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important to Sebastian? His violin and his music, on the one hand, and on the other hand the people he loved: his mother, presumably, and Claire. Was there anything else? For the time being, I should proceed on the assumption that there was not; otherwise, surely Claire would have known. So, the terrible thing that he had found out must have concerned these things, or been triggered by one of them. The violin – the music – the mother – Claire. In asking Frau Bochsler’s guests to recall their conversations with Sebastian, I would concentrate on these four points. Something, somewhere, had triggered a terrible realisation in him. Surely it could not be impossible to find out what it was.
    If only I had met him. It was so hard, feeling my way blindly, trying to understand the innermost thoughts of a young man I had never met. If only I had seen him but once. But I shook my head briskly, and scolded myself. I must stop thinking this way: as though I had missed my chance. Frau Bochsler had met him and Herr Hegar had met him, and they understood as little as I. Having met him was not the point. Trying to understand the secrets of his mind was not the point. The point was simply factual, I reassured myself. Sebastian had been to Frau Bochsler’s; I had been to Frau Bochsler’s. He had walked to the Pension Limmat; I was walking the same way. He had met some people whom I would meet tomorrow.
Somewhere
along that path that he had trod, and that I would tread after him:
somewhere
, his secret must be hidden. If, after having followed it, it still seemed to me that everyone I spoke to said nothing more than platitudes and banalities – my greatest fear at that very moment – why then, somewhere, I would have missed the single pebble that was actually a pearl. I might do so. Yet that did not mean that the pearl was not there. Its existence was a matter of plain fact: of that much I was certain.
    I left the bridge and wandered on up the street in the direction of the pension. Doubt was not an option.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    In which Vanessa meets a retired violinist and asks him a number of questions
     
    I sat in a comfortable armchair in front of a small table decorously laid with small pastries. It was already the fifth of my morning calls in the company of Frau Bochsler, and each host had offered us something to eat. I was beginning to feel foolish, frustrated and exhausted. It had been obvious to me in the first five minutes of each call that no information was to be had, and yet we had been obliged to spend another ten minutes each time in polite conversation, most of which took place between Frau Bochsler and the host or hostess, and escaped me entirely, held as it was in singsong Swiss German.
    My enquiries had begun on the previous evening when I interviewed Frau Dossenbach, the proprietress of the low-ceilinged, medieval Pension Limmat, but from her I had learnt nothing but the barest of facts. Frau Dossenbach’s English was rudimentary: she appeared to possess an exactly equal and minimal knowledge of English, French, Italian and high German; precisely those words and phrases necessary to attend to the immediate wants of her numerous foreign guests, such as ‘Do you wish for hot water now?’ and ‘The evening meal is at seven o’clock precisely’. My attempt to pose a few modest questions about Sebastian Cavendish had met with blank incomprehension until I was rescued by a gentleman passing through the hall. He took the trouble to interpret my questions and Frau Dossenbach’s answers, but as might be expected from one so entirely devoted to the necessities of her daily work, she had only facts of this nature to tell (and some reluctance, due no doubt to the natural discretion of one in her profession, to mention even those). I could learn absolutely nothing about Sebastian’s state of mind, and gleaned only the simple confirmation of the fact that he had departed early on the morning of the 29th of December,