"Was he?"
"Yes. He was sitting on the same side of the table as you, so you wouldn't have noticed. But he was opposite to me; and he was afraid."
Hillyard was puzzled.
"I can't think of a reason. I was a shipping clerk of no importance. I can't remember that I ever came across his name in all the eighteen months I spent in Alicante."
When Martin Hillyard was nineteen, Death intervened in the family feud. His parents died within a few weeks of each other.
"I was left with a thousand pounds."
"What did you do with them?"
"I went to Oxford."
"You? After those years of independence?"
"It had been my one passionate dream for years."