"That would be very expensive indeed." A sharpness in Mattie's voice. Yes, he was a stickler for protocol and procedure. No, he should never have allowed his Service life to meld with the crusade that was the boy's.

"I could pay for it."

Mattie Furniss was off on his travels, and that was no business of the boy's. And he didn't know his schedule yet.

He did not know when he would return, when they could next meet. So much to talk about. They should have been talking in comfort of gentler matters, relaxed, they should have been gossiping – not prattling around the subject of stand-off capability and armour-piercing weapons under a tree in St James's Park for God's sake, with the rain beginning to come down in earnest. He took out his pen and a sheet of paper from a leather backed pad. He wrote briefly on it. A name, an address.

"Thank you, sir," Charlie said.

The keen statement. "In for longer, the reports more regular."

"Please give my best regards to Mrs Furniss, and to the girls."

"Of course I will. They'll be glad to know I've seen you."

He wondered whether the boy had been more than a friend to his daughters, either of them. They'd been very close, down in the country, and when his brood were all in London and the boy was their guest. It had been in London, three years before, in their little drawing room, the boy on his first trip from California and away from his mother, that Mattie had told Charlie Eshraq, as straight and as baldly as he could, what had happened to his sister and his father and his uncle.

He had never seen the boy cry since then. Bottled it all up, of course. "When do you go, dear boy?"

"Pretty soon."

"You'll telephone me, at home, before you go?"