She made off down the swaying corridor. The attendant began to tap on doors and to enquire fruitlessly of his passengers if they were doctors. “I shall see my comrades of the other voitures,” he said importantly. “Evidently one must organize.”

Alleyn found Ricky sketchily half-dressed and in a child’s panic.

“Where have you been, however?” he demanded. “Because I didn’t know where everyone was. We’re going to be late for getting out. I can’t find my pants. Where’s Mummy?”

Alleyn calmed him, got him ready and packed their luggage. Ricky, white-faced, sat on the lower bunk with his gaze turned on the door. He liked, when travelling, to have his family under his eye. Alleyn, remembering his own childhood, knew his little son was racked with an illogical and bottomless anxiety, an anxiety that vanished when the door opened and Troy came in.

“Oh golly, Mum!” Ricky said and his lip trembled.

“Hullo, there,” Troy said in the especially calm voice she kept for Ricky’s panics. She sat down beside him, putting her arm where he could lean back against it, and looked at her husband.

“I think that woman’s very ill,” she said. “She looks frightful. She had what she thought was some kind of food poisoning this morning and dosed herself with castor-oil. And then, just now she had a violent pain, really awful, she says, in the appendix place and now she hasn’t any pain at all and looks ghastly. Wouldn’t that be a perforation, perhaps?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, my love.”

“Rory, she’s about fifty and she comes from the Bermudas and has no relations in the world and wears a string bag on her head and she’s never been abroad and we can’t just let her be whisked on into the Italian Riviera with a perforated appendix, if that’s what it is.”

“Oh, damn!”