“When he’s released, you mean?”

“Yes. When he’s released.” The words were spoken almost as a sigh. She took the photograph back to the mantelpiece, positioned it carefully between a carriage clock and a china rabbit, then looked round and smiled wryly at me. “None of which helps get you off the hook with Bella, of course.”

I shrugged. “Can anything do that?”

“I doubt it. She wants you to disprove something you and I-and probably she-believe to be true. And that’s a game you can’t win, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is.”

“But one you’ll go on playing?”

“I’m afraid I have to.” Now I too summoned a smile. “At least for a little longer.”

Sarah offered me a bed for the night, but I insisted I’d better press on home. It occurred to me, flogging across Salisbury Plain through the inky blackness as rain spat at the windscreen, that the offer might just possibly have been more than a friendly gesture. But then I dismissed the thought. In the prevailing circumstances, Sarah needed a friend far more than she needed an aspiring lover. And so did I.

Besides, my relations with the Paxton family were already quite complicated enough. As the three recorded messages from Bella on my answering machine testified. Each one ended with the same promise: “I’ll call again.” Early the following morning, when I was still only half awake, she did so. And it was immediately obvious the hour didn’t agree with her temper.

“You’ve turned up nothing?”

“It’s not for the want of trying, Bella.”

“Then you’ll just have to try harder.”

“But how? There’s nobody left to ask.”

“This postcard Mrs. Bryant remembers…”

“Thinks she remembers.”

“And thinks was sent from Chamonix. Where Paul claims he never went.”

“Not from Chamonix, according to Paul. Chambéry. A station on the main line from Lyon. It was a ruse. A deliberate blind.”

“Or else his explanation’s the blind. I went to the pension he says he stayed in here in Biarritz yesterday. Showed his photograph to the landlady. She’s never seen him before in her life.”

“You mean she didn’t recognize him.”

“Same difference.”

“No it isn’t, Bella. He spent a few days there more than three years ago. Did you seriously expect her to remember him?”

“The fact is she didn’t. But maybe somebody in Chamonix does.” I knew at once what she was going to say next. And I also knew what my answer was bound to be. “So you’re going to have to go there, Robin. Aren’t you?”

I flew out to Chamonix the following Friday, telling Adrian, Simon and Jennifer that a friend in Brussels needed helping out of an emotional crisis and I was going to see what I could do for him in the course of a long weekend. God knows what Adrian made of it, since he was due to have left for Sydney by the time I got back. Simon suggested I was hoping to discover an EC regulation that the Bushranger bid could be said to contravene. But I don’t think he was serious.

In the event, I might have been better employed on just such an errand. Several days of trekking round the hotels, restaurants, cafés and boarding-houses of an out-of-season Alpine skiing resort from which the vast shadow of the Mont Blanc massif seemed never to lift proved as futile as I’d anticipated-and even more frustrating. Nobody remembered the name Paul Bryant. Nobody recognized the bridegroom’s face in the photograph I’d brought with me of his and Rowena’s wedding. And nobody thought it remotely likely that anybody else would. “Un étudiant, monsieur? Il y a plus de trois ans? Vous plaisantez, non?”

I wasn’t joking, of course. But I might as well have been. I’d had enough by the end of the first day, but felt obliged to plug on. Come the third day, however, I called a halt at lunchtime and rode the cable-car-as Paul had told his mother he’d done-up the mountainside to the Aiguille du Midi. I stared out from the observation platform at the dazzling snowfields that stretched as far as Italy, breathed the clear cold air and reflected on the pointlessness of my journey. Paul had never been there. His footprints were nowhere to be found. But somehow I didn’t think that conclusion was going to satisfy Bella.

Answering to Bella, however, wasn’t the first problem to confront me when I flew home on Tuesday. Liz had left a recorded message saying that Detective Inspector David Joyce of West Mercia C.I.D. would be coming down to see me the following afternoon. And she’d added a disturbing rider. “I tried to tell him I couldn’t confirm the appointment until I’d spoken to you, but he told me he wasn’t asking for an appointment; he was making one.”

He looked as irksomely youthful as he had three years before. I congratulated him on his promotion, which his desultory thanks implied was old news. He enquired after my mother and seemed genuinely sorry to hear of her death. And then, when Liz had delivered the tea and gone again, he weighed in.

“As you may know, sir, we’ve been asked to investigate Paul Bryant’s confession to the murders of Louise Paxton and Oscar Bantock.”

“I knew it was likely to come to that, Inspector, of course. But I didn’t know your investigation was actually under way.”

“Well under way. And already we’ve learnt from Mr. Bryant’s family and from a Mr. Peter Rossington that somebody else seems to be engaged on what you might call a parallel inquiry.”

“Ah. I see.”

“But I don’t, sir. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?”

“The same as you, I imagine. I simply wanted to check Paul’s story before it became public. To spare the family any unnecessary-”

“The Paxton family, you mean?”

“Well, yes, of course.”

“Of which you’re not a member.”

“Not directly, no. More a friend. Although my sister-in-law-”

“Ah yes, the present Lady Paxton. With you. More complicated than the Borgias, isn’t it?” His smile would have been no more than irritating had I thought sarcasm his sole object. But I detected an implication that my connection with Sir Keith’s second wife had aroused his suspicion. Which I doubted could be dispelled by a simple explanation of how such a state of affairs had come about. “Do I take it you’re unconvinced of Mr. Bryant’s guilt?”

“No. But there must be a remote possibility he’s lying.”

“Why would he be lying?”

“I don’t know. But his wife killed herself only four months ago. A thing like that could… well… lead to irrational behaviour.”

“We’ve had a psychiatrist give him the once over. He’s pronounced Mr. Bryant as sane as you or me.”

“Really?”

Joyce’s smile took on a weary edge. “The point is, Mr. Timariot, we’re paid and equipped to enquire into all these matters. And we’re doing so. Thoroughly and expeditiously. Interference from amateurs, however well-meaning, is only likely to obstruct our efforts.” So we’d arrived where I’d assumed we would from the start. The warning off.

“I didn’t realize asking a few questions constituted interference.”

“Well, it does. Raking over the ashes of a dead case is disagreeable enough at the best of times.”

“Especially when you may have to admit you got the wrong man.”

It was a dig I’d been unable to resist. But the flush of anger in Joyce’s face and the steely hint of a threat in his voice made me regret it at once. “Exactly, sir. It could prove very embarrassing. For us-and the witnesses at Naylor’s trial who helped send him down.” He cleared his throat. “I have with me a copy of a statement you signed on the twenty-fifth of July, nineteen ninety.” He pulled the document out of his pocket and held it out. “Do you want to refresh your memory of what you said?”