Of course it was from Oswald Hackett. Even a quarter-century after that fateful encounter with Radcliffe in the dungeons of Windsor Castle, no matter how he had hidden his past – even to the extent of changing the family name – Luis had always known that Hackett would be able to find him, that such a summons would come. That his past would catch up with him some day. And of course he felt compelled to attend. It wasn’t hard to get away. Since the death of his wife Luis had lived alone, and his son and daughter, both grown, had long flown the nest, Ella to a comfortable marriage, Robert to take up engineering for which he showed an unusual aptitude, marrying somewhat later in his life. So Luis travelled to London by train from Bristol, where his financial interest in various steamship companies was based – controlled by means of a layer of company holdings under a false identity, and with no trail back to initial investments under his own name before Radcliffe’s attempted entrapment of the Waltzers in 1871.
