None the less, it was during our brief period of creative partnership that my father took his photograph. It caught us in characteristic poses: Joan sitting eager and upright, a trusting, toothy grin lighting up her face, while I half turned away from the camera, a pencil held to my lips, my head inclined at an introspective angle. My father made two prints from the negative, and gave us one each. For many years, she told me, Joan kept her copy in a secret drawer, where it occupied a special place even among her most prized possessions. But I chose to have it on show in my bedroom; and before very long, as so often happens with these childish treasures, it was lost.

∗

Barkers Bank Ltd,

The Counting House,

Lucre Lane,

Shillingham.

23 July 1960

Dear Mr Owen,

We were most interested to hear that you have recently received a rise in your pocket money to the tune of 6d a week. With your weekly income now totalling 3s, we thought you might like to hear of some of our new savings opportunities.

May we recommend, for instance, our Bonanza Budget account? This package combines minimum investment with maximum growth. In fact one of our customers, who only opened his account last month, has already shot up to more than 6′ 6″.

Failing that, as a farm-dweller you may like to consider our Piggy Bank Special. We supply the pig, you supply the cash – and you might end up saving more than your bacon! At the end of the year, you could find yourself with a lump sum of more than £1 IS(or a ‘guinea pig’, as we like to call it) simply by depositing sixpence a week: we wouldn’t suggest anything rasher.

Incidentally, as one of our most valued customers, you are now entitled to join the bank’s social club, which meets every Tuesday at ‘The Quids Inn’ for an evening of capital entertainment and first-class cuisine: whether your taste runs to bags of dough, some royal mint or just the occasional bit of lolly, we’d be glad to have you along.

Yours in the pink,

Midas Touch,

(Manager).

∗

There is one other dream that I can remember clearly, and it dates from several years later, when I was fifteen. On Wednesday March 27th 1968, in the early hours of the morning, I dreamed that I was flying in a small jet plane which suddenly and for no apparent reason began to plummet to the earth. I can still hear the quiet hum of the engine turned to a throaty splutter, and see the wall of dense grey cloud appear out of nowhere. The window shatters loudly and in an instant there are shards of glass hurling themselves at me, spearing my arms and shoulders, and now there is a mighty rush of air, throwing me backwards into bruising collision with the fuselage, and now we plunge, hurtling downwards at unthinkable speed, and I am hollow, my body is an empty shell, my mouth is open and everything that was inside me has been left way behind, way up in the sky, and the noise is deafening, the terrible whine of engine and airstream, and yet above it all I can still hear myself talking, for I am repeating a phrase, either to myself or to some absent listener, evenly and without emphasis, I repeat the words: ‘I’m going down. I’m going down. I’m going down.’ And then there is the final scream of metal, the piercing laceration as sections of the fuselage start to tear themselves apart, until at once the whole plane breaks up and shoots off in a million different directions, and I am in freefall, diving, unshackled, nothing but blue sky between me and the earth which I can see clearly now, rising up to meet me, the coasts of continents, islands, big rivers, big surfaces of water. I am no longer in pain, I am no longer afraid, I have already forgotten what it means to feel these things: I merely notice that the shadow of the earth has begun to swallow the delicate blue of the sky, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.

Then I wake up, not shaking or sweating or shouting for my father, but registering, with a sense of anti-climax, even regret, the fact of my familiar shadowed bedroom and the unresponding night outside. I turn over and lie awake for a few minutes before falling again, this time into a dreamless and pellucid sleep.

It was two days later, over breakfast on the Friday morning, that my father passed me his copy of The Times and I learned that Yuri Gagarin was dead, and his co-pilot too, their two-seat jet trainer having crashed at Kirzhatsk just as I was having my dream. The last that anyone had heard from Yuri was the calm announcement ‘I’m going down’ as he tried to steer his aircraft away from a populated area. I didn’t believe it at first, not until I saw a photograph in the next day’s paper which showed the building where his ashes had been put on display, the Central House of the Soviet Army; and coiled around it, threading through the blackened streets, a queue of mourners six deep and three miles long.

∗

… Si vous dormez, si vous rêvez, acceptez vos rêves. C’est le rôle du dormeur …

The envelope dropped to the floor. Immediately, roused by its arrival as nothing else could have roused me, I swung my legs out of bed and rushed into the hallway to retrieve it. It bore a first-class stamp and was addressed to ‘M Owen, Esq’ in elegant, spidery handwriting. Too impatient to go into the kitchen for a knife, I opened it roughly with my thumb, then took it into the sitting room and began to read the following communication, my astonishment mounting with every sentence:

Dear Mr Owen,

This brief, too hastily written notelet is by way of apology, and by way of a proposal.

Apologies first. I have, let me be the first to admit it, been the perpetrator of several crimes, against your property, and against your person. My only excuse – my only claim, in fact, upon your mercy and forgiveness – is that I have always acted out of motives of humanity. For many years now, I have been deeply interested in the case of Miss Tabitha Winshaw, whose long and unwarranted confinement I regard as one of the most shocking injustices I have ever encountered in my professional career. Accordingly, when I learned, through your advertisement in The Times, that you were engaged on an investigation into circumstances not wholly unrelated to this matter, my curiosity was at once excited.

You must pardon the eccentricities, Mr Owen (or may I call you Michael, for I must admit to feeling, having read your two excellent novels, that we are already the oldest and dearest of friends) – you must pardon the eccentricities, as I said, of a wayward old man, who, rather than approaching you direct, preferred to sound out the territory in advance, according to his own tried and tested methods. I must confess that it was I, Michael, who broke into the office of your remarkable publishers, and pilfered your manuscript; it was I who followed your taxi home the very next day; it was I, wishing to make personal contact with you, in order to assure you of the honesty of my intentions, who approached you outside a restaurant in Battersea, and was privileged – if somewhat surprised – to receive a gift of twenty pence from your charming companion (a cheque for which sum you will find enclosed with this letter); and it was I, you will have guessed by now, who followed you both home from the restaurant, my aged legs struggling to keep pace, and finally, through a sad miscalculation on my part, gave said companion a most regrettable shock at the very moment – if my reading of the situation is to be trusted – that you might have been about to progress to terms of the most delightful intimacy.