‘Dying?’ Eusden repeated incredulously as they drove along Birdcage Walk through the visibly unaltered but transformed workaday morning.

‘An inoperable brain tumour,’ said Gemma, sorrow deepening her matter-of-fact tone. ‘He’s got a few months at most. But it could happen sooner. It could happen any time.’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘No. And I don’t want to. I don’t think I could handle that, Richard. But I’d have to see him to do this favour he wants. That’s why…’

‘You thought of me.’

‘You and Marty were friends long before I came into your lives. You shouldn’t let him die without… patching it up between you.’

‘Shouldn’t I?’

‘No. Of course you shouldn’t. You know that.’ Her sidelong glance caught him unawares, his expression doubtless revealing more than his words. ‘Don’t you?’

Nearly forty years had passed since Richard Eusden’s first meeting with Marty Hewitson. Carisbrooke Grammar School, Newport, Isle of Wight: a cool day in early September, 1968. They were of the last generation of boys on the Island to take the eleven-plus and found themselves standing next to each other when the first year intake was corralled in the windy school yard that morning. Of such chances are friendships made. They were both intelligent and inquisitive, intellectually ambitious as well as mildly rebellious. They stuck together through seven years at Carisbrooke, Richard thriving on exams, while Marty, the more naturally gifted of the two, kept pace with him effortlessly. Then on to Cambridge, where their fateful shared infatuation with the bewitching Gemma Conway began.

It took more than two decades for the tragicomedy of their triangular relationship to play itself out – insofar as it had. After Cambridge, Richard joined the Civil Service, Marty went into TV journalism and Gemma studied for a Ph.D. They were all based in London. Marty seemed to have won the contest for Gemma and Richard tried to accept defeat graciously. But Marty was already beginning to hone a serious drug habit which Gemma could not tolerate. She left him for Richard. They married while Marty was ITV’s Man in the Middle East. Gemma secured a teaching post at Surrey University. They moved to Guildford. Suburban conformity beckoned. But Gemma recoiled from it. Marty returned from the Middle East, Lebanese girlfriend in tow. They began to spend time together as a foursome. Gemma landed a post at the LSE. Soon, she was back with Marty, despite the drugs, though Richard did not find out until the Lebanese girlfriend told him. Divorce followed. Gemma married Marty. They moved to Italy, where Marty was supposed to be writing a novel while Gemma taught at the University of Bologna. There was a kind of rapprochement. Richard visited them several times. Everyone behaved in a very civilized way. But it was not clear if they had their hearts in it. Naturally no novel was written. Cocaine became more important to Marty than Gemma. She left again – for a fellowship at Cambridge. Marty drifted back to London. His greatest attribute – the impossibility of holding a grudge against him – was unimpaired. Richard knew better than to try holding one anyway. Winning back Gemma was a different matter. He could not stop himself trying to do that, with some success, at least for a while. But too much had gone wrong too often. Their relationship finally fizzled out around the time Marty copped an eighteen-month prison sentence for drug dealing. The experience did not prove salutary. He was on remand for a second offence when he skipped the country. Richard, who had put up his bail money, had neither seen nor heard from him since, bar one cryptically apologetic postcard from Uruguay. The triangle was broken at last. Or so it had seemed.

‘Where are we going?’ Eusden asked as Gemma took off from the lights by Buckingham Palace.

‘Hyde Park. We can talk there.’

‘OK.’

He opened his briefcase and took out his phone. ‘I’d better call the office and let them know I’ll be late.’

‘Say you can’t make it today at all.’

‘Why not?’

‘That favour I mentioned. It’s now or never.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ll explain. I promise. Just wait till we’re out of the traffic and I can concentrate.’

Memories gather poignancy like dust. They confer on the past a magical unattainability. Schooldays on the Isle of Wight; student years at Cambridge; married life in Guildford; evenings in pubs with Marty, rivalry for Gemma sharpening their arguments about politics and economics and the future of the world: Eusden mourned them all now as lost interludes of contentment, even though contented was not what he had felt at the time. Marty Hewitson was the best and closest friend he would ever have. And he would never love another woman as he had loved Gemma Conway. Those were facts of his life. He could not alter them. He could not wish them away. Even if he wanted to. Which of course he did not.

There had been plenty of spaces in the car park by the Serpentine. Joggers and dog-walkers were thin on the ground at this hour. The bare trees were skeletal against the gun-metal sky. Some geese were still asleep, heads tucked under wings, denying the day had begun. Only the coots were active, corvetting noisily around as Gemma set a brisk pace past the boathouses, the hotel blocks of Park Lane rearing ahead like the buttes of a sunless desert.

‘Where’s he been these past few years?’ Eusden asked, breathing hard from the effort of keeping up with her.

‘Amsterdam, mostly. He doesn’t think the police have been trying very hard to find him. But he doesn’t want to risk arrest by coming back here.’

‘So, what’s the favour?’

‘He phoned me last week. I was too shocked by his news to realize how… difficult I’d find it to see him again. He wants something taken to him.’

‘In Amsterdam?’

‘No. He’s coming to Brussels to meet me off the Eurostar this afternoon. I’m hoping you’ll agree to go instead. It’s just a day trip, Richard. You’ll be back this evening. The Foreign Office can spare you for twenty-four hours, can’t they?’

‘Why is it so difficult for you to see him again?’

‘Because I’ve got over him. I don’t want to see him looking ill or old. I don’t want to be reminded of what we once had – and what he threw away.’

‘You can’t bear to see him because you loved him once. But you can bear to see me.’

‘You’re not dying.’

‘Actually, we’re all dying, Gemma. Just at different rates.’

She stopped and looked at him. ‘Are you going to do this?’

‘Depends what this is.’

‘A package of some kind. I’m to collect it later this morning from a Bernie Shadbolt.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Someone Marty met in prison. Someone he trusts.’

‘Why doesn’t he trust him to take the package, then?’

‘He said Shadbolt couldn’t spare the time. For what it’s worth, I suspect it’s a ruse. To see me again. Maybe to… try to persuade me to go back to him… for as long as he’s got left.’

‘When did that possibility occur to you?’

‘When Monica pointed it out to me.’

Ah, Monica. Eusden had wondered how long it would be before Gemma’s Cambridge housemate found her way into the conversation. He had tried hard not to ponder the true nature of their relationship. Naturally, he had failed. ‘Did she also point out that carrying a package through Customs for a convicted drug dealer isn’t the smartest of moves?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Richard.’ Gemma looked genuinely disappointed that he had asked such a question. ‘No one’s trying to set you up. Marty lives in Amsterdam. He doesn’t need to smuggle drugs over from the Isle of Wight.’

‘The Isle of Wight?’

Gemma sighed. ‘The package is a family keepsake of some kind. Something he wants to have with him… in the months ahead. However many months there are. Shadbolt picked it up for him from Aunt Lily.’