Over lunch Alix complained that she did not see enough of him. 'You suddenly dropped out of my life.'

'For men must work,' said Stafford lightly, not worrying too much that his remark was a direct dig at Dirk Hendriks. 'I've been scurrying around Europe, making the fortunes of a couple of air lines.'

'Still intent on expansion, I see.'

'As long as people have secrets to protect there'll be work for people like me. I'm thinking of moving into the States.' He leaned back to let a waiter remove a plate. 'A chap this morning recommended that we expand our activities into South Africa. What do you think about that, Dirk?'

Hendriks laughed. 'Plenty of secrets in South Africa. It's not a bad idea.'

Stafford shook his head. 'I've decided to keep out of Africa altogether. There's plenty of scope in other directions and the Dark Continent doesn't appeal to me.'

He was to remember that remark with bitterness in the not too distant future.

Three thousand miles away Ben Hardin knew nothing about Max Stafford and Kenya was the last thing on his mind. And he was in total ignorance of the fact that, in more senses than otic, he was the man in the middle. True, he had been in Kenya back in 1974, but it was in another job and in quite a different connection. Yet he was the unwitting key which unlocked the door to reveal the whole damn mess.

It was one of those hot, sticky days in late July when New York fries. Hardin had taken time off to visit his favourite bar to sink a couple of welcome cold beers and, when he got back to the office, Jack Richardson at the next desk said, 'Gunnarsson has been asking for you.'

'Oh; what does he want?"

Richardson shrugged. 'He didn't say.'

Hardin paused in the act of taking off his jacket and put it back on. 'When does he want to see me?'

'Yesterday,' said Richardson dryly. 'He sounded mad.'

'Then I guess I'd better see the old bastard,' said Hardin sourly.

Gunnarsson greeted him with, 'Where the hell have you been?'

'Checking a contact on the Myerson case,' said Hardin inventively, making a mental note to record the visit in the Myerson file. Gunnarsson sometimes checked back.

Gunnarsson put his hands flat on the desk and glowered at him. He was a burly, square man who looked as though he had been hacked out of a block of granite and in spite of the heat he wore his coat. Rumour had it that Gunnarsson lacked sweat glands. He said, 'You can forget that, Ben; I'm taking you off the case. I have something else for you.'

'Okay,' said Hardin.

Gunnarsson tossed a thin file across the desk. 'Let's get this straight. You clear this one and you get a bonus. You crap on it and you get canned. We've been carrying you long enough.'

Hardin looked at him levelly. 'You make yourself clear. How important is this one?'

Gunnarsson flapped his hand. 'I wouldn't know. A Limey lawyer wants an answer. You're to find out what happened to a South African called Adriaan Hendriks who came to the States some time in the 1930s. Find out all about him, especially whether he married and had kids. Find them, too.'

'That's going to take some legwork,' said Hardin thoughtfully. 'Who can I use?'

'No one; you use your own damn legs.' Gunnarsson was blunt. 'If you can't clear us a pisswilly job like this then 'I'll know you're no use to Gunnarsson Associates. Now you'll do it this way. You take your car and you go on the road and you find what happened to this guy. And you do it yourself. If you have to leave New York I don't want you going near any of the regional offices.'

'Why not?'

'Because that's the way I want it. And I'm the boss. Now get going.'

So Hardin went away and, as he laid the file on his desk, he thought glumly that he had just received an ultimatum. He sat down, opened the file, and found the reason for its lack of bulk. It contained a single sheet of computer print-out which told him nothing that Gunnarsson had not already told him; that a man called Adriaan Hendriks was believed to have entered the United States in the late thirties. The port of entry was not even recorded.

'Jesus wept!' said Hardin.

Ben Hardin wished, for perhaps the thousandth time, or it could have been the ten thousandth, that he was in another line of work. Every morning when he woke up in whatever crummy motel room it happened to be it was the thought that came into his mind: 'I wish I was doing something else.' And that was followed by the automatic: 'Goddamn that bastard, Gunnarsson,' and by the equally automatic first cigarette of the day which made him cough.

And every morning when he was confronted by breakfast, invariably the junk food of the interstate highways, the same thought came into his mind. And when he knocked on a door, any door, to ask the questions, the thought was fleetingly at the back of his mind. As with the Frenchman who said that everything reminded him of sex so everything reminded Hardin of the cruel condition of his life, and it had made him an irritable and cynical man.

On the occasion of the latest reiteration of his wish he was beset by water. The rain poured from the sky, not in drops but in a steady sheet. It swirled along the gutters a foot or more deep because the drains were unable to cope, and Hardin had the impression that his car was in imminent danger of being swept away. Trapped in the metal box of the car he could only wait until the downpour ceased. He was certainly not going to get out because he would be soaked to the skin and damn near drowned in ten seconds flat.

And this was happening in California – in Los Angeles, the City of the Angels. No more angels, he thought; the birds will all have drowned. He visualized a crowd of angels sitting on a dark cloud, their wings bedraggled, and managed a tired grin. They said that what California did today New York would do tomorrow. If that was true someone in New York should be building a goddamn Ark. He wondered if there was a Mr Noah in the New York telephone book.

While he waited he looked back on the last few weeks. The first and obvious step had been to check with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He found that the 19305 had been a lean decade for immigrants – there were a mere 528,431 fortunate people admitted into the country. McDowell, the immigration officer he checked with, observed dryly that Hardin was lucky – in the 1920s the crop had been over four million. Hardin doubted his luck.

'South Africa,' said McDowell. 'That won't be too bad. Not many South Africans emigrate.'

A check through the files proved him right – but there was no one called Adriaan Hendriks.

'They change their names,' said McDowell some time later. 'Sometimes to Americanize the spelling. There's a guy here called Adrian Hendrix…' He spelled it out. 'Would that be the guy you want? He entered the country in New Orleans.'

'That's my man,' said Hardin with satisfaction.

The search so far had taken two weeks.

Further searches revealed that Hendrix Had taken out naturalization papers eight years later in Clarksville, Tennessee. More to the point he had married there. Establishing these simple facts took another three weeks and a fair amount of mileage.

Adrian Hendrix had married the daughter of a grain and feed merchant and seemed in a fair way to prosper had it not been for his one fault. On the death of his father-in-law in 1950 he proceeded to drink away the profits of the business he had inherited and died therefrom but not before he sired a son, Henry Hendrix.

Hardin looked at his notebook bleakly. The substitution of the son for the father had not made his task any easier. He had reported to Gunnarsson only to be told abruptly to find young Hendrix and to stop belly-aching, and there followed further weeks of searching because Henry Hendrix had become a drop-out – an undocumented man – after leaving high school, but a combination of legwork, persistence and luck had brought Hardin to the San Fernando Valley in California where he was marooned in his car.