When she entered the hotel she saw that the Jubilee Rooms had been cleared and a long table set up and laid for dinner. At the reception she was handed two envelopes with her key. The first was from Darsh Darshan and contained his card with a note scratched in childish writing. ‘Please contact me in person soonest.’ The second was an invitation from Mermagen to a nightcap in the bar after dinner.
Once in her room, she undressed and bathed the gash on her anklebone, then examined the bruises on her shoulder and by her left kidney. Eyam’s scarf had done something to protect her neck, but there was a bump on the back of her head which, like the grazes on her upper arm and shin, wouldn’t show. Violence shocked her and when directed at her made her feel a sense of total astonishment. She recalled the breath and the violence of the man who held her down, and his evident excitement, and hoped that he had been injured by the jab with the chair leg. From the minibar she took a whisky miniature and Canada Dry, which she drank looking out into the night. At least they hadn’t got the will or Eyam’s letter, and according to Russell, there was nothing on the documents to show who they were intended for, although that would be easily deduced once the will was known about. Though surprising, the will was straightforward enough. The letter, on the other hand, struck her as bizarre and strained. She took out the envelope and ran her finger along the words of the last passage.
The evening I speak of at the start of this note is perfect. I write on a patch of gravel garden in front of the cottage resting on an old metal table, which I inherited when I bought the place. I have a glass of Puligny Montrachet at my side; a neighbour’s dog is making eyes at a bowl of cheese sticks. It has been a very hot day. The sun has set and the sky is bruising a gentle purple in the west. It is just past eight o’clock, and the cuckoos call from the other side of the valley. There are hawks hunting in the dusk above me. As ever, the Dove is their prey. The birds sing but mostly they listen and watch at this time of the day. You will find it all very much behind the times, but I have been happy here.
If you are reading this it means I’m gone. The evening is yours now with al its grandeur and its flaws: you are more than equal to both. Good luck, and look after my books, my beloved Bristol and my garden – especialy my vegetable patch.
With my love, David.
Dove Cottage, August 20th.
It was as if someone else had written it. Eyam’s prose was fluent and stagey: long sentences with plenty of asides placed between dashes that could try the reader’s patience. These staccato eruptions of sentiment weren’t him at all. And there was much else that jarred. For a start, Eyam hated dogs and white wine, even when it was very good. Montrachet was her favourite wine, not his. She remembered one of his rather obsessive monologues talking about the village of Puligney Montrachet on the Côte de Beaune, where he had once found himself looking for a restaurant. The village was dead; the houses had been bought as investments by the wine growers and were empty. There were no shops and no one about. It was like an abandoned film set, a place with no content, waiting for lines to be spoken to give it semblance of life. Montrachet was a fraud and so was its wine, he said.
He also loathed descriptions of sunsets, once saying to her that it was impossible even for a genius to evoke a sunset without seeming like a booby. Sunsets were off limits, as were all love poetry, walks in the moonlight and nightingales.
Which brought her to the cuckoo. She didn’t know much about British natural history but she did remember a verse her English grandmother had taught her: ‘The cuckoo comes in April, Sings her song in May, Changes tune in the middle of June, And then she flies away.’ The letter was dated in August by which time the cuckoo was well on its way back to Africa. Like the neighbour’s dog and the Montrachet, the cuckoo was a fraud. The cheese sticks too. Eyam was allergic to dairy products, particularly cheese. He had once keeled over at Oxford after eating cheese on top of a shepherd’s pie.
The sentence ‘I kiss your clever eyes for good fortune and the happiness that has not been ours’ touched her but she had to admit it didn’t sound like Eyam. He simply didn’t think that way, at least he never said or wrote such things. So the entire point of the letter was to warn her that he had been watched and that things at Dove Cottage were not as they seemed. It didn’t make any sense to her, because the letter was oblique in its meaning yet at the same time obviously coded. She rose and walked around the room, working through the events of the day.
The process of fixing the elements of a problem calmed her because she had a faith, acquired in part from Eyam, that no difficulty existed without a solution: optimism was the prerequisite for civilisation, he used to say. Without optimism humanity was ruled by fear and superstition. She dressed again, went downstairs and asked the man on reception if she could use the phone. Tony Swift, the coroner’s clerk, answered from his usual stool in the Mercer’s Arms. They met forty minutes later at a Thai restaurant a five-minute walk from the eastern end of the square, which with various diversions and feints took her the full forty minutes.
‘I wonder if I can ask you a few more questions about the inquest,’ she said when she sat down.
‘Are you all right? You look distraught.’
‘I fell over,’ she said. ‘Bruised my ribs and ankle. About the inquest: can you tell me about it?’
‘Off the record, sure.’
‘Why was the hearing held here?’
‘When Lady Eyam decided she’d have the funeral where her stepson lived, it became a matter for the coroner, because he has jurisdiction if a body lies within his district. We were notified that the remains would eventually arrive in High Castle and so the investigation – such as it was – went ahead.’
‘Its purpose being to . . . ?’
‘Establish the cause of death.’
‘Was there any kind of official interest in this case? Pressure from anyone?’
‘What are you asking?’
‘Did anyone try to stop you investigating what had happened in Cartagena?’
He eyed her thoughtfully. ‘You’re asking if I think he was assassinated, aren’t you?’
‘Well, it’s a possibility, surely?’
‘No, I spoke to Detective Bautista by phone before the formal interview and he was clear which group planted the bomb and why. They wanted to kill as many as possible in that party headquarters and not David Eyam. Besides, there was no motive to kill Mr Eyam.’
‘What if you were told that Eyam had offended certain parties in Britain; would that alter your view?’
He shook his head. ‘I knew that he’d had to resign from government. He told me. He made no secret of it. Everyone knew.’
‘Was there anything that you discovered that was not submitted as evidence to the inquest?’
‘What do you have in mind?’
‘The money – Eyam’s father’s money. He was worth between twenty and thirty million. I happen to know that Eyam did not inherit anything like that.’
‘Maybe there wasn’t time. After all, they died only a couple of months apart.’
‘So you looked into that.’
‘No, I read about his death in the papers. I put things together.’
‘Come on, Tony, you talked to people. You followed your instincts. I can see it in your eyes.’
He lifted the glass of wine to his lips and ruminated. ‘I am not an investigator,’ he said eventually.
A procession of small dishes began to arrive, which he marshalled and addressed with the kind of relish that made her think food was a substitute for something missing in big, slow-moving Tony’s life.
‘The Swedes – what happened to them? And the man who shot the film?’
‘They were treated for minor injuries and shock and went home.’
‘Why didn’t you interview them? They might have seen something that the camera didn’t pick up.’
‘We had the detective. That was all that seemed necessary, but I grant you that the Swedes might have had something to say.’
‘Have you got their names? Contact numbers?’
‘No, I don’t believe we do.’
‘That’s an odd way to conduct an inquiry.’
‘We have limited resources. We do our best.’
‘But no one questioned what Eyam was doing in Colombia? Why was that? There is probably no country in the world that would have been less appealing to him, and yet no one thought to ask what he was doing there. It doesn’t cost any money to ask a question like that.’
Swift shook his head and mumbled something.
‘Did you check with the border police? Did you find out the flights he took? His onward journey? The government collects all that information nowadays.’
‘Of course.’
‘So you know when and where he left the country.’
‘Not exactly. There are no records of his departure.’
‘What . . . Jesus, and you didn’t produce that at the inquest.’
‘It was in no way relevant to his death.’
‘But it could have been, Tony. It could have been.’ She slammed her palm down on her table. Then she thought for a second. ‘Maybe he left using another name.’
‘Then why would he check into the Hotel Atlantic under his own name? Apart from the film, that’s the reason we know he was involved. The room key: remember? And his passport was returned to Britain.’
There was a silence while Swift concentrated on his food. He encouraged her to join him by waving his fork at the dishes but she told him she wasn’t hungry. ‘Look,’ he said at length, ‘David Eyam is dead and we will never know what he was doing in Cartagena, or what he planned to do in his life. It’s wrong. It’s wrong such a talented and wonderful human being is dead, but sometimes injustice is the nature of things.’
‘Sheer fatalism,’ she said and ordered a whisky. ‘I don’t believe that injustice or mystery is the natural order of things. That is why I am a lawyer.’ She stopped and waited until she felt she had his attention. ‘I heard that Eyam was sick.’
‘Really?’ he replied without raising his eyes. ‘He didn’t look ill. I saw him in November at a screening of The Big Sleep. He’d lost a bit of weight but he looked fine to me. That was the last time we met.’
‘Maybe cancer,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone suffering from cancer go for a long trip to Colombia? He looked like shit in the film. Wasted. You know what a wonderful physique he had. A rower’s build. But in that film . . . Maybe he needed treatment.’
‘Whether he was ill, or not, has nothing to do with the coroner’s court. Our business is to establish the cause of death, not what someone might die from if they’re lucky enough to live to eighty.’
‘You know, Tony, I think you’re full of it. You come over as this self-effacing guy, this bachelor who eats on his own, a little disappointed maybe, down-trodden.’
‘I’m divorced, of course I’m bloody well disappointed and downtrodden.’
‘But I know you’re different than that.’
‘In this country educated people still say different from, not different than.’
‘And I know you’re smarter than you’re letting on. In my job I see a lot of men come into the room and throw their weight around. I never pay any mind to them. The ones I’ve learned to watch are the people like you. I know you, Tony. I know you asked all these questions yourself and you’ve gotten more answers than you told them because nobody of your intelligence could have failed to ask them.’
He looked up and shook his head. ‘You just said all that in near-perfect American idiom. You know, you could pass for an American. Look, I wish I was the man you describe but I’m not.’ His eyes flicked to the door. She turned to see a slim black man looking in their direction. Swift gave a tiny shake of his head and the man vanished.
‘A friend?’ she asked.
‘An associate,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’
‘Maybe Eyam’s other friends can help me. Was there anyone special in his life?’
‘What about his interest in the bell ringers? Did he do any kind of work? Diana Kidd says not, so what the hell did he do out here for two years?
‘Why are you asking all this?’
‘No more diversions – just tell me about his friends,’ she said and then she realised that along the way she had struck a nerve because Tony Swift’s expression had become several degrees more resistant. ‘I met some people at the wake today – Chris Mooney, Evan Thomas and Alice Scudamore. Know any others?’
He began to reel off the names. She looked in her bag for some paper, ignored the envelopes containing the will and the letter, and withdrew the list for the Eyam dinner. On the back she wrote the names of Danny Church, picture framer and sometime journalist; Michelle Grey, a divorcee who lived with the town’s best restaurateur; Andy Sessions and Rick Jeffreys, partners in a web design business; Penny Whitehead, a former probation officer now a local councillor and Paul Sutton, a retired publisher who with Diana Kidd was involved in the Assembly Rooms. He told her that Chris Mooney was a portrait photographer and Alice Scudamore a writer.
The contrast between the list for Eyam’s dinner and the people he mixed with in High Castle couldn’t have been starker. On one side of the piece of paper Mermagen had handed to her during the wake were some of the most powerful people in the land, all of whom knew Eyam well enough for them to travel to his funeral and attend a dinner in his memory; on the other side were his new friends, people you’d find in any provincial town in England making their lives in decent, humdrum obscurity.
Finally Swift wiped his mouth with a napkin and gazed at her with his tongue searching some particle of food lodged in his upper gum.
‘What is it? What do you want me to ask you?’ she said.
‘Anything. It’s not often that I am out with such a beautiful woman.’
‘These people: I know it sounds snobbish but they all seem a bit, well, underpowered for Eyam.’
‘They’re good people,’ he said firmly. ‘And nearly every one of them is suffering because they were friends with Eyam.’
Then he told her with a series of coughs and murmurs that since Eyam’s disappearance, all of them had fallen foul of the law or of the tax authorities. It had taken a couple of months for them to put it together, but as he understood things from his friend, Danny Church, their troubles intensified just after the New Year. All were under some kind of investigation or had been charged under new laws, which they didn’t know existed.
‘What are they doing about it?’ she asked.
‘What can they do? Most of them have broken the law. Penny Whitehead made the mistake of repeatedly writing to some company about global warming and has been charged under the harassment laws. Chris Mooney had his accounts seized. So did Danny Church. Both look as though they will be done for tax avoidance. Alice was an easy target because she’s an ID card refusenik. Her property has been repeatedly seized in lieu of fines for not having a card. They always go for her computer so she can’t write her books and they do a fair amount of poking about among her personal papers. I heard Rick and Andy have had some trouble with their business, and their premises have been searched.’
‘Sounds like someone is looking for something,’ she said.
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘But don’t you go asking about that. Proceed with caution, Miss Lockhart. Some of the larger circle of friends belong to Civic Watch, and be careful how you use that,’ he said, pointing to her smart phone on the table. ‘They can listen to any call or read any message or email you send.’
‘I know. What the hell is Civic Watch?’
‘A quasi-secret network of volunteers – mainly public officials and council employees – who each have a code number. They monitor the communities they live in for signs of anything untoward. They call it “community tension”. It’s all very informal; a way of passing information up to people who may find it significant. It gives the state another pair of eyes – actually hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes. I am a member of CW, though not a very active one it has to be said.’
‘A network of spies and informers. I’ve never read anything about this. Why would you want to sign up?’
‘There’s discreet pressure. It’s easier to join and forget the thing exists than have to explain your reasons for not doing so.’
This depressing fact was the last useful information she got out of Tony Swift. She pleaded exhaustion, paid the bill and left him flushed after darting a strictly consoling kiss to a plump and unloved cheek.
At the hotel, Karl was on the desk. When she asked for her room key he said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Lockhart, the hotel management must now insist you comply with the identity regulations.’
‘I repeat: you have seen my passport and credit card. What else does the hotel need?’
‘We need for you to complete this form.’ He slid the papers over the desk with a camp backwards movement of his fingers. She glanced down the list of some forty items contained in the ID Supplement Form which included mandatory fields on credit card details, phone numbers, email address, movements over the last month, including any visits to countries of special interest (Russia, Pakistan, Iran, etc.) and destinations during the period of stay in Britain (dates, addresses and telephone numbers all required). At the base of the form was a panel where the respondent was invited to lift the clear plastic strip, moisten their right index finger with a generous amount of their own saliva and place it firmly on the spongy material in the panel, thus allowing their DNA and fingerprint to be recorded without ‘any further inconvenience’.
‘Can’t we just forget it? I’m leaving tomorrow.’
‘It’s an offence not to complete it,’ Karl said. He handed her a pen with her key. ‘Just leave it here when you’ve finished.’
She sat down in the lobby with the form. Her answers showed an uncharacteristic lack of precision and in one or two questions she simply gave false information and made up her telephone numbers and credit card details. When she came to Biometric Window she lifted the flap but failed to complete the procedure.
By this time her concentration had wandered to the dinner in the Jubilee Rooms, now visible through a glass door from which a curtain had just been drawn. Her eyes met the heavy gaze of a man in his mid-fifties at the centre of the table, who wore a simple grey suit and a dark-blue and white striped shirt open at the neck. The other men were in dinner jackets. Behind him stood a tall blonde man whom she had seen with Glenny at the wake. Mermagen was leaning into the composition, his expression eager and confidential. On his left, Glenny expounded, and in the foreground two heads nodded in silhouette.
Eden White in chiaroscuro. The few photographs she had seen of him during Calvert-Mayne’s defence of Raussig Systems Inc. showed an unexceptional-looking man of average height, understated in dress with slightly hooded eyes, a smile lurching to the right.
Old Sam Calvert once leaned over her desk to look at the photograph on her computer then placed his hand on the screen to cover the right side of his face. ‘That’s the man we’re dealing with,’ he growled. ‘He’s not the pathetic jerk-off he looks.’ The corporate raptor came into focus: all the power in his face was concentrated in his left eye. The smile on the right side of his mouth became a neat incision on the left. When Sam removed his hand, a mild-looking insurance executive reappeared. ‘He’s a remorseless, two-faced, vindictive bastard.’
In the flesh, White was even less impressive than his photograph, though it was evident from the body language and glances of those around him that he held all the power in the room. He was very still; his eyes moved slowly around the group then settled on her again. She couldn’t tell whether he was appraising her or simply lost in thought, but then he seemed to nod in recognition, perhaps to himself, before his attention moved to Mermagen, who was clinking a glass for silence. A few seconds later the door was closed and the curtain drawn again, but she could still hear the rumble of Oliver Mermagen making the most of his audience.
She got up and placed the identity form on the empty reception desk with a scribbled note saying she would check out in the morning. Instead of going to her room, of which she was heartily sick, she crossed the stone flags of the lobby to the bar and ordered a drink, which she didn’t particularly want, and stared at a huge log smouldering in the grate. She was there about twenty minutes when she heard Mermagen’s voice in the hall, which caused her to sink into the button-back leather armchair. His face loomed in the door.
‘Ah, there you are, Kate: I’ve brought Mr White to meet you.’
White was in the doorway. Kate rose and nodded to him. ‘Hello, she said. ‘Did you enjoy the dinner? David would have been touched, I know.’
Mermagen was looking agitated. Clearly something more was required of her.
‘I would offer you a drink but—’ she started.
‘Yes, I think we have a few minutes. Mr White was interested to know that you were on the other side of the Raussig deal.’
‘A minor legal role,’ she said.
‘You do yourself a disservice,’ said White quietly. ‘My information is that you devised the strategy – the use of the public relations and lobbying firms, the approaches to government.’
‘To match the endeavours of your company, yes, we did, but I am on the legal side. I am a simple lawyer.’
‘I know that it isn’t true,’ he said without smiling and moved to place his hands on the back of the chair in front of her. ‘Yes, I believe we do have time to converse with Miss Lockhart . . . Would you tell them, Oliver.’ Mermagen nodded and vanished.
‘I don’t want to delay you,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed soon: it’s been a long day.’
White sat down in the chair opposite. ‘You should have been at our event for David: a most interesting evening. We had one or two informal presentations.’
‘David would have loved that,’ she said with such underlined sarcasm that it was surprising White didn’t seem to notice.
‘A deep dive on the purpose of modern government.’
Mermagen appeared between them looking anxious and pulled a chair over. ‘As you know, Kate, Mr White has been putting most of his energies into government through his consultation business and Ortelius, his think tank.’
Kate nodded. ‘But you still have a heck of an empire to run.’
‘I’ve got good people: they look after the day-to-day business, leaving me free for my . . .’
‘Strategic interests,’ said Mermagen.
‘Right,’ said Kate.
‘Oliver tells me you are looking for a new position.’
‘I still work for Calverts. I’m going to their London office after a break.’
‘You should consider coming over to us. We are doing a lot of work on the governmental side, repurposing technologies developed in our corporate arm and applying them to social intelligence programmes. Ortelius has been concerned to deliver solutions that help business and government simultaneously under our long-running Government of Insight project.’
‘That sounds like a Powerpoint presentation,’ she said. ‘What the hell does it mean?’
‘It means that government know what individuals want before they know themselves.’
She snorted a laugh. Mermagen looked nervously at White. ‘You see! I’d be no use to you,’ she said. ‘I can’t even understand what you’re saying. How can the government know what I want before I know myself?’
‘Your behavioural patterns: what people of the same generation, social class, income bracket, beliefs and expenditure want will, ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time, tell us what you want.’
‘I doubt it,’ she said.
‘It is a fact. Government is now learning to read the public in the way corporations like mine have been doing for a long time, and that can only lead to good outcomes, better understanding between the governed and those who govern.’ He continued with a ten-minute speech full of gristly little abstractions and jargon that was delivered with an accent that oscillated between a functional American management drone and a South African sports commentator. What the hell had Eyam seen in him?
White had good recall, yes, and a certain chilly mental organisation, but Sweet Jesus the man was such a bore and, despite his hard, rather plain face, he seemed vain too. It was her father who had pointed out to her that people obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte were often psychologically flawed. In Napoleon’s self-aggrandising, unprincipled, bloodletting ambition they recognised their own amorality, though it was disguised as something altogether more noble. She remembered now that during the Raussig defence they discovered almost nothing on his personal life: a wife and family long dispensed with, few friends, no culture, and no interest apart from this obsession with Napoleon. There were no skiing or yachting or hunting pictures in the White album. Just White on a dais and White arriving at Bohemian Grove in California for his annual misanthropic jamboree with the boys or at the Sun Valley Conference with media and banking moguls. White became American and connected to the most powerful men in American business very quickly indeed, but you didn’t get the impression that his company was sought after. The research department could not work out whether there was a vast secret to White’s life or if he was simply a dismal modern success story.
The bare facts were these. Born in South Africa to an engineer of Russian Jewish extraction and an English mother, White changed his name from Riazanov soon after leaving South Africa and finding work for a Bombay-based trading company in Kenya. He rose quickly to a position of trust, which he used to lease planes on behalf of the company. On the outward or return journey, the plane always carried White’s own shipments – anything from arms to rare metals such as indium and tantalum. He made a tidy fortune, particularly as he seemed to be able to tap in to supplies that were not available to other companies. This period came to an abrupt end when one of the planes was discovered with twenty crates of small arms on the way to the Congo. Plane and cargo were impounded. White skipped Nairobi. Aged twenty-four he entered Lausanne Business School using a forged degree certificate and a reference from the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, also forged. Two years later he turned up in Las Vegas with an MBA working for Saul Carron, the casino and entertainment magnate. White never stayed long in any job. He learned fast, took what he could and moved on. By thirty he had bought his first business, a supermarket chain in the Midwest, then he moved quickly into systems, after realising the importance of customer databases. At this time he became known as The Grinder for his remorseless and punitive business methods. There were periods when he seemed to be consciously softening his image by following Saul Carron’s example and making large charitable donations as well as ingratiating himself with legislators by financing their pet projects. But it didn’t work for him on the Raussig deal. Calverts and their attack dogs threw up enough dirt to panic the government into finding another buyer, which even Kate admitted was no better qualified than Eden White.
Perhaps aware that she hadn’t been listening, White leaned forward and touched her arm. ‘We can work together I believe, Miss Lockhart. I have come to love this country – to see a lot of good and some great people who’ve got much to contribute. Let’s be in touch.’ He got up, buttoned his jacket and left with a bleak little grin. This caught Mermagen by surprise. By the time he struggled out of his chair White had left.
‘He likes you,’ he whispered. ‘It’s those foxy oriental looks of yours, Kate.’
‘Oh that’s great news. Do me a favour, Oliver, and tell Mister White that I’m a dyke.’
‘I’m serious, Kate. Someone with your brains could go a long way with White. He owns so much and he’s the influential person in the private sector in the UK at the moment. It’s just the sort of change you’re looking for. I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Don’t, Oliver: I am not interested.’ She put down the drink she had resorted to while White spoke and got up. ‘I’m going to bed.’
At any other time she might have blamed Ella, the Romanian maid, who cleaned her floor and in the evening was responsible for turning down the bed, switching on the bedside light, placing a scented candle on the dresser and chocolate mints on the pillows. More than once she had contrived to allow a mint to slip between the pillows, and Kate had found it in the morning, warm and compressed in its gold foil. The candle was lit but the mints had been put on the bedside table behind the phone, one on top of the other. Ella might have left them there, but it was also possible that someone had removed them to search the bed and forgotten to return them to the little depressions in the pillows.
Charlie used to say she ordered her possessions to withstand military inspection at any hour of the day, which was almost true, and it was why she now looked around the room, alert to a disturbance that could be described as no more than a change in the barometric pressure. If the room had been searched, it had been done by experts. Except for the mints there was no other sign. She went to the desk and looked down at the small laptop. She knew the battery was still out of juice because she’d failed to leave it on charge. So no one could have found anything on that unless they had plugged it in. She checked the lead in the computer case, but it was bunched and held together by a wire tie that she wound in a particular way. The big red folder containing information on the hotel had been moved, again possibly by Ella, and the usual effects of the drawers in a hotel room – the hair dryer, bible, notepaper and pen – might have been rearranged but she couldn’t be sure. She opened the doors of the wardrobe, causing the unused hangers to knock into each other and emit the sound of a wind chime, rifled through the trousers, cardigans and sweater and the three jackets, all of the same chic, utilitarian business cut. There was only one mistake: the herringbone she’d worn to the funeral was on the left instead of the right of the rail and a little of the dark-grey lining protruded like the tip of a tongue from the right-hand pocket. The room had been searched but nothing important had been found because the will and Eyam’s note were in her handbag.
She pulled out her cell phone, switched it on and dialled the handwritten number on Darsh Darshan’s card. A female voice asked her to leave a message for Darsh. Without giving her name, she said, ‘I’m calling on Tuesday evening in response to your note. You remember where we first met? Can you be there at noon on Thursday or Friday? Indicate which by text. Don’t call.’