I didn’t weep in the eye. The science was accurate, but the heart-wrench was missing.
Robin looked thoughtful and was airsick.
I carried the rescued folder in the hold-all and Robin showed me, a few weeks later, several short hand-written notes in Hebrew, Greek, Russian and Arabic.
‘They say thank you,’ he said.
By then I’d returned to the BBC and put on for the winter the Edwardian cape-coat version of me, and over in Kensington John Rupert in pleased surprise said his superior officer wanted Perry Stuart raised to ‘need to know’ status.
I and Ghost, thin white-haired grandfather, bounced vigorous young tempests into unputdownable text books that in due course I signed by the hundreds in schools, and after that in five hundreds in bookshops.
I seldom saw Kris. One sordid anecdote too many finally scuppered his job with the BBC, despite his Norse god lookalike presence. No longer talking of trains, he spent the insurance from the Luton crunch on a drama course and let out his extravagant nature playing super heroes.
Bell, who phoned me often for advice as a brother, swung as ever between love and exasperation, nuptials on, nuptials off, indecision rules, OK.
Behind my back my faithful Jett van Els conspired with my grandmother to make my Monday morning impulse irreversible, but with contentment we came in time to ‘I do’, ‘I do’, and I gave her a ring and a promise.
Under the successful exterior, the damage inflicted on me by Michael Ford still stung as a painful memory, try as I might to ignore it. To have been smashed to a standstill by a thug, I told myself, wasn’t an abject disgrace, it was one of life’s little hiccups. Try telling that to the winds!
In Robin’s dangerous double life, the Unified Trading Company faded away, to be replaced by new recruits who understood from Day One that action first, report later were the wrong way round.
The Traders atrophied, the Select Group bloomed.
Evelyn left Robin with a goodbye note.
Jett stayed at home when Robin Darcy and I drove from his home in Miami to Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, to hear Amy’s claim to be owner of Trox Island.
I gave evidence with photographs of having been there. Ravi Chand clinched things with New Delhi grins, and Amy lost her claim but kept her cows.
Michael came to the hearing, too close on my horizon.
Michael’s hunger, like a lion’s, was awake and prowling.
He hadn’t properly understood Ravi Chand’s explanation of antibodies and in fury began taunting the Indian birth and skin colour of the world expert witness. Who was he, Michael shouted, to interfere and to say his wife’s cattle carried a sickness?
I left Ravi trying in vain to explain pasteurisation techniques and went back into the room where the hearing had been held. I picked up the small churn of raw unpasteurised Trox milk that Amy had lied on oath was safe, and I took it outside and put it on the table near to Michael and, using a dipper, filled a glass and set it down.
It was worth a try.
Michael looked at the glass with disgust and at me with a sneer as an adversary well beaten and now afraid of a replay.
‘Don’t drink that,’ I warned Michael. ‘It’s unpasteurised. It will make you ill.’
I spoke the truth but, as I hoped, he didn’t believe me.
Michael wouldn’t have believed me if I’d said the sun was hot and, in arrogance and bravado, he drank the milk.
That evening, Michael, about to become the second-ever case of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X, lost his cool, shot an intruder and was having to answer the difficult question: why did the bullet in the intruder match the one removed from a man discovered face down in the Everglades with his legs half eaten by alligators?
It wasn’t Michael’s day.