‘Cheers,’ said Shadbolt, starting on his whisky. Eusden reciprocated half-heartedly. Gemma said nothing. ‘I couldn’t let the two most important people in Marty’s life come and go without at least standing them a drink.’

‘The two most…’

‘That’s right, Richard. You and Gemma. It’s what he called you when he filled me in on this little fetch-and-carry operation.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, now am I?’

‘I suppose…’

‘You’re with the FO, right?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘Any chance you could put me wise on that dodgy dossier, then? Only, I’ve got a nephew in Iraq. He’d be interested in exactly how you Whitehall wallahs managed to get it so wrong. If you did get it wrong. Know what I mean?’

‘It’s good of you to have done this for Marty,’ said Gemma, taking pity on Eusden.

‘Well, I owed him one.’

‘What exactly is the package?’ asked Eusden, feeling no keener to discuss the nature of Shadbolt’s debt to Marty than the calibre of government intelligence.

‘Don’t you know?’ Shadbolt shot back at him.

‘No. How could I?’

‘You’re his childhood chum. I reckoned you’d know all about it.’

‘’Fraid not.’

‘So, what is it… Bernie?’ asked Gemma, smiling tightly. ‘The package.’

‘Some old attaché case. I mean, really old. Locked. Marty’s got the key, natch. You could force it open easily enough. But that wouldn’t be playing the game, would it? Marty didn’t say what was in it. I guess he’s keeping us all on need-to-know.’

‘Didn’t you ask his aunt?’ Eusden put in.

‘According to Vicky, she didn’t know either. Or, if she did, she wasn’t-’

‘Who’s Vicky?’ queried Gemma.

‘My daughter. You were just speaking to her.’

‘So, you didn’t go yourself?’

‘Nah. Too busy. Besides, I thought Vicky’d go down better with the old biddy. Plus it gave her a break from all that secondary smoking Jules inflicts on her.’

‘We ought to make a start for the station,’ said Gemma, polishing off her Perrier. ‘You’re supposed to check in half an hour before the train leaves.’

‘No worries,’ said Shadbolt, passing his glass to the landlady for a refill. ‘I’ll drive you. You can leave your car at the yard. Want the other half, Richard?’

‘No, thanks. I…’

‘I’m not going, Bernie,’ said Gemma, uncomfortably but emphatically. ‘It’s just Richard. So, I’ll drive him to Waterloo. Thanks all the same.’

Shadbolt smirked at her. ‘I must have misunderstood.’

‘Like you, I’m rather busy at the moment,’ she said defensively.

Eusden smiled grimly. ‘Whereas I have all the time in the world.’

‘Crying shame about Marty,’ said Shadbolt during the short walk back to the yard.

‘So it is,’ agreed Eusden.

‘Tell him from me if there’s some specialist he needs to see who could pull off a miracle cure, he doesn’t have to worry about the money.’

‘That’s very generous of you,’ said Gemma.

Shadbolt beamed at her. ‘That’s what friends are for.’

He led the way across the yard to his car – a vintage Jag polished to a fine sheen. Eusden caught a glimpse of Vicky watching them through the window-mesh of the Portakabin as her father unlocked the boot and swung it open.

‘There it is,’ he announced.

And there it was. A battered old leather attaché case. Very old, as Shadbolt had said. Probably Edwardian, Eusden judged. But he had an advantage in dating it. There were initials stencilled on the lid: CEH. And he knew what they stood for.

‘Seen it before, Richard?’ Shadbolt asked.

‘No.’

‘Funny. You look as if you have.’

‘I’ve never seen it before.’ Eusden looked Shadbolt in the face. ‘But I recognize the initials.’

‘Reckoned you might.’ Shadbolt raised an index finger across his lips. ‘But don’t tell, hey? If Marty didn’t think I needed to know, we’d better keep it that way.’

‘I recognized the initials as well,’ said Gemma as they drove away from the yard.

‘I suppose you would.’

‘I guess they confirm what Marty told me. A family keepsake.’

‘Strange Aunt Lily doesn’t know what it is, then.’

‘Maybe she just pretended not to know.’

‘Yeah. And maybe she’s not the only one.’

‘You think Shadbolt was holding out on us?’

‘I’m certain he was.’

‘Why would he?’

‘I don’t know. But Marty can explain everything when I see him. He’s bound to tell me the truth, isn’t he?’

‘You’re getting this out of proportion, Richard.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘I am. Give me a call when you get back. You’ll see things differently then.’

‘I wonder.’

Gemma’s return ticket was for the six o’clock train from Brussels, due into Waterloo, thanks to the time difference, at 7.30. If everything went according to plan, Eusden would be back home an hour later, his simple task accomplished. And he would have seen his old friend Marty Hewitson, probably for the last time.

The attaché case passed unremarked through the X-ray machine at the Eurostar terminal. Eusden was momentarily tempted to ask the operative what he could make out of the contents. The weight, about equal to that of his own briefcase, suggested they might be documents of some kind.

He waited in the departure lounge for boarding of the 12.40 to be called. It was a quiet day for Eurostar. Most business travellers would have caught an earlier train. And it was a slack time of year in the leisure market. He sat alone, flanked by his two items of luggage: his briefcase and the battered old attaché case.

CEH was Clement Ernest Hewitson, Isle of Wight police officer, father of Denis and Lily Hewitson, grandfather of Marty. He had lived into his nineties and was more than twenty years dead. A long departed relic of a bygone age. But not forgotten by any who had known him. Which included his grandson’s childhood friend, Richard Eusden.

Eusden had based a school project on the life and times of Clem Hewitson. He was, in a sense, the only biographer the man had ever had or was ever likely to have. Clem was already over eighty when young Richard first met him. A widower of long standing, he lived alone in a spotlessly clean terraced house in Cowes, just up the hill from the floating bridge. His grandson’s home was socially a world away – a mock Tudor residence set in half an acre of land at Wootton Bridge – but it was only a short bus ride from Cowes. Most Saturdays would see Richard and Marty meeting at the Fountain Arcade, where Richard’s bus from Newport arrived, for several hours of aimless wandering around the town that usually ended with tea at Clem’s.

The old man was a natural storyteller, whose life had given him a seemingly inexhaustible fund of entertaining recollections. Born in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (as he never tired of pointing out), he followed his father into work at White’s shipyard, but rapidly tired of the physical toil and exploited a family connection with the Chief Constable (Clem’s uncle had served under him in the Army) to get himself taken on as a police constable. He rose through the ranks to become a detective chief inspector, in charge of the Island’s modest CID, and clocked up more than forty years in the force, inclusive of four in the Army, braving shot and shell on the Western Front during the Great War (as he always referred to it).

Richard had plenty to choose from when it came to selecting incidents from Clem’s career for inclusion in his project: suffragettes, German spies, drifting mines, burning ricks, suicide attempts, escaped prisoners – Clem had tackled them all, along with a varied assortment of burglars, arsonists, fraudsters and the occasional murderer. Hard though it was to believe, in view of the almost total uneventfulness of life on the Island as experienced by the average schoolboy in the late 1960s, Clem could look back on excitements galore – and was happy to do so.