted a child. Which is probably why I wouldn't listen to my wife's pleadings. It wasn't one of my ambitions. I don't think I was ever naturally paternal.'
    'Yet now you are prepared to give this unknown stranger enough money to build a small industrial town. Why? What's changed?'
    Damian thought for a moment and a tiny sigh made his thin shoulders rise and fall. The jacket, which must once have fitted flawlessly, flapped loosely around his shrivelled frame. 'I'm dying and I have no beliefs,' he said simply. 'This is my only chance of immortality.'
    Then he was gone and I was left to enjoy his library alone.

TWO
    I have never been a good judge of character. My impressions at first meeting are almost invariably wrong. Although, human nature being what it is, many years had to pass before I could bring myself to admit it. When I was young I thought I had a marvellous instinct to tell good from bad, fine from shoddy, sacred from profane. Damian Baxter, by contrast, was an expert at assessment. He knew at once I was a patsy.
    As it happens, we had both gone up to Cambridge in September 1967, but we were in different colleges and we moved in different crowds, so it was not until the beginning of the summer term of 1968, in early May I think, that our paths first crossed, at a party in the Fellows' Quadrangle of my college, where I was no doubt showing off. I was nineteen and in that heady stage of life for someone like me, at least for someone like me then , when you suddenly realise that the world is more complicated than you had supposed, that there is in fact a vast assortment of people and opportunities on offer, and you will not