'I felt so sorry for you that day.'

George looked up, the picture in his head of a twenty-one-year-old girl by the disappointing ruins of a Welsh castle replaced by a greying, middle-aged woman behind a teapot. She spotted some more dust on the binocular case and gave it another wipe. George gazed at his sister. Sometimes he could not tell which of them was taking care of the other.

'It was a happy day,' he said firmly, holding to the memory he had made into certainty by repetition. 'The Belle Vue Hotel. The tramway. Roast chicken. Not going to pick up pebbles. The railway journey. It was a happy day.'

'I was pretending for most of it.'

George was not sure he wanted his memories disturbed. 'I could never tell how much you knew,' he said.

'George, I was not a child. I might have been a child when it all began, but not then. What else did I have to do except work it out? You cannot keep things from someone of twenty-one who rarely leaves the house. You are only keeping things from yourself, pretending to yourself, and hoping she will go along with it.'

George thought his way back from the Maud he knew now, and realized there must have been a lot more of this woman in that girl than he was aware of at the time. But he had no desire to pursue the complications of this. He had decided long ago what had happened; he knew his own story. He might be willing to accept a general correction of the kind just made; but the last thing he wanted was fresh detail.

Maud sensed this. And if, back then, he had kept things from her, she had also kept things from him. She would never tell him of the morning Father had called her into his study and announced that he feared greatly for the mental stability of her brother. He said George had been under much strain and was refusing to take the slightest holiday; so he would propose over dinner that brother and sister take a day trip to Aberystwyth, and whether she wanted to or not she was to concur and insist that they must, absolutely must go. And this was what had happened. George had politely yet stubbornly refused his father, then yielded to the pleas of his sister.

It had been a piece of scheming quite untypical of the Vicarage. But more shocking to Maud had been Father's assessment of George's condition. To her he had always been the reliable, conscientious brother; while Horace was the frivolous one, who lived life on a whim, who lacked stolidity. And as it turned out, she had been right and Father wrong. For how could George have survived his ordeal if he had not possessed much greater mental fortitude than Father ever attributed to him? But these were thoughts Maud would always keep to herself.

'There was one matter on which Sir Arthur was profoundly wrong,' George declared suddenly. 'He opposed votes for women.' Since her brother had always supported female suffrage during the time it had been an issue, this opinion came as no surprise to Maud. Rather, it was the fierceness in his voice that was unaccountable. George was now looking away from his sister in embarrassment. The trail of memory, and all that came with it, had set off in him the tenderest of emotions towards Maud, and a realization that these had been, and would continue to be, the strongest feelings of his life. But George was neither skilled nor easy at conveying such thoughts, and even this most indirect of confessions disturbed him. So he rose, folded the Herald unnecessarily, handed it back, and went downstairs to his office.

There was work to be done, but instead he sat at his desk thinking about Sir Arthur. They had last met twenty-three years ago; still, the link between them had somehow never been broken. He had followed Sir Arthur's writings and doings, his travels and campaigns, his interventions in the public life of the nation. George often agreed with his pronouncements – on divorce reform, the threat from Germany, the need for a Channel Tunnel, the moral necessity of returning Gibraltar to Spain. He permitted himself, however, to be frankly dubious about one of Sir Arthur's lesser-known contributions to penal reform: the proposal that hardened recidivists in His Majesty's gaols should all be transported to the Scottish island of Tiree. George had cut articles from the newspapers, followed Sherlock Holmes's continuing exploits in The Strand Magazine, and borrowed Sir Arthur's latest books from the library. Twice he had taken Maud to the cinema to watch Mr Eille Norwood's remarkable impersonation of the consulting detective.

He remembered, the year they first came to Borough High Street, buying the Daily Mail solely to read Sir Arthur's special despatch on the marathon race at the London Olympics. George could not have been less interested in athletic endeavour, but he was rewarded by a further insight – if any more were needed – into the nature of his benefactor. Sir Arthur's description had been so vivid that George read it again and again until he could picture it in his head like a newsreel. The vast stadium – the expectant crowd – a small figure enters ahead of all the others – an Italian in a state of near collapse – he falls, he rises, he falls again, he rises again, he staggers – then an American enters the stadium and begins to catch him up – the plucky Italian is twenty yards from the tape – the crowd is hypnotized – he falls again – he is helped up – willing arms propel him through the tape before the American can catch him. But the Italian has, of course, broken the rules by accepting assistance and the American is declared the winner.

Any other writer would have left it at that, pleased with his success at evoking the drama of the moment. But Sir Arthur was not any other writer, and had been so touched by the Italian's bravery that he started a subscription for the man. Three hundred pounds had been contributed, which enabled the runner to open a baker's shop in his native village – something a gold medal would never have been able to effect. This was typical of Sir Arthur: generous and practical in equal parts.

After his success with the Edalji Case, Sir Arthur had involved himself in other judicial protests. George was rather ashamed to admit that his feelings towards subsequent victims consisted of envy verging occasionally on disapproval. There was Oscar Slater, for instance, whose case took up years and years of Sir Arthur's life. The man had, it was true, been wrongly accused of murder, and nearly executed, and Sir Arthur's intervention had spared him the gallows and eventually gained his release; but Slater was a very low sort of fellow, a professional criminal who had shown not an ounce of gratitude towards those who had helped him.

Sir Arthur had also continued to play the detective. Only three or four years ago there had been the curious case of the woman writer who disappeared. Christie, that was her name. Apparently a rising star of detective fiction, though George had not the slightest interest in rising stars, as long as Holmes was still compiling his casebook. Mrs Christie had vanished from her home in Berkshire, and her car was found abandoned some five miles from Guildford. When three police forces could find no trace of her, the Chief Constable of Surrey had called in Sir Arthur – who had, in his time, been Deputy Lieutenant of the county. What happened next surprised many people. Did Sir Arthur interview witnesses, scour the trampled ground for footprints, or cross-examine the police, as he had done in the famous Edalji Case? Not a bit of it. He had contacted Christie's husband, borrowed one of the missing woman's gloves, and taken it off to a psychic who had laid it against his forehead in an attempt to locate the woman. Well, it was one thing – as George had proposed to the Staffordshire Constabulary – to use real bloodhounds to sniff out a trail, quite another to employ psychic ones who merely stayed at home and sniffed gloves. George, on reading of Sir Arthur's novel investigative techniques, had felt quite relieved that more orthodox ones had been applied in his own case.