Consciousness returns to me slowly, like a kitten whose trust I lost through playing too roughly. It exacts a cruel retribution, each moment of lucidity more uncomfortable than the last. My back feels cold, there’s a nasty taste in my mouth, and an orchestra consisting solely of a percussion section is performing an extended symphony at the back of my skull. There’s only one conclusion I can draw: I’m in for the mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle and second cousin twice removed of hangovers.

I lift my face from the pillow, reaching out an unsteady hand to grip the bedside table as my sluggish brain tries hard to decode the visual signals my watch is sending it. The smell of congealed vomit drifts up from the jeans lying in a heap on the floor with my other clothes; it brings back unsolicited memories of my guts being spewed into the lavatory bowl, which it appears I didn’t quite reach in the nick of time after all.

And of what led to me to that sorry state.

I should have known better, I suppose. Suki Tatsukichi warned me this body couldn’t process alcohol as quickly or efficiently as the one I was used to. Something about me having a lower proportion of water to fat, so it reaches my brain in a more undiluted state. I might have listened a bit more intently if I’d realised I was going to be stuck with the bloody thing.

It’s an eventuality for which you should certainly prepare yourself.

But I didn’t.

The idea was too horrendous to contemplate.

Now I’ve got to face it head-on.

I’m female. No matter what happens to me, that will never change.

I will be a woman for the rest of my life.

Rest in peace, Rich.

Who was I trying to kid? It’s one thing resolving to cast off my former identity when I’ve just sunk four shots of vodka, quite another to keep that promise in the sober light of a new day.

I’m a girl.

That still shocks me to the core.

And now I know I’ll always be female.

How do I accept that and move on?

You could stop being so negative about it. Remember what Suki told you five months ago in Hayden Hall?

You’re about to embark on a unique journey of discovery. If it turns out to be a one-way trip I suspect that what you’ll gain will far outweigh anything you lose.

Maybe that’s true. There has to be more I can get out of being a woman than periods, mood swings and blokes staring at my tits.

Stifling a yawn, I roll over and groan at the cacophony coming from inside my head. The covers have slid down my hips, but since I can’t find the energy to reach out and pull them over me I lie there counting my goosepimples until my bladder calls a halt to this narcissistic indolence. Unfortunately I obey its commands a little too promptly, and as the room gyrates about me I make a solemn vow never to touch anything stronger than shandy if I live to see Screaming Lord Sutch win a seat in the House of Commons.

When I emerge from the shower an unedifying and decidedly wobbly fifteen minutes later, my headache has eased to a dull throbbing I can just about live with. Clean underwear pushes me a little further along the road to feeling human again — though it also points me firmly in the direction of the wardrobe I have no option but to raid now that my jeans are only good for the laundry basket.

I pull the doors open, frowning at the three pairs of slacks hanging on the left of the rail. One way to break with the past would be to make skirts and dresses my preferred form of attire, and I can’t imagine there’ll ever be a more appropriate moment than this to begin the change.

If only I’d harboured a secret desire to be a transvestite…

I open a new packet of tights and allow my procedural memory to take over, sliding the sheer nylon past my ankles, calves, knees, thighs and hips, then smoothing it upwards until it’s clinging to everything below my middle like a second skin. As I sit at the dressing table to comb my hair I reflect that for the vast majority of girls my age — certainly those who work in offices or aspire to join one of the professions — slipping on a pair of tights first thing in the morning is part of their default routine. It’s only a novelty for me because I haven’t yet acknowledged that I should only be wearing leather, denim and the like to prove I’m not afraid to dress down once in a while.

Before I’ve finished applying my make-up I already have a fairly well-defined mental image of the outfit I want to put together. Soon I’m standing in a sleeveless mauve blouse, laying out a light grey cotton jacket on the bed. I ransack the hangers for the pleated skirt I know will match the latter without making it look like a suit, then take a deep breath as I prepare to spend the next several hours showing my legs to all and sundry.

Holding the skirt by the waistband, I step inside it, pull it up, tuck in my blouse and fasten the zip at the side. The hem ends a few inches above the knee, and flares out so much it’ll probably brush both sides of the doorway, but with my legs sheathed in nylon I can move around and almost forget it’s there. Sitting down is when I’ll have to call upon the rules of deportment Suki instilled in me so thoroughly.

Bend the knees together. Smooth the back as you lower your posterior. Right thigh over left, then spread the hem as far as it’ll let you. Hands folded in your lap, or better still holding your bag. Well done. Now let’s go for a drive. You can practise getting in and out of the car.

What she didn’t tell me was why women, and not men, have to go through all this palaver. At what point in history was it decided that we should be the ones saddled with billowing folds of cloth every time we want to take the weight off our feet?

I put on a pair of black silver-buckled shoes, check my bag and attempt to put yesterday’s events behind me as I get ready to immerse myself in the next instalment of life’s great adventure.

As a girl.

Because that’s what I have to be.

Because that’s who I am.

I don’t hang about; time, tide and breakfast at the Gladstone wait for no one.

Norah Russell reads the note she found beneath the magnetic elephant on the side of the fridge-freezer and fixes me with a look that could transform a jeroboam of the finest Champagne into a liquid only a fish and chip shop or a pickle factory might find a use for. There’s more steam coming from her ears than the Flying Scotsman generated at top speed. Were her hairnet to work loose, it would take off with such force as to leave gaping holes not only in the ceiling and the roof but in all likelihood the ozone layer as well.

“A continental breakfasht?” she seethes. “In her room? Where doesh she think she ish, the Shavoy?”

“I’ll see to it,” says Sylvia, who unlike her mother has ventured abroad several times and doesn’t subscribe to the view that if God had intended her to wander around mainland Europe He wouldn’t have put the English Channel in the way. “She’ll be happy with fruit juice, bread rolls, a slice of Dutch cheese, preserves and coffee. What d’you reckon, Ruth?”

“Sounds okay to me.”

She replies with a long, hard stare.

“Are you all right?”

I rub my bare arms, mainly to give my hands something to do now they haven’t got pockets to stuff themselves into.

“Course. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Are you sure?”

“Said so, didn’t I?”

How old am I, twelve and a half?

Although Norah continues to grumble about ‘foreign muck’ as she cracks eggs into a bowl — for reasons possibly associated with an obscure Nostradamus quatrain she always serves them scrambled on Thursdays — I can’t help but wonder if a sequence of events has been set in motion that could one day revolutionise eating habits at the Gladstone. When she sees how little washing up Yvette de Monnier’s breakfast produces she might be tempted to make it a permanent addition to the menu. Does it take such a prodigious leap of the imagination to envisage her turning her hand to something genuinely outlandish such as curry and rice?

I offer to carry the tray upstairs myself. As the instigator of this unprecedented break with tradition it’s the least I can do.

But I make no mention of my suspicions regarding Egerton. Sylvia still thinks he’s a journalist; I don’t want her confronting him until I find out why he’s really here.

There’s no answer when I knock.

“Mademoiselle de Monnier...est-ce que vous áªtes éveillé?” I ask, slipping into French automatically. “J’apporte votre petit déjeuner.”

Not a peep.

I turn the handle, and find the door unlocked. The room is in darkness; she must still be asleep. I decide to leave the tray on the writing desk and make a discreet withdrawal. Averting my eyes from the bed in case Egerton is slumped between his fiancée’s thighs, I tiptoe across the floor.

“JESUS CHRIST!!!”

The severed head on the dressing table sends Yvette’s breakfast cartwheeling through the air. Of course it’s no such thing, just a wig stand with an incredibly lifelike face, but by the time I’ve realised my mistake the milk has literally been spilt.

Crimson, I turn towards the bed. If mortification could kill I’d be dead already.

Mercifully it’s empty. She’s probably in the bathroom grouting her cheeks with Polyfilla.

I open the curtains, admitting the feeble light from another overcast morning. Down in the forecourt, the Rolls is conspicuous by its absence.

They’ve skipped breakfast altogether. Egerton’s backhander was for nothing.

A quick search of Yvette’s belongings reveals little a well-heeled socialite might not take with her when she’s travelling. That’s only to be expected; if she had anything worth concealing she wouldn’t leave it lying around when she knows the rooms are cleaned on a daily basis.

Egerton’s room gives rather more away. A packet of Embassy Regal and a book of matches advertising the dubious pleasures to be had at Knottingley Fork Services on the A1. A well-thumbed copy of Fiesta. A biro filched from a betting shop. Three pairs of British Home Stores Y-fronts still in their polythene bags. A bottle of Hai Karate splash-on deodorant.

Hai Karate? Even Richard Brookbank chose a brand with more class than that.

Single malt, I think. With ice, if you have any.

The clown doesn’t know how to drink whisky either.

The evidence is unambiguous: J G Egerton, who sounds as if he was born not so much with a silver spoon in his mouth as a gold ladel sticking out of his behind, is no more a toff than Norman Stanley Fletcher.

Now what was it he said yesterday in the dining room?

I understand, Yvette...but let’s not have another scene, eh?

It makes sense now. He’s her minder, maybe an unemployed actor she’s paying to keep her out of trouble and at the same time give everyone the impression she can not only pull a bloke ten or fifteen years her junior but also have him salivating with lust whenever she cocks one of her delicately pencilled eyebrows.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t more demeaning ways of earning a crust. He gets to drive a Rolls-Royce, wear some snazzy suits and strut around with a beautiful woman on his arm. More fun than being an extra in one of the Confessions films, I imagine.

None of this tells me why they’re in Northcroft, or what significance I ought to read into Egerton’s affiliation with Fratton Park.

Maybe I’d be better off putting this whole business out of my mind. It’s all come at the wrong time. I need to get away for a while so I can take stock of my life and plan for the future.

I could also do with a few female friends, people who aren’t drifting into middle age. I may have as long as fifty or sixty years in front of me as a woman, and I want to get it right. How do I succeed when my only current role model is Sylvia?

Once Kerrie Latimer’s finished dragging me all over the north-east I might use some of my savings to rent a cottage in the Lakes for a couple of weeks, or maybe hire a car and drive wherever the fancy takes me. I’ve been a prisoner in this place for far too long.

I spend a minute or two making sure Egerton’s things are exactly as they were when I let myself in, then go back to de Monnier’s room and begin clearing up the mess.

You work for us now.

That’s what you think, darling. I resign as of this instant.

Less than two miles west of Throston Bridge, the Durham road ascends through rolling countryside sprinkled with small farms, each field and hedgerow pregnant with the promise of spring despite the consistently dull weather. This has always been my favourite time of the year, a verdant prelude to warm summer days and long, balmy evenings, heralding the season of beaches and beer gardens, of swimsuits and sun-tan lotion, of tennis courts, tent pegs and toffee apples.

The Three Fates alone know what this coming summer has in store for me — and they’re keeping quiet about it.

“Penny for them, sweetheart?”

Kerrie Latimer, looking anything but a thirty-eight year old mother of two with her lop-sided multicoloured hairstyle, her black jeans and the translucent grey sand-pattern T-shirt that does precisely nothing to cloak the stunning cleavage her black lace bra only just holds in check — I’m betting the skeleton is still in his room trying to put his eyes back in their sockets — sounds a bit worried that the double act she suggested we perform after we reach Hexham might not be such a spiffing idea after all if one half of it is as good as mute.

“That’s about what they’re worth,” I reply.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

“Sorry...?”

“That it didn’t last.”

She wants to talk about Tim.

Terrific. Welcome to another edition of Make It Up As You Go Along.

“Wasn’t meant to,” I say firmly. “End of story.”

“Did you plan to have children?”

Gordon Bennett! Does she not understand simple English?

“Eventually, I suppose.”

“There’s no time like the present.”

I flick imaginary bits of fluff from the lapel of my jacket, then smooth the front of my skirt.

“Be serious,” I grunt.

“I am being serious. Having a bun in the oven is the best thing that could happen to you. We’re not living in the dark ages. Plenty of single women are starting families these days. How old did you say you were?”

“Twenty-three.”

“I was seventeen when I had my first baby.”

“Seventeen? You were just a kid.”

“I soon grew up, I can tell you.” She pats my forearm. “Don’t leave it too long, that’s all I’m saying. You won’t want little ones grabbing at your apron strings when you’re pushing forty.”

We cross the A19, entering the more open landscape of the East Durham plateau. The only substantial settlement we encounter is a former pit village, the straggling main street lined with empty and shuttered shops. Outside the Co-op, a girl who can’t be much older than twenty is rocking a pram as a toddler pulls at her other hand; the swelling visible beneath her drab brown overcoat suggests it won’t be many weeks before she’s added to her brood.

Seeing her just a few minutes after Kerrie’s intrusive if well-intentioned advice leaves me deep in thought. The only person who can be the mother of my children is me. That means carrying, bearing and raising them. It also involves taking part in the activity necessary to conceive them.

I’d have to be pissed out of my brain first.

Back to the real world...

The audacious magnificence of Durham cathedral, aloof to the hordes milling through the congested city at its feet, certain to outlast them as it has their predecessors for nine hundred years. The impregnable walls of the Norman castle, bulwark against the plundering Scots. The swollen River Wear, flowing between precipitous wooded banks in its deeply incised meander, brown with sediment washed into it by the recent rain.

Some places make your problems feel so ephemeral.

Another half an hour sees us safely through the ferrous haze that pollutes the air east of Consett, across the Derwent and into the unspoiled beauty of Northumberland. The road climbs steady and straight, passing wide pastures bounded by dry stone walls and rising to high ridges clothed with coniferous plantations. The western horizon is blocked by the moors and commons of the North Pennines, the largest truly empty region in England. It has me pining for the days when dad would ask mum to put up a picnic, then hand me the road atlas and tell me to take us on a mystery tour. Fourteen was too soon for all that to be brought to such an abrupt end.

After four or five miles a sharp turn to the right takes us down to the Tyne valley. At the junction with the main Gateshead to Hexham highway, on the edge of a village called Stocksfield, Kerrie spots a signpost indicating that Bywell is only three-quarters of a mile away.

“Our luck’s in, sweetheart!” she smiles. “I’ll pull in somewhere so we can touch up our war paint — and I can get rid of this piece of orange peel that’s lodged itself behind my dental plate.”

My make-up doesn’t need fixing, but I fuss with it anyway because that’s what girls do. When Kerrie begins removing her false teeth I decide to give her some privacy by stepping outside for a cigarette. A young woman carrying a heavy shopping bag leaves the post office; I return the empathetic smile she gives me when the breeze plays havoc with my hem as I’m lighting up. A pimply youth follows her, gets an eyeful and we both deploy our facial muscles in an entirely different way.

I’m back in jeans tomorrow, I don’t care if I have to put them through the wash myself.

Then I see something that pushes that thought right to the back of my mind.

A hundred yards or so to the west, a silver Rolls-Royce has emerged from the side road Kerrie and I will shortly be driving along. The vehicle has disappeared in the direction of Hexham before I can identify the occupants, but I have a good idea who they were.

Left the metropolis for deepest Somerset, called HQ to report ‘mission accomplished’ and received orders to head north without further delay.

Somerset.

And one of the hikers who was in Europe with Sarah-Jane Collingwood came from Glastonbury.

De Monnier knows about that visit. She’s checking each address in turn.

What’s her game? Is she working for Mademoiselle Malraux or trying to expose her? If it’s the latter, how did she find out where those girls lived?

I ought to tell Kerrie. But I can’t, not until I have more to go on. There’s no sense in both of us worrying about what the hell we might be getting ourselves into.

Bywell isn’t so much a village as a collection of farms and cottages strung along a narrow lane beginning a short distance from the northern side of the old stone bridge spanning the Tyne, which encloses the settlement in a broad loop. Behind the buildings to our right stands lush parkland belonging to a large house whose upper storey is visible above the trees a quarter of a mile away; presumably Bywell Lodge is part of the same estate.

Kerrie slides the Beetle to a halt in front of a small yet dignified church surrounded by meadows where cattle graze peacefully in the slowly improving midday light. Opposite the lych gate we can see a steep drive leading up to a white-walled building fronted by a tidy lawn overhung with sycamores.

“The Vicarage,” she reads from the plaque beside the entrance. “Well, it’s as good a place to start as any. Let’s hope the locals are as hospitable as you say they are.”

“Rural Northumberland? They’re famous for it.”

She pats down a stray gingery wisp that’s escaped from the clips she’s used to tie my hair in a loose bun. I’m also wearing her glasses, which feels extremely strange after five months of near perfect eyesight. Fortunately the lenses haven’t been ground to a very strong prescription, so my vision is only slightly blurred.

“You’ll do,” she declares.

“They’ll think I’m here rounding up overdue library books,” I complain, running a hand back from my exposed forehead.

“Don’t be such a misery. You should’ve worn something a bit more daring if you wanted to be the looker.”

Daring? If only she knew…

As we approach the front door, it opens to reveal a slim-built man of about forty wearing a lemon cardigan, a striped shirt, grey flannel trousers and a dog collar. His eyes dart to Kerrie’s bust — St Paul himself couldn’t have done otherwise — but quickly settle on me. They aren’t exactly brimming with Christian charity.

“Good morning, reverend,” I begin, smiling sweetly. “My name’s Ruth Hansford-Jones, and this is my friend Kerrieanne Latimer. We’re looking for Bywell Lodge. We have some–“

“Some questions you’d like to ask Mr Collingwood. I’m sorry, but you people really have a cheek stirring things up again like this. Don’t you think the poor man’s been through enough? Or are you so desperate for a story you hold his grief to be of no account?”

Kerrie and I exchange a look. A subtle arch of her brow indicates that as it’s my integrity that’s been called into question it’s up to me to set the record straight.

“We’re not reporters,” I stress. “What I was going to say before you cut me off in mid-sentence was that we have some bad news for one of the family. We thought it would be better to give it in person than just, you know, drop them a line.”

From her shoulder bag Kerrie takes the notebook she found in the casket’s false bottom. She opens it at the page containing the four names and addresses.

“This is the person we’re trying to trace,” she says, handing it to the vicar. “If you turn back the page you’ll see a photograph of her.”

He does so, shaking his head.

“That’s Sarah-Jane, all right. I recognise her from the portrait John keeps on his mantelpiece. Such a shame.”

“What d’you mean?” asks Kerrie.

But the vicar has found the picture of Sorina. He moves it closer to his eyes, which are widening in disbelief and shock.

“By all the blessed saints...” he gasps.

“Not something you see every day, is it?” I venture. “She’d certainly stand out in a crowd.”

“You don’t understand. This explains so much. What Freda said, it was all true.”

“Sorry reverend, I’m not with you.”

“Can’t you see?” he cries, jabbing a finger at the photograph. “It’s her. It’s Sarah-Jane.”

He passes me the notebook. I can’t tell if he’s right or not because of the spectacles I’m wearing. But Kerrie’s high-pitched ‘oh!’ as she leans so close I can feel the pressure of her boob against mine is all the endorsement I need.

Things seem to have stepped up a gear.

Wedged between Kerrie Latimer’s substantial left thigh and the arm of a chocolate brown sofa, I think back ruefully to the words of a careers consultant the Department of Employment sent me to see during one of my longer periods of enforced idleness.

"In an interview situation, always accept a cup of tea or coffee if you’re offered one. A refusal can cause offence; your host may feel you don’t trust them to make it properly. But under no circumstances should you take a biscuit. They’re accidents waiting to happen."

The crumbs in my lap bear witness to the truth of that last assertion — and Reverend Peter Sawdon’s redoubtable better half doesn’t come across as the type who’d appreciate seeing them casually brushed to the carpet. Going by the expression seared onto her stern features, which match both the puritanical severity of her short, greying curls and the staid lines of her dark brown jacket and skirt, it would be all she needed to order me out of her home forthwith.

“Rachel’s a local girl,” the vicar is telling us. “She didn’t know Sarah-Jane well, but she was here when the, uh...”

“It was a scandal,” his wife says in the clipped tones of a woman who has worked hard to disguise her Tyneside accent. “There’s no other word will do.”

Peter glances at her, as if seeking permission to continue. A nod confirms that he has received it.

“Sarah-Jane decided on a career in the Women’s Royal Naval Service,” he goes on, and if he didn’t have my undivided attention before, he certainly does now. “In the summer of 1964 she was invited to take part in an induction course, which I believe was based at Torpoint in Cornwall. She didn’t return. ‘Missing at sea’, they said. But her body was never found.”

“Freda — that’s Sarah-Jane’s mother — took it really badly,” says Rachel. “If she could have buried her daughter I think she’d have got over it eventually. As it was, she fell to pieces. She went round showing us all letters she claimed Sarah-Jane was still sending her. Apparently she was living in Europe and doing important work there, that was why she couldn’t come home. Of course they were fakes. You only had to look at them.”

“John let me read one when I first took over the parish,” Peter puts in. “It was composed in an extraordinarily old-fashioned style, like something from the Victorian era. No eighteen year old could possibly have written prose that elaborate and long-winded. That told me something about the extent of the grief Freda felt, to have allowed herself to be taken in by such a blatant deception.”

“In the end John called the police, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. They brought in an expert, who compared the handwriting with some of Sarah-Jane’s exercise books she’d kept from school. It was close, almost an exact match. Whoever was doing this had access to a sample they could work from. But the investigation led nowhere. The envelopes bore no postmarks, and the only fingerprints on them were Freda’s.”

“And it didn’t stop there,” Rachel says gravely.

“Unfortunately no,” agrees Peter. “About a year after Sarah-Jane’s disappearance, the circle of victims widened. Her cousin, who was expecting her second child at the time, was targeted. So were most of the girls she’d known at Prudhoe High, and even one or two of the younger teachers. All received the same message: an epiphany of some kind was coming, and they were to embrace it in order to be free of...what was it again?”

“The illusion of selfhood. I got one in the next batch. So did Lady Tynedale over at Bywell Hall. That got the wheels turning, and no mistake.”

“To cut a long and not very uplifting story short, the detective in charge of the case concluded that Freda had written the letters herself. She was cautioned for wasting police time, though she protested her innocence to the last. You can imagine the effect it had on her when the local press got hold of it.”

The vicar goes on to relate how Freda Collingwood spent the next ten years in virtual seclusion, her health deteriorating to the point where she became bedridden.

“She died just a few weeks back,” adds Rachel. “Sixty-three, that’s all she was. I mean, it’s no age nowadays, is it?”

Yet fate hadn’t finished with Freda’s long-suffering husband.

“John told me another letter purporting to be from his daughter arrived at the Lodge a few days after the funeral,” says Peter. “He was angry — we both were. This person had destroyed Freda’s life, and for what? Thankfully there haven’t been any more, and he’s agreed to let the matter rest. But now...”

He gestures towards the notebook, which is lying closed on top of Kerrie’s bag.

“I think we should tell him,” says Rachel. “I don’t care what this cult or whatever it is has done to Sarah-Jane, she’s still his flesh and blood.”

“I’ll second that,” agrees Kerrie.

“It won’t be a particularly pleasant undertaking,” Peter warns us. “John has let himself go a little bit since Freda passed away. He doesn’t make much of an effort to keep the house clean, and he’s not eating properly.”

“There’s no need for you to tag along, sweetheart,” Kerrie whispers into my ear.

“Thanks,” I murmur. “I could do with a cig after that.”

A few minutes later I’m standing beside the Beetle smoking a Winston, with no more idea of what’s going on than a drunk who’s just woken up in the middle of Hampton Court maze after a three-day bender.

How can Sarah-Jane Collingwood have been lost at sea, then turn up on a walking holiday in the middle of Europe? What part did Helen Sutton play in this miraculous resurrection? And why are Egerton and de Monnier so interested in all of this?

Not much dust. That means whoever it was, they were here fairly recently.

Who broke into 6 Redheugh Close? Why did they leave the casket behind? If they were so anxious to keep anyone else from finding it that they jammed a crate full of sandbags against the door, why didn’t they take the extra precaution of locking the one in the kitchen?

Question after question — and not a sniff of an answer to any of them.

“I’m starting to wonder if Peter was right, sendin’ the other two away like that,” says Rachel from the bottom of the path. “People have suffered. I don’t care what’s going on out there, it needs to be brought into the open.”

“Isn’t that Mr Collingwood’s decision?” I suggest.

“I got one of those letters, remember.” She steps closer, though only the cows in the field next to the church can hear us. “I’ve never told Peter, but some of the words…well, they spoke to me. I wanted to go out and repeat them to every woman I saw. I still do. And it’s not just me, either.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“You will when you see them. You’ll understand then all right.”

She goes back to the house, leaving me more puzzled than ever. What she said made no sense at all. Words that make you want to repeat them? What’s that about?

I can’t do this any more. I’m not a trained field operative, just an ordinary girl who needs time to forget that she was ever anything else.

But when I think of John Collingwood, his wife lying in the cemetery and his daughter looking like a cross between Dracula’s daughter and the bride of Fu Manchu, I wonder if I haven’t come out of this affair relatively unscathed.

So far.