CEDRIC MARCHANT LEFT England for the first time at the age of forty-one. He travelled to France by train and boat at the insistence of his sister, Freda, who had gone to live in the Dordogne with a painter from Leeds who called himself Roberto.

Freda, who was forty-three, seemed to think that Roberto was a younger man. How she could tell was beyond Cedric because Roberto had a shaven skull and an orange beard covered his face up to his small close-set violent eyes.