‘Thomas, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Well, that was it.

That was the last glimmer of hope gone. When she lied to me, standing there by the water in the rising night, I knew what I knew.

‘It was you who called them, wasn’t it?’

She struggled against my grip for a moment, and then laughed again.

‘Thomas, you’re… what the hell is the matter with you?’

‘Please, Sarah,’ I said, keeping hold of her elbow, ‘don’t act.’

She was getting really frightened now, and started to try and pull away. I hung on.

‘Jesus Christ…’ she began, but I shook my head and she stopped. I shook my head when she frowned at me, and I shook my head when she tried to look scared. I waited until she’d stopped all those things.

‘Sarah,’ I said eventually, ‘listen to me. You know who Meg Ryan is, don’t you?’ She nodded. ‘Well, Meg Ryan gets paid millions of dollars to do what you’re trying to do now. Tens of millions. Do you know why?’ She stared back at me. ‘Because it’s a very difficult thing to do well, and there aren’t more than about a dozen people in the world who can pull it off at this distance. So don’t act, don’t pretend, don’t lie.’

She closed her mouth and seemed suddenly to relax, so I eased my grip on her elbow, and then let go altogether. We stood there like grown-ups.

‘It was you who called them,’ I said again. ‘You called them the first night I came to your house. You called them from the restaurant, the night they took me off the bike.’

I didn’t want to have to say the last bit, but somebody had to.

You called them,’ I said, and they came to kill your father.’

She cried for about an hour, on Hampstead Heath, on a bench, in the moonlight, in my arms. All the tears in the world ran down her face and soaked into the earth.

At one point the crying became so violent, and so loud, that we began to gather a distant, scattered audience, who muttered to each other about calling the police, and then thought better of it. Why did I put my arms around her? Why did I hold a woman who’d betrayed her own father, and who’d used me like a piece of paper-towel?

Beats me.

When at last the crying started to ease, I kept on holding her, and felt her body jerk and shudder with those after-tears hiccups that children get.

‘He wasn’t meant to die,’ she said suddenly, with a clear, strong voice, which made me wonder if it was coming from somewhere else. Maybe it was. ‘That wasn’t meant to happen. In fact,’ she wiped at her nose with her sleeve, ‘they actually promised me he’d be okay. They said as long as he was stopped, then nothing would happen. We’d both be safe, and we’d both be…’

She faltered, and for all the calm in her voice, I could tell that she was dying from the guilt. ‘You’d both be what?’ I said.

She bent her head back, stretching her long neck, offering her throat to someone who wasn’t me.

Then she laughed. ‘Rich,’ she said.

For a moment, I was tempted to laugh too. It sounded like such a ridiculous word. Such a ridiculous thing to be. It sounded like a name, or a country, or a kind of salad. Whatever the word was, it surely couldn’t mean having a lot of money. It was just, simply, too ridiculous.

‘They promised you’d be rich?’ I said.

She took a deep breath and sighed, and her laughter faded away so quickly it might never have happened.

‘Yup,’ she said. ‘Rich. Money. They said we’d have money.’

‘Said it to who? Both of you?’

‘Oh God, no. Dad wouldn’t have…’ She stopped for a moment, and a violent shiver ran over her body. Then she tilted her chin upwards, and closed her eyes. ‘He was way, way past listening to that kind of stuff.’

I saw his face. The eager, determined, born-again look. The look of a man who’d spent his life making money, making his way, paying his bills, and then, just in time, he’d discovered that wasn’t the point of the game after all. He’d seen a chance to put it right.

Are you a good man, Thomas?

‘So they offered you money,’ I said.

She opened her eyes and smiled, quickly, and then wiped her nose again.

‘They offered me all kinds of things. Everything a girl could want. Everything a girl already had, in fact, until her father decided he was going to take it away.’

We sat like that for a while, holding hands, thinking and talking about what she’d done. But we didn’t get very far. When we began, both of us thought that this was going to be the biggest, deepest, longest talk either of us had ever had with another human being. Almost immediately, we realised it wasn’t. Because there was no point. There was so much to be said, such a huge mound of explanation to be gone through, and yet somehow, none of it really needed to be said at all.

So I’ll say it.

Under Alexander Woolf’s leadership, the company of Gaine Parker Inc made springs, levers, door catches, carpet grips, belt buckles, and a thousand other bits and pieces of Western life. They made plastic things, and metal things, and electronic things, and mechanical things, some of them for retailers, some of them for other manufacturers, and some for theUnited States government.

This, in the beginning, was good for Gaine Parker. If you can make a lavatory seat that pleases the head Woolworths buyer, you’re quids in. If you can make one that pleases the US government, by conforming to the specifications demanded of a military lavatory seat - and I assure you that there is such a thing, and it has specifications, and at a guess I’d say those specifications probably cover thirty sides of A4 paper - if you can do that, well, then you’re quids in, out, round to the front and in again, a million times over.

As it happened, Gaine Parker didn’t make lavatory seats. They made an electronic switch that was very small and did something clever with semi-conductors. As well as being indispensable to the manufacturers of air-conditioning thermostats, the switch also found a home in the cooling mechanism of a new kind of military-specification diesel generator. And so it came to pass, in February of 1972, that Gaine Parker and Alexander Woolf became sub-contractors to the US Department of Defense.

The blessings of this contract were without number. Besides allowing, or even encouraging, Gaine Parker to charge eighty dollars for an item that elsewhere in the market would be lucky to fetch five, the contract served as a stamp of guaranteed, no nonsense, blue-chip quality, causing the world’s customers for small, clever, switchy things to beat a wide gravel drive to Woolf’s door.

From that moment, nothing could go wrong, and nothing did. Woolf’s standing in thematerielbusiness grew and grew, and his access to the very important people who run that world - and who therefore could safely be said to runtheworld - grew with it. They smiled at him, and joked with him and put him up for membership of the St Regis golf club onLong Island. They called him atmidnight for long chats about this and that. They asked him to go sailing with them in the Hamptons, and, more importantly, accepted his return invitation. They sent his family Christmas cards, and then Christmas presents, and, eventually, they began to wine him at two hundred-seat Republican party dinners, where much talk was exchanged on the subject of the budget deficit andAmerica ’s economic regeneration. And the higher he rose, the more contracts came his way, and the smaller, and more intimate, the dinners became. Until, finally, they stopped having much to do with party politics at all. They had more to do with the politics of common sense, if you follow me.