Luca and Betsy lived somewhere between High Wycombe and Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. I had collected them that morning, as I had often done, from a rest area just off Junction 3 on the M40.

“Isn’t your car in the rest area?” I asked. I had sometimes transferred the gear into his car there.

“No,” said Luca. “Betsy’s mum dropped us off this morning.”

Bugger, I thought. I would either have to come to Ascot again tomorrow or deprive Luca and Betsy of their day.

“OK,” I said with resignation in my voice. “I’ll be here. But I’m fed up with dressing like this. I’ll be more casual tomorrow.”

Luca smiled broadly. I knew he loved the exhilaration and energy of the big race days. I constantly reminded myself that I would lose him if I concentrated too much on the smaller tracks and stopped going to Ascot in June, Cheltenham in March and Aintree in April.

“Great,” said Luca, still grinning. “And you’d hate to miss another day like today, now wouldn’t you?”

“I can’t believe there will be another day like today. Not ever,” I said. “But, no, I wouldn’t want to miss it if there were.”

“We must dash,” said Luca. “See you here tomorrow, then. Usual time?”

“Yes, all right,” I replied. “Have fun tonight.”

They disappeared off towards the station through the gap in the hedge from where the police tent had now been removed, the gap in the hedge where my father had been stabbed.

I stood and watched them go. I couldn’t remember when I had last been to a birthday party.

Jason, the nurse, hadn’t been very happy when I called him to say that I would be late at the hospital. I had a job to do. I had hoped to do it the following day but…

I looked again at my watch. It was half past eight.

I’d promised Jason I’d be there in time to watch the ten o’clock news with Sophie. I still hoped I might make it, but things were not going quite as I had planned.

Having left my morning coat, vest and tie in my parked car, I was on foot in Sussex Gardens, in London, looking for a certain seedy hotel or guesthouse. The problem was not that I couldn’t find any. Quite the reverse. Everywhere I looked there were seedy little hotels and guesthouses. There were so many of them, and I hadn’t a clue which was the one I wanted.

“Near Paddington Station,” my father had said.

I imagined him getting off the Heathrow Express at Paddington with his luggage after the long flight from Australia and pitching up at the first place with a vacancy. So I had started close to the station and worked my way outwards. So far, after an hour and a half, I had drawn a complete blank, and I was getting frustrated.

“Do you, or did you, have a guest this week called Talbot?” I asked without much hope in yet another of the little places I had been in. “Or one called Grady?”

I pulled out the now-rather-creased copy of the driver’s license that Detective Sergeant Murray had made for me. A young woman behind the reception counter looked down at the picture, then up at me.

“Who wants know?” she asked in a very Eastern European accent. “Are you police?” she added, looking worried.

“No,” I assured her. “Not police.”

“Who you say you want?”

“Mr. Talbot or Mr. Grady,” I repeated patiently.

“You need ask Freddie,” she said.

“Where is Freddie?” I asked, looking around at the empty hallway.

“In pub,” she said.

“Which pub?” I asked patiently.

“I not know which pub,” she said crossly. “This pub, that pub. Always pub.”

This was going nowhere. “Thank you anyway,” I said politely, and left.

Even if my father had been staying there, I wouldn’t have known about it. It had been a stupid idea, I realized. I thought that if I found out where he had been staying, and recovered his luggage, I might learn why he had really come back to England. There had to have been more of a reason than simply to see me after a thirty-six-year absence. After all, he had risked getting arrested for murder.

Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn hadn’t asked me if I knew where my father had been staying in England, so I hadn’t told him. I wasn’t really sure why I hadn’t. I was generally a law-abiding citizen who, under normal circumstances, would be most helpful to the police. But the circumstances hadn’t been normal and the chief inspector hadn’t been very nice to me. He had point-blank accused me of lying to him, which I hadn’t, but, I now realized, I had also not told him the whole truth either.

I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it was a hopeless task. Over half the hotels and guesthouses I had been into either had no proper record of their guests or they wouldn’t tell me even if they had.

Just another couple more, I decided, and then I must leave for Hemel Hempstead.

Many of the properties in Sussex Gardens had been constructed at a time when households regularly had servants. The grand pillared entrances had been for the family’s use only, while the servants had access to the house via a steep stairway down from street level to a lower ground floor behind iron railings.

The Royal Sovereign Hotel was one such property but, nowadays, its name was rather grander than its appearance. The iron railings were rusting and the white paint was flaking from the stucco pillars set on either side of the dimly lit entrance. And the doormat looked as if it had been doing sterling service removing city dirt and dog muck from travelers’ shoes for at least half a century.

“Do you, or did you, have a guest this week called Mr. Talbot, or Mr. Grady?” I asked yet again, placing the driver’s license photocopy down on the Royal Sovereign Hotel reception desk and pushing it towards the plump, middle-aged woman who stood behind it. She looked down carefully at the photograph.

“Have you come for ’is stuff?” she asked, looking up at me.

“Yes, I have,” I said excitedly, hardly believing my good luck.

“Good,” she said. “It’s cluttering up my office floor. ’E only paid cash in advance for two nights, so I’ve ’ad to move it this morning. I needed ’is room, you see.”

“Yes, I do see,” I said, nodding at her. “That’s fine. Thank you.”

“But we only ’ad ’im ’ere,” she said, looking down at the picture again. “Not any other one. And ’is name wasn’t Talbot or Grady. It was Van-something or other. South African, ’e said ’e was. But it was definitely ’im.” She put her finger firmly down on the picture.

“Oh yes,” I said. “There is only one person, but he sometimes uses different names.” She looked at me quizzically. “One’s his real name and the others are professional names,” I said. She didn’t look any the wiser, and I didn’t elaborate.

“Where is ’e, then?” she asked, pointing again at the picture.

What should I say?

“He’s in the hospital,” I said. Technically, it was true.

“ ’ Ad an accident, did ’e?” she asked.

“Yes, sort of,” I said.

“Looks like you did too,” she said, putting her hand up to her own eye.

My left eyebrow remained swollen, and my whole eye was turning a nasty shade of purple with orange streaks. I was getting used to it, but it must have been quite a sight for all the hotel and guesthouse reception staff I had encountered.

“Same accident,” I said, putting my hand up to my face. “I’m his son.”

“Oh,” she said.“Right. Back ’ere, then.” She disappeared through a curtain hanging behind her. I placed the photocopy carefully back in my pocket, went around behind the reception desk and followed her through the curtain.

To call it an office was more than a slight exaggeration. It was a windowless alcove, about eight foot square, with a narrow table on one side, piled high with papers, and a cheap yellow secretary’s chair that had seen better days, the white stuffing of its seat appearing in clumps through the yellow vinyl covering. Most of the remaining floor space was occupied by mountains of megasized packs of white toilet paper.