The Secret

'Another one?'

Geoffrey Thurslow nodded. 'Thank you, Jack.' I picked up our glasses and carried them over to the bar. 'Two pints when you're ready, Fred.'

'Right you are, sir.' The landlord took the glasses and refilled them. The Badger's Rest is my local, partly because it's near to the cottage and partly because Fred knows how to look after his beer, which is supplied by Fullers' Brewery of Chiswick. We're a fair distance from the metropolis, I know, but London Pride travels pretty well so long as it is given a few days to settle.

When I got back to our table one of Fred's boys had cleared the plates away and Geoffrey was sitting back comfortably, puffing away at his pipe. That's the other reason I patronise the Badger's Rest - there are no silly rules about smoking in the bar. What's the point of a public house, I say, if you can't smoke and drink in it?

Geoffrey took his glass. 'Cheers!'

'Cheers!' I rummaged in my pocket for my pipe, refilled it and lit it with a taper from the fire, and we sat companionably for a while. People came and went, families looked in, saw the haze of blue-grey smoke that hung around our heads, tut-tutted and went into the garishly decorated family room next door, where their children could eat hamburgers and chips and play on the games machines. Fred's a canny businessman and he does his best to keep all his customers happy, not just old fogies like Geoffrey and me.

We hadn't seen each other for a few weeks and so we were catching up on each other's news; though, to be frank, neither of us had actually done a very great deal since we had last met. It's enough at our age just to be able to meet up in the pub from time to time and talk about the old days. It must have been the mention of somebody we'd known at The Vale that jogged my old friend's memory.

'I've got something for you.' Geoffrey reached into his top pocket. 'I just remembered. Something for the Valetudinarian.' He passed a letter over to me. It carried a Berkshire postmark.

'Hatch, match or dispatch?'

'A death I'm afraid, Jack. It's one of yours. Chap called Sellars.'

Oh, how I hate that kind of letter. As editor of the magazine of The Vale School Old Boys' Association - the Valetudinarian - I have to expect that I will receive such a letter from time to time. There are always ten or so obituaries to insert in every yearly edition. It's worse, though, when the death has occurred among one of my boys - one of the four hundred or more who lived in School House during the thirty-five years that I was House Master. I suppose that I should be grateful that I was there in peacetime and never had to stand up in Chapel every Sunday and read out the names of those Old Boys who had died in one war or another and whose names would one day be added to the Roll of Honour on the school's War Memorial.

I started to read the letter. It was from the deceased's son, who had himself left The Vale School only five years previously to read Social Engineering at some red-brick university or other. Social Engineering? What sort of subject was that? Nothing that would improve the state of the country, I was sure. Whatever the evanescent nature of the course the young man had taken the contents of the letter were clear and coherent enough. At least some of the things he had been taught at The Vale School had stuck and he could still organise his thoughts well enough to write a decent letter. The facts were plain enough - his father John Sellars, sometime Head of School House, had been killed in a motor accident near Swallowfield in Berkshire on the fifteenth of September. That was just over two weeks ago, then.

Sellars... Of course I remembered him, even though he had left school thirty years ago. He had been Head of my house and a School Prefect, after all. He must have been only in his late forties or early fifties when he died - unfairly young, especially so when I considered that I was still in pretty good condition myself, despite having celebrated my eighty-third birthday this year.

Geoffrey leaned across the table. He must have seen the mist in my eyes, for he said quietly, 'I know, Jack. It's a brute, isn't it?'

'It's always bad when they die before their time. Always bad...' I took a pull at my pint.

'His son was at The Vale too, wasn't he? Duncan, was it?'

'Yes that's right, in the 1980s. He was in Griffiths' House, not mine. I wonder why he wrote to you?' I had a shrewd idea why he hadn't written to me.

'He didn't write to me. He wrote to the Head. I had told him that I was coming down to Dorset to see you, so he passed the letter on to me.' Oh yes. I should have looked more carefully at the envelope.

'They'll be well provided for, I suppose.'

'Yes, I'm sure they will be.' Every now and then Old Boys send me news of their progress - from first jobs to partnerships, from footloose travellers to men of property, from wild youths to pillars of the establishment. They tend to lead lives of solid achievement, our Old Boys. I suppose those who are less successful tend not to write to me. No doubt there are many stories of failed promise and unfulfilled lives that I don't get to hear. Just the same, I print the stories in the magazine and I expect they encourage people to excel in their own ways. I tucked the letter absent-mindedly into my coat pocket. I was feeling uneasy. There was something... something at the back of my mind, waiting to come into focus. Something about John Sellars.

'Come on Geoffrey. Let's head on back.' We finished our beer, picked up our coats and to a cheery 'Thank you, gentlemen!' from behind the bar made our way through the blustery autumn wind the short distance down the lane back to the cottage, making a stop or two along the way as old men do when they have had three pints to drink and the weather is on the chilly side. When we got home, it was to find that my wife had lit the fire in the sitting-room and settled herself in the corner with a book. Two mugs of tea were waiting for us by the hearth. Muriel knows Geoffrey and me very well indeed.

People sometimes ask me why I moved away from the Vale of White Horse when I finally retired from teaching. 'After all,' they say,' you must have liked it there. How long were you at The Vale?'

'Nearly fifty years,' I reply.

'How could you bear to leave?'

And I explain that, although being a senior master at a Public School is a good life, it's not the only life. Not for me, anyway. Some masters enjoy playing games, some go on expeditions, some compile crosswords, some collect antiquities. I write mystery novels and I don't mind admitting that I'm pretty good at it. I must have had over fifty of them published by now and I've had my fair share of success - TV adaptations, a couple of films, that sort of thing.

It was the royalties from my detective stories that bought the cottage, not my school pension. It's the repeat fees from the television shows that have allowed Muriel and I to enjoy a very comfortable retirement, taking holidays whenever we feel like it and still having enough money left over to help our children when they need it. Not for us the life of a Mr Chips, dosing quietly away in genteel poverty just outside the walls of the school. That's Geoffrey's preserve. He never married although there had been talk once, many years ago, that he might have. Only he and I knew the truth about that, and we never talked about it, even on the occasions, three or four times a year, when he drove his old Rover the hundred miles or so down from Oxfordshire and came to stay with us for a few days.

So we moved away, to Dorset and the coast where Muriel could mix with people who had absolutely nothing to do with education (to her great relief). I could enjoy the sun and the wind and the rain, and look at the sea whenever I wanted, and do a little writing too, and keep in touch with the old world - kept at an appropriate distance - via the expensive new computer that was installed in the study which I had had built on to one side of the cottage.

The computer... Sellars... Now it came into focus at last.

'Geoffrey. Would you come into my study for a moment?'

'I've just got comfortable.'

'No, come on.' Geoffrey grumbled, but he stood up and followed me into the study. I turned on the computer. 'You haven't brought me out here just to show me your nasty new toy again, have you?'

'Sit down, old chap.' I pointed to a wickerwork chair in the corner of the room, next to the display case where I keep my literary trophies. Geoffrey sat there and scowled at me while I turned on - or "booted up", as my IT instructor likes to phrase it - the machine. After a minute or two of mysterious buzzes, clicks and whirs the logon screen appeared and I entered my name and password. This process mystifies Muriel, which annoys me. She's an intelligent woman and could easily learn to use the computer just as well as - or better than - I do. I clicked on the Outlook icon and my email magically manifested itself, all the messages I had received neatly arranged in reverse order of delivery with the newest one at the top of the list.

Now then... about a week ago, wasn't it? I scrolled down the messages... and there it was. I clicked on it and it opened in a new window. (I know the jargon, you see.)

'Look at this.'

Geoffrey peered over my shoulder. 'I can't see a thing. Can't make it out. You read it.'

The room was cosy and warm, but I felt a chill as I read the message out aloud.

Dear Mr Jackson,

Please excuse me not writing to you properly. I got your email address from the School magazine. I'm afraid that I have some bad news to pass on to you. My father, who was in your House from 1966 until 1971, died last week in a car crash. I expect you'll want to put something about him in your magazine, I'll send you something in the post.

Yours sincerely,

George Campbell

'Campbell...' Geoffrey mused. 'We had lots of Campbells. I suppose you remember this one? If he was in your house, I mean.'

Yes, I most certainly did. My mind may have been a little befuddled earlier by the effects of three pints of best bitter and a generous helping of Fred's chicken and leek pie but it had recovered its clarity now. I swivelled the computer chair around and faced Geoffrey.

'We kept it quiet at the time.'

'Sorry? What do you mean, you kept it quiet? What did you keep quiet?'

'You'll see. It's an odd story and so far as I know only Sellars, Campbell and myself knew about it. We didn't want any kind of scandal and it was possible in those days to have people promise to keep things under their hats and actually stick to their promises. They wouldn't go running off to the papers just because someone waved a cheque-book at them.'

'Many did, though, even then. What about the Profumo affair?'

'Yes, I know, but not the kind of people who were at The Vale. It wasn't the form. People had more decency and a proper respect for authority.'

'More reticence, anyway.'

'Just as you like, Geoffrey. But listen...'

There were never two boys so different as Sellars and Campbell. Sellars weighed over twelve stone when he first came to The Vale at the age of thirteen and none of it was fat. He was extraordinarily strong, and to go with his strength he had an excellent eye for a ball and a passion for games of all sorts. While no genius, he'd had no problems with keeping up in class so long as he applied himself. Geoffrey remembered him as being somewhat dense, but as my friend’s chief subject and dearest love was Latin this was perhaps not to be wondered at. Very few boys managed to live up to Geoffrey's standards of scholarship. Sellars' true home was on the football field or in the fives or squash courts. He was tough and aggressive and the kind of boy who could take a loose assortment of players and mould them into a team. It was no surprise to anybody when he became School Captain of Football when he was in the Fifth Form and still only sixteen.

Campbell was another case altogether. He was tall and lanky and gawky and thin and walked with an odd drooping posture. He always looked as if he was as if he was about to fall asleep and that often led the boys and the staff to assume that there was something wrong with him - before they got to know him, that is. In fact, he had won the top scholarship of his year and, when he applied himself or his interest was aroused, was capable of the most extraordinary work. Once, I remember Hedges the Lower School maths master coming to me in a state of great excitement - 'Jackson! Look! It's your young Campbell! Look at this!' He showed me an exercise book full of abstruse symbols that meant nothing to me whatsoever.

'Very good, Hedges. What is it?'

'What is it? What is it?' Hedges chirped at me. 'Fermat's Last Theorem. He's proved it! Nobody's been able to do that, ever. Not for hundreds of years! Look!'

I looked. I had no idea what Fermat's Last Theorem was, nor whether Campbell had proved it, nor whether this was a good or a bad thing to have done.

'Very good, Hedges. Very good.' (Actually, I still don't know whether Campbell had proved it or not. I saw a television programme about it a year or two ago which said that an English chap called Wiles who was working in America had done it, so I suppose that either Campbell hadn't really proved it after all, or he hadn't been able to prove that he'd proved it.)

Chalk and cheese, apples and oranges. Two very different boys. We prided ourselves at The Vale School that we could bring out the best in every boy, and as a rule we did pretty well. I think that the school was big enough to contain both boys and, had things been arranged differently, they would not have clashed so disastrously. But they were not.

For a start, both boys were placed in my House. We allocate new boys to Houses on a sensible basis, taking into account parents' preferences (if the father is an Old Boy he may well want his son to enter the same House as he once lived in), the existence of siblings (a boy may - or may not - want to occupy the same House as his elder brother) and whether boys who were at the same Prep School want to stay together. After that, boys with no predetermined preferences are spread around the Houses in such a way that the good sportsmen and the good scholars are evenly distributed. It was no surprise and only fair that, having been given a superb footballer one year, I should get no more outstanding players for a while, but be handed an academic type the following autumn.

That was the root of the problem. Sellars was a year senior to Campbell. Why was this a problem? There were two reasons. First, the brighter new boys moved immediately into the Fourth Form, while their less academically distinguished comrades spent a year in the Third. This meant that Campbell and Sellars took many of their lessons together, despite their year's difference in age and seniority. I've no doubt that Campbell's effortless academic superiority and patronising air towards those who were less gifted than him grated on the older boy.

The second reason lay in the way that sporting contests between the Houses were organised. As you might expect, we had things like inter-House cricket matches, squash tournaments, swimming competitions, track days; all that and more. The boys who were good at games got into their House teams and enjoyed themselves. The ones who did especially well were awarded their House Colours and strode around the school grounds wearing them and feeling that they were mighty fine fellows. But it was felt - and rightly so - that there should also be an opportunity for those boys who were never chosen for their House sides to make a contribution and so the House Standards competitions were introduced.

They worked like this: each term had its own corresponding sport - gymnastics in Winter, athletics in Lent and swimming in Summer. For each sport a set of standards were set - a first-year might be expected to climb a twenty-foot rope in five seconds, or run a hundred yards in eighteen seconds or dive for a brick at the bottom of the deep end of the swimming pool. The standards were set so as to be challenging, but nevertheless achievable by the average boy if he was prepared to make a decent effort. Every time a boy achieved a Standard, a point was awarded to his House. The points were totted up at the end of the competition and the House with the most points won. Of course, there were some boys in each House who got all their standards with no trouble at all, and others who struggled to gain more than one or two. It was generally felt that, so long as a boy did the best he could, and showed a respectable amount of House spirit he would have shown himself to be a good sort. The prefects chivvied those boys who had not gained all their Standards down to the gym, or the track, or the pool and encouraged them to win more points for their House.

It was a good basis for a competition, I think. No boy could earn any more points for his House than any of his fellows could, however good he was, and the results reflected more the ability of a House's prefects to motivate and organise their charges than the brilliance of any particular individual.

'I kept well clear of all that nonsense,' Geoffrey said.

'It wasn't nonsense.'

Geoffrey shook his head. 'All right, Jack. But it brought out the worst in some of the boys, even if it brought out the best in the others. Take your man Sellars, for example.'

So Geoffrey had noticed, then. It was inevitable that when he entered his final year at The Vale, Sellars should not only become a House Prefect, but also Head of School House, if for no other reason than the need to do something about the lamentable state of our trophy cupboard. If anybody could lift our sporting results, it would be him. It worked, too. We won the House Rugby hands down, and came second in the Gymnastics Standards, despite Sellars being no gymnast himself. He was tireless; sweeping School House every afternoon for all the boys who still had Standards to earn and urging them on as they suffered on the various instruments of torture with which the gym was equipped. I would go down there regularly and give him my support, and I couldn't help but notice that his keenness and encouragement sometimes tended to turn into bullying and intimidation. I had had a quiet word with him once or twice to go easy on some of the less able boys. Of course I never saw Campbell in the gym, or on the rugger pitches either, and I don't recall that he ever earned School House more than a desultory point or two in all the years he was with us. This did not at all endear him to Sellars.

The other housemasters would come up to me in the Staff Room. 'No chance for us this year, eh Jack?' I'd smile and say that it was School House's turn at last for a little sporting success.

Christmas came and went, with its School Play and Carol Concert. Then it was Lent Term, with chilly winds and snow on the ground. The Athletics Standards competition started after half-term and ran for four weeks. The initial six-week series of my Miss Dorpleston tales was being performed on the wireless, I recall. It was the first time any of my detective stories had been adapted into dramatic form and I was eager to hear what the BBC Repertory Company had done with them. It was ten past three in the afternoon and I had just settled down to listen to their production of The Lady's not for Spurning, when there was a heavy knock on my study door.

Blast, I thought and, 'Come in,' I said.

It was Sellars in his sports kit, red-faced and furious. He glared at me as if I was a particularly obnoxious fourth-former.

Geoffrey interrupted; 'They are obnoxious.'

'So they are, Geoffrey. But let's get back to the story.'

With a sigh, I turned the wireless down. 'Do take a seat, Sellars,' I said.

The boy remained standing. Although the room was warm I could have sworn that I could see steam rising from him. 'Sir,' he said. 'I want your permission to beat Campbell.'

This must seem like an extraordinary request these days, when corporal punishment is forbidden in schools, but it was not so very uncommon then.

'Why?'

'He's the most dreadful slacker, sir.'

'That is unfortunate Sellars, but not sufficient cause to punish him.'

'He has told me a direct lie.'

Ah. That was more serious. Campbell's total lack of interest in sport was down to the way he was made and there was nothing much we could do about it. Lying to a prefect was another thing altogether. At The Vale we preferred to teach our pupils to tell the truth, rather than how to lie effectively, as seems to be the case so often nowadays.

'Very well, Sellars. I shall need some time to consider this. Would you and Campbell please come and see me tonight at nine? I shall listen to what both of you have to say then.' Sellars left the room, still fuming, and I turned the wireless back up. I saw no reason why a squabble between two boys should interrupt my listening.

'Was it any good?'

'The programme? I thought it was execrable. Totally lifeless. They made Miss D. sound like a ninety year old moron.'

'Oh dear,' said Geoffrey, sounding less upset than I would have liked.

They had had a row, of course. Sellars had gone barging about the House in his usual way, flushing reluctant sportsmen out of their comfortable studies and into the changing rooms, to put on running shoes and shorts and go down to the chilly athletics track and have another try at the 220 yards, or whatever Standard it was that they hadn't earned yet. He had found Campbell in his room, reading a book with his feet up on his desk and listening to choral music on the wireless. He had told him to get off his anatomy and get into his kit and to show some doubly-qualified House Spirit for a change. Campbell had ignored him; except for turning his wireless up a notch. Sellars had lost his temper at this and, although he didn't actually strike Campbell he pretty much forced him to his feet and out into the changing rooms. He probably threatened him with a week of polishing the prefects' shoes or some other form of punishment. Sellars claimed that Campbell had told him that he would see him by the high jump - which was the one Standard that he thought the gangling six-footer might be able to achieve - in ten minutes. He never turned up and Sellars found out later that he had gone to the Music Department instead and played Scarlatti sonatas all afternoon, still wearing his plimsolls.

'He told me he was going to the field and he didn't. He never meant to. He was lying to me, sir!'

I considered. The accusation was serious, and it seemed to be well-founded. Campbell was a sixth-former, and consequently high standards of probity and integrity were expected from him. On the other hand, there was Sellars' bullying manner to consider. Campbell could claim that his promise to go to the high jump was forced from him under duress.

'What do you say, Campbell?'

'I say he should jolly mind his own business. If he spent less time running around the place shouting at people about his stupid Standards he might have a better chance of passing a few A levels next term!' Campbell, like so many academically clever boys, had absolutely no tact. A levels were as much of a bête noire to Sellars as sports were to Campbell. If only they hadn't been exactly one year apart!

'How do you mean?'

'You see Geoffrey; if they had been in the same year then Campbell would almost certainly have been a prefect too, and Sellars would not have been able to demand that he go to the sports field and threaten to punish him if he didn't. If Campbell had been two years younger than Sellars, he wouldn't have dared to disobey him. Or if they had been in different Houses or Sellars had been younger than Campbell, then again the problem wouldn't have arisen. But from Campbell's point of view he was Sellars' equal and he saw no need to show him any deference or respect at all. There was a lot of that sort of thing about in the late 1960s.'

'All that awful music, you mean.'

'Yes, and the Paris Riots of 1968. It was all very unsettling. In the following year, the prefects tore up the punishment system altogether.'

'Good Heavens!'

'It meant a lot more work for me.'

Sellars had been an idiot, coming to me. It meant that I was involved, for Sellars' authority derived from me, and if I didn't back him up then his credibility - and mine too - would be in danger. Somehow, I needed to find a way out of this impasse.

'Why can't you two come to some agreement? Settle it now? Admit you've both got a bit steamed up?'

'I will, sir.' That was Campbell.

'No! He has told a deliberate lie to a School Prefect! Either I must beat him or you must, sir.'

I was coming to that conclusion myself. It would have been a very bad idea to let Sellars, who had a powerful squash player's right arm, cane Campbell, especially as he had such an obvious grudge against him.

'Very well. If you cannot agree to shake hands and admit that you have both made a mistake, then I shall have to punish Campbell. But I must tell you, Sellars, that you have fallen a great deal in my estimation over this. A very great deal.' That was my way of punishing Sellars.

'We're going to win the Athletics Standards, sir. That's what matters. I'm going to make sure of it.' Sellars' determined expression made this seem very likely. And if I were being honest, I should have to own up to the fact that I was enjoying School House's new run of successes, and I knew that it was mostly down to Sellars' efforts.

'So you're going to get Mr Jackson to do your dirty work for you, are you?' Campbell sneered. The hostility between the two boys was at its most palpable. Neither could or ever would see the other's point of view.

'That's enough, Campbell!' The boy was going too far.

'Sir, before you cane me for this, I think there's something you ought to know.'

'What's that?'

I leaned across to Geoffrey.

'Campbell told me something about Sellars that I will never tell you or any other living soul. Not even now, even though both he and Campbell are dead. It was astonishing and very, very horrible. They both had sons, and it would be the most appalling thing if they were to learn from anybody other than their own fathers what I learned from Campbell that evening. I hope their fathers never told them.'

'Was it...?'

'No. Please don't ask. All I'll say is that Sellars looked very sick indeed, and I had to send a boy over to fetch Muriel to take him down to the San.'

When Sellars had gone I turned to Campbell. I had absolutely no idea of how to deal with him. 'I should bloody well thrash you for what you've just done. I hope you're proud of yourself.'

'He made me say it, sir. I didn't want to.'

You didn't have to say it, I thought, but kept my thoughts to myself.

'How did you find out, anyway?'

'Our sisters... they go to the same school. Girls talk, you know, sir.'

'Why would your sister tell you a thing like that?'

'She wouldn't have, I'm sure. Only, one day in the hols I was telling her what a beast Sellars is and what he was doing to me, and she told me what I told you, and she made me swear never to tell a living soul. You won't tell on me will you, sir?'

'I will not. But in your turn you must promise that you will never repeat to anybody what you have told me this evening.'

'Yes, sir. Sorry sir.'

I looked at the boy, still standing by the bookcase. He looked as pale and ill as Sellars had, and even though I despised him for what he had done, I felt pity for him too. What a heavy burden that knowledge must have been!

Both boys stayed on at The Vale, although I suggested to each of them individually that it would be the right thing for them to leave. I would have preferred it if we could have expelled them; but on what grounds? It was totally inconceivable that I should tell anyone what I had learned, so we would have had to send them down for trumped-up reasons. Sellars never spoke to Campbell again. He left at the end of the year with a modest set of A level results and spent three years at a provincial university, gaining a third class honours degree and going straight into his father's business, where he prospered. Campbell was not made a prefect - he was temperamentally unsuited, I told his parents - and he moved on to a life of academic research, and modest fortune, as so many very clever but socially maladroit boys do. That might have been all there was to tell, except that when the Internet took off in the mid-1990s it turned out that he had registered some patents which were a key part of the system, and he became very rich, moving to the Thames Valley and living and working quite near to his old adversary who was by this time a well-established businessman.

The second letter arrived a day or so later. I showed it to Geoffrey.

'Good heavens! What an extraordinary thing!'

'Yes. Most extraordinary. So extraordinary and unlikely that I think we should go to Berkshire and take a closer look. What do you think?'

Geoffrey, Muriel and I piled into the Saab and I drove us up to Wokingham, which is the town where Sellars and Campbell had both lived. We didn't like it much. There was nowhere decent to have lunch, even though the town was full of pubs and restaurants. In fact, I've never seen anywhere so thoroughly spoiled as that town. It must have been a pleasant enough place fifty years ago, before the corporations and the money and the housing estates arrived, but now it was drab and dreary, traffic-choked and cramped. In the end we gave up on it, and drove out to the west. Swallowfield, where the accident had occurred, was three or four miles away, to the south of Reading.

When we reached Swallowfield we found that there was still a bunch of wilted flowers lying by the side of the road, where it made a turn to the east. It had been a few weeks since the crash, so the grass had started to grow back over the tyre marks, but the scrapes on the wall and the newly-replaced section of wooden fence behind it told a story which I could read easily enough. Standing on the verge we could see that the entrance of the drive which belonged to the house which stood on the inside of the apex of the bend was a dangerous place to turn out from - so dangerous that the owner had fixed a two-sided mirror to a post on the far side of the road so he could see cars coming from both directions.

It had made the front page of the Wokingham Times. Two middle-aged businessmen, both driving powerful German sports cars of the same make and colour, had collided on the bend. Each had been going at an estimated sixty miles per hour. Both cars were in excellent mechanical order, and easily capable of rounding the bend in the dry conditions which pertained at the time of the accident. One had been driven by Sellars, one by Campbell.

'What do you make of it?' asked Geoffrey, when we regained the warmth and safety of the Saab. I didn't answer immediately, but started the car and drove down the road a little way, reversed in a side-entrance and came back slowly.

'Look straight ahead,' I said, and 'Oh, yes!' Muriel said immediately afterwards. Geoffrey, who was sitting in the back seat, didn't see what we saw from the front, so I carried on past the bend and stopped in a lay-by. My two passengers changed places and I turned the car round again.

'Keep your eyes on the road ahead,' I told him. Geoffrey stared forwards. We passed the corner for the third time.

'Ah... I see,' he said. 'It's like something out of one of your books, isn't it?'

'So each driver saw what he thought was the reflection of his own car in the mirror that was fixed by the side of the road. He didn't realise that it was actually the other driver's car that he was seeing. What time did the accident happen?'

'Seven-fifteen in the evening. It was just getting dark. Twilight is always the most dangerous time to be out on the roads. Both drivers must have known that road very well - the paper said it's a popular route if you want to get from Wokingham to Basingstoke and avoid the traffic on the A33. Campbell was ploughing along, saw Sellars' car, thought it was the reflection of his own car in the mirror and not another car coming in the opposite direction, and took the bend a bit wide.'

'While Sellars, who was on the outside of the bend, made the same mistake and, as he was going pretty quickly too, he decided to cut the corner a little.'

'And the result was that they met on the crown of the road at a combined speed of one hundred and twenty miles per hour.' Muriel shuddered. 'No wonder they were both killed instantly.'

We were drinking coffee in the sitting-room of the cottage. It was dark outside and Muriel had drawn the curtains and turned up the radiators.

'I read somewhere,' I said, 'that's there's no such thing as a coincidence. So many things happen in the world every day, every second, that even the most extraordinary improbabilities are really very commonplace indeed. Suppose that there was a million to one chance that you would, oh I don't know, meet a man from Mars on any particular day. Now there are over fifty-five million people in this country alone, so several of them could be shaking hands with Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark, right now.'

'You mean, Flying Saucers Really Have Landed.'

'Don't be silly. You know what I mean. It wasn't so very unlikely that Campbell and Sellars would end up in the same relatively prosperous part of the country, nor that they, having made their pile, would buy similar Porsche sports cars.'

'Yes - but why should they meet on that particular day on that particular bend in the road?'

'It was a day like any other. Any day would have done.'

'It's still too much. Too... bizarre, too wrong.'

'I agree.'

'Could Campbell have been blackmailing Sellars, with the knowledge he had? You still won't tell me what it was?'

'If I told you, you'd only wish I hadn't. Believe me Geoffrey, you're better off not knowing.'

'If it was as terrible a secret as you say, are you sure that Campbell wasn't using it against Sellars?'

'Why should he? He had plenty of money. And why then, and not before when he wasn't so well off?'

'They were both the same in so many ways - dogmatic, never paying much attention to other people's opinions or feelings.'

'Could we have helped them, while they were at The Vale?'

'They would never have seen eye to eye. Their happening to clash the way they did was just another coincidence - in other words, not a coincidence at all. The same goes for the accident, don't you think?'

'If only we could be sure...'

'If you two don't cheer up soon,' said Muriel, 'I'll send you both off to the pub!'

How many people are there left who know Sellars' secret? I wondered, as I lay awake in bed that night. It had been many years since I had let that fearful knowledge disturb my sleep, but it came back to me with full force now. It was the stuff of nightmares, and I was rather afraid that I would be suffering upset nights for some weeks to come. Thoughts kept turning over in my mind - about the secret, of course, but about otther things too. There were ramifications and consequences to consider.

For example, were Campbell's and Sellars' sisters still alive? They both knew the secret and I prayed that they had not let it get any further than it had already. But if they too had died like their brothers in an unlikely accident that only left me and maybe their sons. And, if I was the only one left alive who knew the secret, I could be sure that the knowledge of it would die with me, for I will never tell it to anybody. There is another possibility, however, and it worries me. Suppose there is somebody who, without knowing the secret themselves, knows that I know it and needs to be sure that its last owner can never pass it on? What about Sellars' son? Was he told about it? Or that I was privy to it? Surely not. But can I be sure? Could it be that I too will suffer an untoward end some day? And perhaps Muriel as well? It would be too dangerous to make enquiries, however discreet, so I shall never know.

There is just one other thing that bothers me. As I said, I've been a successful writer of mystery stories for forty years or more, and published more than fifty books. Could it be that somewhere in one of my tales I have let slip, unconsciously of course, some little detail that an alert reader could use to discover what Sellars' secret was? No author knows more than half of what goes into his stories and any writer who claims that he understands himself and his writings completely is either deluding himself or a liar. The secret has been lurking in the back of my mind for over thirty years. Who knows what effect it might have had on the workings of my imagination or the way in which I may have chosen to tell a story? I simply cannot tell whether I have inadvertently revealed the truth about Sellars, and I know no safe way of finding out.

There is, however, one thing of which I am certain. I do not think that I shall ever again drive in the twilight.