“Oh, come on,” he said. “We’d been looking for his luggage too, you know. And I’d been looking for your father as well, for weeks. Ever since he stole the microcoder.”

“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just turned back and looked out at the road.

“Why did you murder my father?” I said slowly.

“I didn’t,” he said, still looking ahead.

“But you had it done,” I said.

“No.” He turned again to face me. “That was not me.”

“Then who was it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And you expect me to believe you?” I said. “Perhaps we should go to the police station and you can then explain to them exactly who you are and why you were in my house last night.”

“I’ll deny it,” he said. “You vacuumed up the evidence, remember?”

I pulled the Volvo into a rest area and stopped the engine. I turned to him.

“And what is it you really want?” I asked.

“The microcoder,” he said flatly. “That’s all.”

“And what exactly is this bloody microcoder anyway?” I said.

“An electronic device.”

“Yes, but what does it do?” I asked.

He sat silently for a moment or two clearly debating with himself as to how much he should tell me.

“It writes coded information onto animal-identification tags,” he said.

“RFIDs,” I said absentmindedly.

“So you do know what it is,” he said, slapping his knee. “So where the hell is it?”

Now it was my turn to sit silently debating with myself how much I was going to tell this Just call me John mysterious stranger.

“Are you some sort of secret agent?” I asked.

He laughed. “What makes you think that?”

“You seem pretty secretive,” I said. “And you talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’ as if you were part of an organization.”

He again stared for a moment through the windshield.

“Indirectly,” he said. “I work for the Australian Racing Board.”

“Do they know you break into people’s houses?”

“They would deny any knowledge of my existence.”

“You don’t sound Australian.”

“I’m not,” he said. “English to the core. Can’t stand the Aussies. Too bloody good at cricket, if you ask me.”

“So this so-called microcoder is to do with Australian racing?”

“It’s to do with all racing, everywhere.”

“But is there much racing in Australia?” I asked. “I’ve heard of the Melbourne Cup, of course, but not much else.”

“There’s a lot more racing in Australia than that,” he said. “There are six times as many racetracks in Australia than here in Great Britain, and twice as many horses in training. It’s big business.”

“Do they have licensed bookmakers?” I asked.

“Yes, plenty of them,” he said. “But all off-track betting is through the TAB, their equivalent of the tote.”

“Well, you live and learn.”

“And you must have heard of Phar Lap?” he said. “Most famous racehorse that ever lived.”

“The name rings a bell.”

“Well, he was an Australian horse,” John said. “Back in the thirties. He won fourteen group races in a row one year, including the Melbourne Cup.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah, but he was poisoned with arsenic during a visit to the United States. Some said the horse was killed on the orders of the Chicago mob to prevent him winning again and costing them a packet in illegal bets.”

“Why are bookies always cast as the villains?” I asked.

“That’s because you are,” he said, smiling at me. “Now, where’s my microcoder?”

“So it’s yours, is it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“How can I be so sure? And why is it so important?”

“It just is,” he said. “And I know you have it.”

“How?”

“I had a description of the man who collected your father’s luggage from the hotel in Paddington, though I didn’t know it was you, not until I saw you at the inquest.”

“Lots of people look like me,” I said.

“Stop playing games with me, Mr. Talbot,” he said seriously. “The lady at the Royal Sovereign Hotel described you absolutely perfectly, including your black eye, though why she didn’t question your name being Dick Van Dyke I’ll never know.”

I couldn’t help smiling, and he noticed.

“What on earth made you come up with that?” he said.

Perhaps he was unaware that my father had used the name Willem Van Buren when he’d checked in. The hotel lady had said he was called Van-something, and Dick Van Dyke had been all I could come up with at the time.

“If you know so much, how come you took so long to find him-so long, in fact, that I found his luggage before you did?”

“Because he wasn’t using his real name,” he said.

“And what is his real name?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he said. “You formally identified him at the inquest two days ago. So it’s now officially recorded by the coroner as Peter James Talbot. But is that right? Who, then, is Alan Charles Grady?”

And who, I also thought, was Willem Van Buren, of South Africa?

“Tell me what you know about my father,” I said to John.

“Why should I?” he said.

“Do you want your microcoder back or not?” I asked.

“You probably won’t like it.”

I was sure of that, if what I knew already was any indication.

“Well, for a start, I knew him only as Alan Grady. The first time I heard the name Talbot was after he was dead. I had been keeping a tight eye on Mr. Grady for some time. He was followed from Melbourne, but I lost him at Heathrow. I now think that he never came through immigration but took another international flight straight out. But I don’t know where to.”

I thought about the e-ticket receipt I had found tucked into the Alan Grady passport in my father’s rucksack. There had been no other flights listed there, other than his return to Australia.

“Was he using the name Grady?” I asked.

“I don’t know that either,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have access to airline passenger lists.”

“An unofficial tail, then?” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said. “As I told you, officially I don’t exist.”

I wished.

“For how long, exactly, have you been keeping a close eye on my father?” I asked him.

“For years,” he said. “Must be twenty at least. As far as I know, he’s always been known to the racing authorities. He used to run an illegal backstreet bookmaking business in Melbourne.”

“But I thought you said that bookmaking was legal in Australia?”

“Only on-course bookmakers are legal,” he said. “Needless to say, our friend Mr. Grady was not one of those.”

“But I am, remember,” I said to him.

“Oh yes, so you are.” He looked like he had stepped in something nasty.

“You’re showing your prejudices. We’re not all bad, you know.”

“Aren’t you?” he said, laughing. “Well, Alan Grady had been hovering around the edges of racing in Australia for as long as I’ve been working there. He mostly was very good at keeping one step ahead of the security service, doing just enough to keep himself out of court.”

I was surprisingly quite pleased that he was good at something. “Only ‘mostly’?” I asked.

“He did get convicted a couple of times,” he said. “Small stuff, really. He did one short stretch inside for obtaining money with menaces. Unpaid gambling debts. Then he got himself turned over by another illegal outfit and ended up bankrupt.”

At least that bit of my father’s story had been true, I thought.

“How come a man can go to prison and also be bankrupted and still no one realizes that he’s not using his real name?”

“But Alan Grady was his real name,” he said. “Passport, driver’s license, bank accounts, even a genuine birth certificate, all in the name of Grady. He was Alan Grady. As I said, I didn’t hear the name Talbot until the day after he died and that was only by chance from someone I had lunch with at Ascot last Wednesday. He told me about the murder in the parking lot.”

“But how did he get a genuine birth certificate in a false name?” I asked.