‘And you might be?’ said the man on the desk, gently replacing the receiver and smiling across at me.

‘Ashley Barson-Garland, I’m Sir Charles’s personal assistant.’

‘Ashley Barson-Garland, Ashley Barson-Garland…’ he picked up two black notebooks that lay by the telephone. ‘What frightful handwriting our friends in blue have … ah, yes, here we are. Ashley Barson-Garland. Says here you’re a researcher for Sir Charles and a school friend of Edward’s. But surely you must be at least twenty-two? Twenty-three perhaps?’

‘I shall be eighteen in two weeks,’ I said, flushing slightly. It has not been uncommon for new boys at school to take me for a member of staff and I dislike being reminded that I look older than my years.

‘My mistake. My name is Smith.’

Smith indeed. A deliberate insult. I went forward to shake his hand and he had the cheek to look into his palm afterwards and then to my face, causing me to flush again.

‘Well, Mr Barson-Garland,’ he said, and I would have found open revulsion infinitely less offensive than the expressionless way he now took a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped it against his hand. ‘I’m afraid that while you were at luncheon some rather bad news came in…

The tone of ‘While you were at luncheon’ seemed to suggest that I had been guilty of some terrible, sybaritic dereliction of duty. In fact, Sir Charles had insisted that I get something to eat and the policemen with him had agreed there was nothing further I could do.

‘Bad news?’ I said, resisting the temptation to explain this and open myself to further humiliation.

‘… it seems that a call was made to the offices of The Times newspaper an hour ago claiming responsibility for kidnapping Edward Maddstone. We are working on the assumption that the call was genuine.’

‘But who? Why?’

‘The claim was made by a man purporting to represent the IRA. As for why …

Sir Charles made a kind of moaning noise and Portia hugged him close to her.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘I was right.’

‘You were right?’ ‘Smith’ raised his eyebrows in mild astonishment.

‘Well, the thought had crossed my mind,’ I said. ‘I mean it seemed a possible explanation, you know. Given, given…, everything,’ I completed, lamely.

‘What a sharp fellow you are, Mr Barson-Garland.

Well, perhaps you might employ some of that sharpness in making yourself useful, if you’ve a mind to?’

I nodded vigorously. ‘Of course. Anything.’

‘The Times will give us a little time to check out the information before they act upon it, but act upon it they surely will. I think perhaps Sir Charles and the young lady here should leave before the media circus arrives and all hell breaks loose. Perhaps you can think of a suitable bolt-hole. Where do you live, yourself?’

‘Tredway Gardens,’ I said. ‘It’s just a flat.’

‘And do you ah, share it with anyone?’ He put the question innocently enough, but again I had the impression that he had detected something in me that amused him.

‘Tom Grove. He works in party headquarters, it’s his house, I have the basement. Sir Charles’s PPS made the arrangement,’ I said, annoyed at myself for feeling the need to elaborate.

‘I see,’ said Smith. ‘Well, let us repair thither and that right speedily.’

‘I can’t drive a car I’m afraid…’

‘My dear old periwinkle, leave all that to me.

As I write this, Sir Charles is upstairs in Tom’s bedroom, asleep. The man Smith arranged for a doctor to come and pump him full of tranquillisers.

Poor Tom Grove has been warned away. Portia was driven off for further questioning half an hour ago, still hysterical with grief. Seems a little hard on her, but I dare say the authorities know what they’re doing. Smith himself has disappeared to ‘rattle a few trays’ somewhere, whatever that means, but said that he would ‘pop his head round the door’ sometime tomorrow, would I mind meanwhile ‘commanding the support trench’ – he really is insufferably pleased with himself.

The flat is now pleasantly calm, however, with no sign of the press anywhere. A part of me feels a little sorry for Ned, but another part tells me that, wherever he is and whatever is happening to him, it will do him a great deal of good.

Enough for the moment. I think I shall watch the six o’clock news now.

No matter how strongly she fought it, Portia's evenings at home had fallen into a routine. She had tried for a long time to prolong a state of perpetual crisis by arguing with Pete and Hillary over everything and nothing, but over the weeks the outbursts subsided and life began to assume a normality that she was not able to resist, however much of a betrayal the very assumption of ordinariness in life might signify.

Were it not for Gordon, she felt she would have gone mad. With tremendous tact and psychological understanding, he had suggested that instead of waiting for news or continuing to sit by Sir Charles’s bedside looking in vain for signs of recovery, she could do Gordon a great favour by showing him the sights of London. All the crazy tourist shit, he meant. Stupid stuff that would take her mind off Maddstone Junior and Maddstone Senior at least for a few hours every day. He’d really appreciate it, he was starting to feel homesick and he still couldn’t find his way round the city.

Pete conceded that it would be cruel to hold her to any promise of working through the summer holidays and had provided enough pocket money for the two of them to buy summer travel passes and spend long days trailing around galleries, churches, museums and royal palaces.

‘I want you both to keep a notebook,’ Peter had said. ‘The architecture and building in London is a discourse on the movement of power and money. You’ll find it’s a kind of economic geology. From the church to the kings to the aristocracy to the merchant classes to the banks and finally to the multinationals. It’s like reading rock strata.’

Gordon and Portia took no notice of this and pressed the buttons at the Science Museum, giggled at the Yeomen of the Guard and tried to get the sentries in their boxes outside St James’s Palace to flinch or move their eyes, just like the other adolescent tourists they accompanied around London. Portia found that taking Gordon around her favourite art galleries and explaining the pictures to him was as close as she had come to pleasure for many weeks. It was something to be able to answer questions, to be needed and useful.

Pete never asked to see the notebook he had insisted on. His own time was taken up by his summer students at the polytechnic. One of them had flattered him into forming a discussion group for the analysis of British colonialism in Northern Ireland and Peter had bullied the Inner London Educational Authority into funding a visit to Belfast so that they could see for themselves what was happening ‘on the ground’, as Pete liked to say. Hillary, busy with her novel was happy enough in the belief that Portia was in the hands of a sensible cousin.

Twice a week Portia still went to visit Sir Charles. It was a relief to her that the press were no longer keeping up a vigil outside the hospital gates, but it was a sign too of waning public interest and that worried her. Events had moved on and the disappearance of the cabinet minister’s son had slipped from the front pages to smaller paragraphs inside until quietly dropping from the agenda entirely. At the height of the public fever, when the Prime Minister, cutting short her holiday in the south of France, had stood at the hospital entrance assuring the cameras that steps would be taken and revenge exacted, Ned’s kidnapping had been the sensation of the summer period known in journalistic circles – Portia discovered with distaste – as ‘the silly season’. But, as sightings of Ned dwindled and reports emerged that the IRA were now denying any part in the affair, the papers began to suggest that the whole thing had never been anything more than a family row, a teenage tantrum of the kind that went on every day. They resumed with relish the usual August parade of fifty-stone women, two-tailed dogs and string beans that spelled out ‘armageddon’ in Hebrew. The senior newsmen left Britain for their summer holidays, and the deputies minding the shop preferred not to mess with tradition. Besides, the only person worth interviewing would have been Charles Maddstone, and he wasn’t saying a word. To anybody.