So it had definitely been Shifty-eyes, the man that Paddy Murphy had called Kipper. He had found me at last.

“What are we going to do?” Sophie asked loudly, suddenly becoming scared. “I don’t want him coming back here.” In spite of the warm evening, she shivered.

“It’s all right, my love,” I said, putting a reassuring arm around her shoulders. “I’m sure he won’t come back tonight.”

The doorbell rang, and we all jumped.

“How sure?” Sophie said, looking worried.

“Ignore it,” said Alice. “Then he’ll have to go away.”

We stood silently in the kitchen, listening.

The doorbell rang again, and there were also some heavy thumps on the door.

“I know you’re in there,” shouted a voice from outside. “Open up.”

I went out of the kitchen into the hallway.

“Who is it?” I shouted through the wood of the front door.

“Mr. Talbot,” said the voice. “I think you may have something of mine, and I want it back.”

“What?” I asked.

“A rucksack,” he said. “A black-and-red rucksack.”

“But the rucksack belonged to Alan Grady, not you,” I said quickly without stopping to think first. Dammit, I thought. Why hadn’t I just denied any knowledge of any rucksack? He might then have gone away, but he wouldn’t do so now.

“I’m calling the police,” said Sophie, coming into the hallway. “Do you hear me?” she shouted loudly with a tremor in her voice. “I’m calling the police.”

“There’ll be no need for the police,” said the man calmly through the door. “Just give me the rucksack and I’ll go away.”

“Give him the rucksack,” Sophie said to me imploringly, her panicky eyes as big as saucers. “Please, Ned, just give him the damn rucksack.”

“OK, OK,” I said.

I went to the cupboard under the stairs and fetched it. It was still full of my father’s things.

“Give it to him,” Sophie urged me again, her voice quivering with fear.

I lifted the rucksack and turned to go upstairs with it.

“Where the hell are you going?” Sophie almost screamed at me.

“If you think I’m opening the front door with him there, you must be…” I didn’t finish the sentence. “I’m going to throw it to him out the window.”

I went up to our bedroom and opened the same window through which I had witnessed the departure of Mr. John Smith from my house only one week previously.

The man was close to the door, and I couldn’t see him as he was standing under the overhanging porch.

“Here,” I shouted.

He moved back into my sight. He appeared just as I had seen him the first time in the parking lot at Ascot racetrack: blue jeans, charcoal-gray hoodie, with a black scarf over the lower part of his face. I couldn’t tell if he was wearing the same black army boots he had used to split my eyebrow and I wasn’t about to go down there to find out. As before, all I could see were his eyes, set rather too close together for the width of his face.

I held the rucksack out through the open window at arm’s length.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Drop the rucksack,” he said, ignoring my question. He didn’t have a strong regional accent, at least not one I could notice.

“What’s your name?” I repeated.

“Never you mind,” he said. “Just give me the rucksack.”

“How did you find my house?” I asked him.

“A little birdie told me,” he said.

“Which little birdie?”

“Never you mind,” he said again. “Just drop the rucksack.” He held up his arms ready to catch it.

“It’s only full of Mr. Grady’s clothes,” I said. “I’ve searched it. There’s nothing else there.”

“Give it to me anyway,” he said.

“Who are you working for?” I asked.

“What?” he said.

“Who are you working for?” I repeated.

“No one,” he said. “Now, give me the bloody rucksack.”

“Who’s John Smith?” I asked.

In spite of only being able to see his eyes, I could still tell that there was no recognition of the name. He didn’t know a Mr. John Smith, but, then, that wasn’t his real name, now was it?

“Give me the bag,” he hissed at me in the same way as he’d hissed at my father at Ascot. “And give it to me now or I’ll break your bloody door down.”

I opened my hand and dropped the rucksack. In spite of having his hands up, he failed to catch it before it hit the concrete path, but he quickly snatched it up and was off, jogging down Station Road in just the same manner as I had previously seen him do in Paddington near the Lancaster Gate tube station.

I wondered how he had found out where I lived. If he had obtained the information that I had given the coroner at the inquest, then why had it taken him so long to arrive at my door? I thought back to what I had done over the previous twenty-four hours. Perhaps his little birdie had been at Banbury police station yesterday, or somewhere else in the Thames Valley Police. That e-fit would have been sent right around the force, and perhaps someone recognized the face, someone not completely honest, someone who had then told Kipper, who had made it.

I would never know exactly how he had found me, and I hoped that this would be the last time I would see him, but, somehow, I had my doubts.

He would certainly find that the microcoder and the glass-grain RFID chips were missing from the rucksack as Mr. John Smith now had them. And I had also kept back the three house keys on their ring and the passports, the two photocopied equine ones, and both of those with my father’s picture in them.

However, if Paddy Murphy was to be believed-and there was absolutely no guarantee of that-then it would be the stash of money that the man would be more concerned about. If he knew where to look, Kipper would find the three blue-plastic-wrapped packages of banknotes back in their original hiding place underneath the rucksack lining. But, if he inspected them more closely, he might spot that the packages had been opened and then carefully resealed using clear sticky tape. And, if he then counted the cash, he might also discover that he was two thousand pounds short from each package.

It had seemed a good idea at the time. But now I wasn’t so sure.

What the hell was all that about?” Sophie demanded when I went down the stairs.

She and Alice were standing in the hall, looking up at me with concerned but expectant expressions on their faces.

“Just an impatient man who wanted something I had,” I said to them, trying to make light of the encounter.

“But he was horrible,” said Sophie. “Why did you give it to him?”

“But it was you who told me to,” I said, slightly exasperated.

“Whose rucksack was it anyway?” she asked.

“It belongs to a man called Alan Grady,” I said. “He gave it to me to keep safe.”

“Who’s Alan Grady?” she asked.

“Just a man from Australia that I met at Royal Ascot.”

“He’s not going to be very pleased with you for giving his rucksack away to someone else.”

She seemed to have completely forgotten the fear and panic that had gripped her when the man had been standing outside our front door.

“I don’t think he’ll mind too much,” I said without elaborating further. I smiled at the two of them. “Now, what’s for supper?”

“He won’t come back, will he?” Alice asked nervously as I ate my macaroni and cheese, the three of us sitting around the kitchen table.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s got what he came for.”

At least he got most of it, I thought. But would he come back for the rest? There was no doubt that he now knew exactly where I lived, and, even though I had been half expecting him to turn up, it was still rather a shock that he had.

After my supper, I went up into my little office to log on to the Internet while the girls took themselves off to bed.

HRF Holdings Ltd was indeed a parent company, and one of the businesses it owned I knew very well. Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd, to give it its full title, was one of the big-five High Street betting shop chains. Their shops were presently mostly confined to London and the southeast of England, but the business was expanding rapidly north and westwards.