I swallowed and said, 'Do you remember the children who had to be driven to school by a judo expert to keep them safe?'

But Kate stared blackly back as if she hadn't heard.

'You are the most beastly person I have ever known, and although you have made it impossible for me to forget you, I shall never think of you without – without -' Her throat moved convulsively as if she were going to be sick. She turned away abruptly and walked unsteadily out through the big main door into the street.

The flash of camera bulbs met her and caught her unawares, and I saw her throw up her arm in a forlorn attempt to hide her face. The vulnerability and the loneliness in the droop of her shoulders cried out for comfort, and I, who most wanted to give it, was the only person she wouldn't accept it from. I watched her walk quickly through the questioning newspapermen and get into the hired car which was waiting for her.

It drove off. I stared after it, numbly.

Presently I became aware that Lodge was standing at my elbow and had been talking for some seconds. I hadn't heard a word he said, and he appeared to be waiting for a reply.

'I beg your pardon,' I said. 'What did you say?'

Lodge glanced out through the door where Kate had gone and sighed. 'It wasn't very important - Look, she'll see things more reasonably in a little while, when she begins to think straight again. I heard a good deal of what she said - but you aren't to blame because her uncle took to crime.'

'If I had known -' I stopped, on the verge of adding the give-away words 'for sure': 'If I had known that George Penn was Claud Thiveridge, I would have done things differently.'

'Things worked out well for the Penns, I think,' said Lodge. 'A quick end has its merits.'

His tone was loaded with meaning, and I knew that he half guessed what part I had played in Uncle George's death. He had several times earlier remarked that my disappearance from Brighton at the moment of success was out of character, and had shown polite scepticism over my excuse that I was growing anxious about my horse. He had mentioned pointedly that the Brighton police, listening in the Marconi-car taxi to Uncle George's ravings, had heard a faint murmur (indistinguishable) in the background, a single shot, and nothing more. They had not been able to account for this, apart from later finding the microphone switched off and a bullet in the wall, and had come to the conclusion that Uncle George had been testing the old pistol to see if it were in working order. The shot had, however, brought them in haste to the Marconi-car buildings.

'You may be right,' I said non-committally to Lodge. His eyelids flickered, and he smiled and changed the subject.

'The Marconi-car drivers come up in court again this week. You'll be there to give evidence, I suppose,' he said.

'Yes,' I agreed, not liking the prospect.

All the drivers who had been looking for me had been alarmed by the shot and the silence on their radios. Some had begun to drive back to Brighton, some had made for London, and one or two had left their taxis and started out on foot. But all had quickly been rounded up, as following the rather vague directions I had phoned to Lodge, the police had begun making road blocks round them while they were still listening to Uncle George. Now the drivers faced charges ranging from intimidation and grievous bodily harm to murder itself.

Records discovered in Uncle George's study, inside a folder marked with gory humour 'Notes on Human Sacrifices', made it clear that Joe Nantwich had indeed been knifed by the man who had been wearing my tie.

And Uncle George's motives were now clear too. Keeping up old standards of luxury had been too much for his income after the war, and instead of making Aunt Deb face reality, or facing it himself, he had gradually spent most of his capital. With almost the last of it he had bought Marconi-cars and launched into crime. He had directed everything through Fielder and had apparently never seen with his own eyes the brutal results of his orders. I doubted whether his misdeeds had seemed either more or less real to him than the primitive barbarities he spent his time studying.

The police had found neat lists, in flies going back four years, of the money he had collected from the little terrorized businesses; and occasionally against the name of a café or a shop or a pub, Lodge told me, was written the single word, 'Persuaded'.

The racing record was shorter and contained lists of sums of money which the police did not know the purpose of; but one sheet headed 'Joe Nantwich' was clear enough. It was a list of dates and amounts, of which the smallest was one hundred pounds. And underneath was drawn a thick line, with the words: 'Account closed' printed in Uncle George's neat handwriting.

With Kate gone, the press men had drifted away. Their fun was over.

'Are you ready to go?' I asked Lodge. I had picked him up in Maidenhead on my way down. He nodded, and we went out to my car.

I drive faster when I'm happy. That day I had no trouble at all in keeping within the speed limit through all the twisty Sussex villages; and Lodge endured my gloomy silence without comment half the way back to Maidenhead.

Finally he said, 'Miss Ellery-Penn was very useful to her uncle. Everything you did in pursuing him went straight back to him through her. No wonder he was so well informed about your movements.'

I had lived with this thought for a long time now; but hearing someone else speak it aloud had a most extraordinary effect. A tingle ran up my spine and set my brain suddenly alive, as if an alarm bell were ringing in my subconscious.

We were running through shrub and heathland. I slowed, swung the car off the road on to the peaty verge, and stopped. Lodge looked at me questioningly.

'What you said - I want to think,' I said.

He waited a while in silence, and then said, 'What's worrying you? The case is over. There are no more mysteries.'

I shook my head. 'There's someone else,' I said.

'What do you mean?'

'There's someone else we don't know about. Someone in Uncle George's confidence.' In spite of everything, I still thought of him as Uncle George.

Lodge said, 'Fielder, the manager, was rounded up. So were all the L. C. Perth operators, though they have been freed again. Only two of the clerks had any idea of what was going on, one who went to the race tracks and one in the office. They received their instructions through Fielder about which horses to accept unlimited money on. There are no niggers left in the woodpile.'

'Joe was stopping horses for months before Uncle George gave Heavens Above to Kate, and she had never been racing before that. Someone else who goes racing must have been working for Uncle George,' I said with conviction.

'Penn would need only the morning paper and a form book for choosing a horse to stop. He wouldn't need to go to the races himself. He didn't need an accomplice at the races apart from his bookmaker – Perth. You're imagining things.'

'Uncle George didn't know enough about horses,' I said.

'So he made out,' said Lodge sceptically.

'Kate told me that for as long as she remembers he was a dead loss on the subject. He started the Marconi-car protection racket only four years ago, and the racing racket less than a year ago. Before that he had no reason to pretend. Therefore his ignorance of horses was genuine.'

'I'll give you that,' he said, 'But I don't see that it proves anything.'

'He must have had a contact on the racecourse. How else did he manage to pick on the one jockey who could most easily be corrupted?' I said.

'Perhaps he tried several, until he found a taker,' suggested Lodge.

'No. Everyone would have talked about it, if he had.'

'He tried Major Davidson,' said Lodge. 'That looks like a very bad mistake from your mythical adviser.'

'Yes,' I conceded. I changed to another tack. 'There have been one or two things which have been relayed recently to Uncle George which Kate herself didn't know. How do you explain that?'

'What things?'

'Joe's bit of brown wrapping paper, for instance. He told everyone in the weighing-room at Liverpool about it. Kate wasn't at the meeting. But two days later, on Uncle George's instructions, Joe was killed and the paper taken away from him.'

Lodge pondered. 'Someone might have rung her up on the Sunday and mentioned it in passing.'

I thought fleetingly of Dane. I said, 'Even then, it was surely not interesting enough for her to have told Uncle George.'

'You never know,' he said.

I started up and drove on in silence for some miles. I was loath to produce for his scepticism the most deep-rooted of my reasons for believing an enemy still existed: the near-certainty that in the concussed gap in my memory I already knew who it was.

When at last I tentatively told him this, he treated it more seriously than I expected. And after some minutes of thought he pierced and appalled me by saying, 'Perhaps your subconscious won't let you remember who this enemy of yours is because you like him.'

I dropped Lodge at Maidenhead and went on to the Cotswolds.

Entering the old stone house with the children noisily tumbling through the hall on their way to tea was like stepping into a sane world again. Scilla was coming down the stairs with her arms full of Polly's summer dresses: I went over and met her on the bottom step and kissed her cheek.

'Joan and I will have to lengthen all these,' she said, nodding at the dresses. 'Polly's growing at a rate of knots.'

I followed her into the drawing-room and we sat down on the hearthrug in front of a newly lit fire.

'Is it all over?' asked Scilla, pushing the dresses off her lap on to the floor.

'Yes, I think so.' Too much was all over.

I told her about the inquest and the verdict. I said, 'It was only because of Bill that George Penn was ever found out. Bill didn't die for nothing.'

She didn't answer for a long time, and I saw the yellow flames glinting on the unshed tears in her eyes. Then she sniffed and shook her head as if to free herself from the past, and said, 'Let's go and have tea with the children.'

Polly wanted me to mend a puncture on her bicycle. Henry said he'd worked out some gambits in chess and would I play against him after tea. William gave me a sticky kiss and pressed an aged fruit drop into my palm as a present. I was home again.