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to write the text for the Gantry Group’s next annual report.’
    ‘How about books?’
    ‘He says he’s working on a manuscript. He won’t let me read it yet, but he says it’s a thriller. He’s looking for an agent just now. He says you can’t get published without one.’
    ‘How about Oz’s old agent? What was his name again?’
    ‘Roscoe Brown?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Primavera, he’s Hollywood; that’s not what he does.’
    ‘I could always send it to my brother-in-law,’ I suggested. ‘He’d read it if I asked him.’
    ‘Miles Grayson? I thought he’d retired.’
    ‘From acting, yes, but he still produces and directs. Although he has so many business interests these days, he insists that films are still his main focus. Everything else is just a sideline.’
    ‘Including the wine business?’
    ‘Very much so. It’s only a small part of his portfolio.’
    A couple of years ago Miles and my sister visited me in St Martí. I introduced him to some of the better wines from our region and he was so impressed that he bought one of the producers. I’ve been a director for the last two years and it’s doing all right.
    ‘Well,’ Susie ventured, cautiously, ‘if you think he would read it, I’ll tell Duncan, and ask him to give you a call.’
    Tom and I went back home next morning, and I thought no more about it, until last autumn, over a year later, my phone rang, and it was Duncan Culshaw, calling out of the blue. He’d booked himself into the Nieves Mar Hotel, in L’Escala, and he told me that he’d like to see me.
    ‘You came all this way on spec?’ I asked.
    ‘Susie said you’d be here,’ he said. ‘She told me that you might be prepared to show my book to your brother-in-law.’
    ‘I might, that’s true, but you don’t need to throw yourself at my feet for it to happen. If I do it, it’ll be as a favour to Susie, pure and simple.’
    ‘I appreciate that,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself with him by sending something blind.’ He paused. ‘Have dinner with me tonight, and I’ll give you a copy.’
    ‘I can’t do that,’ I replied, ‘unless you fancy feeding my son as well. But lunch tomorrow would be okay.’
    He had his manuscript with him when we met in the hotel restaurant, not in printed form but on a four gigabyte memory stick. ‘It’s not quite finished,’ he told me. ‘I have a couple of rough edges that I need to smooth out.’ He handed it to me. ‘Read it please, and we’ll meet again, possibly for coffee tomorrow morning. I’ll call you to arrange something.’
    ‘That’s a tight timescale,’ I observed, ‘for a whole manuscript.’
    ‘You’ll finish it, I promise you. It’s a page-turner.’
    I took the stick from him. ‘Obviously not literally,’ I pointed out, ‘but I’ll do it.’
    We had a pleasant enough lunch; most of our conversation was about the Emporda region, its front-line tourist pitches and some of the spots off the beaten track. ‘That was very useful,’ he told me as he signed the bill. ‘I have a piece to write for one of my airline clients; you’ve given me just about everything I need.’
    ‘That’s handy,’ I remarked. ‘You’ll be able to put me down as a business expense.’
    I had a flash of concern that I might have sounded waspish, or been ‘a nippy sweetie’, as my Glaswegian Granny Phillips would have put it, but far from being wounded, Duncan nodded, beamed, and replied, ‘Yes, indeed, Primavera; the whole damn trip in fact, with free air travel and car hire.’
    My only reaction was a smile, but I felt that for the first time I’d had a flash of the real Duncan Culshaw.
    I drove straight home, dug out the rarely used MacBook laptop that I keep as a back-up for my computer, took it out on to the terrace, with Charlie, our Labrador, for company, and plugged the stick into one of the USB sockets. There was only one document on it, a large PDF file, titled
The Mask
. When I