My brother Mercer looked solicitously at me over the marmalade.

"You’d better go back upstairs and have a rest this morning," he said. "I don’t like the sound of that cough."

When Mercer is solicitous, I suspect something. "And where will you be while I’m having a rest?" I inquired. "Weeding the back-garden?"

"I thought I’d nip down to the village and get the Daimler seen to. It’s been making funny noises." Oh, he was casual. I suppressed a double-entendre about funny noises and said only "Remember Uncle Piers."

"I haven’t washed out my coffee-cup from yesterday," observed Mercer irrelevantly. "Caffeine isn’t supposed to put one to sleep for the afternoon."

Uncle Piers was still alive at ninety, though not very. His most recent will showcased his views on sin and primogeniture: he left, on his death, three million pounds to his eldest surviving nephew, or to whichever of us had not, at that point, exhibited "a demonstrable breach of morals." (A glance at our family tree, in which nearly all the males have died without issue, shows the tendency Uncle Piers feared our moral weakness would take.) Our combined greed had eventually driven Mercer (the elder) and me to early retirement, in a remote country house where we could keep tabs on each other. We very rarely had houseguests, and it was not a comfortable party when we did.

"On second thought, I could do with a bit of a nap," I said. "I’ll toddle on upstairs, I think." I suited the action to the word and (from my bedroom window) watched Mercer get the Daimler out of the barn, put it in gear and drive eagerly away. He had on a checked cap and looked too natty for a jaunt to the mechanic’s.

I gave him five minutes’ head start and then followed him on my bicycle, with my Nikon over my shoulder. We live several miles from the village and by the time I arrived on Rose Street, I was a bit winded. The Daimler was displayed prominently in front of Jack’s Body Shop, the left front tyre missing. Mercer was missing too.

"Seen my brother?" I enquired. Jack emerged from under the car, his attractiveness somehow emphasised by his coating of grease. "Went that way," he said, gesturing hotelwards. I nodded grimly.

"Thanks."

I turned the wheel sharply, hit a cobblestone and (for the next several days) disappeared into blackness. When I came round, I found myself looking at an ovoid object with a kind of glowing paper hat.

"What’s that?" I asked curiously. "It’s a lamp, old son," Mercer said from the other side of my bedroom. "My, you have had a concussion."

"So I have." I sat up and looked around me with interest. "Did you get back from the hotel all right?"

"You’re raving, old chap," said Mercer. "You had a fall on your bicycle." He paused to put something wet, whose name I couldn’t remember, on my forehead. "Your camera got smashed, I’m afraid," he added.

"That’s all right," I said. "I’d taken the film out already."

"I’ll get you some tea," offered Mercer. I was quite unable to remember what tea was but it sounded unpleasant. "No, thank you," I said, and went determinedly back to sleep. Days passed.

Eventually I found myself ensconced downstairs in an armchair, padding back and forth at intervals to the kitchen and the loo but still seized with frequent bouts of dizziness and forgetfulness. On one occasion I blacked out in the pantry and woke up covered in glass and … some sticky substance. "Jam," Mercer explained. He kindly sponged me off.

One afternoon he sat opposite me in the other armchair, looked at me speculatively and said, "I’ve always wondered what happened to Niblick."

"Niblick?" I repeated, searching for this name in my mind and discovering another hole. "Who’s Niblick?"

"Don’t you remember? Young chap who was cycling through here a few years back – relation of Julia’s, I believe. He stopped here a week. Rather nice-looking fellow -- I’m surprised you don’t recall him."

I shook my head, but it was still full of sand, like an hourglass.

"I don’t at all."

"Odd." Mercer got up and fidgeted with the wireless. "He left so suddenly. I wonder what happened."

Left very suddenly. Niblick. A young face. Someone blond? I couldn’t remember at all. "Blast," I said. "My head hurts."

"I thought you might know," Mercer said apologetically. "Never mind. I’m going to fix dinner."

I fell asleep in the armchair and dreamed fitfully.

Mercer is an excellent cook: my talents run more to gardening. This evening he fixed steak and brought up a bottle of red…something…from the cellar. "Montus," he said, and seeing that I still was not fully enlightened explained, "Wine."

"It’s too bad you don’t like women, Mercer," I said. "They would have loved you."

"Ah, perhaps they may still," said Mercer. "Uncle Piers would have it so. To Uncle Piers. May he live, but not for very long."

"It would be a pity," I said, "and just like Uncle Piers, for him to outlive his heir."

"I’ve plenty of life in me yet," said Mercer, designating himself (as always) heir by default. "Sixty’s not old, you know. Not like ninety. There are pills one can take."

"Your acknowledging you need ‘em," I observed, "is tantamount to, to…"

I couldn’t remember the end of my sentence and trailed off.

"You’re tired," decreed Mercer. "Better go to bed."

I obeyed my brother meekly, though I suspected he wanted me out of commission for the evening. Upstairs in my dressing room, which adjoined the bedroom, I noted with interest that my drawers and coat pockets, where I sometimes kept undeveloped film, had been very subtly rifled and rearranged.

"Bravo, Mercer," I said, smiling. The last dresser drawer stuck a little and I jerked the handle. Someone’s…something…was wadded amongst the rollers. Handkerchief. I pulled it out. Not mine. "K. Niblick," read the embroidered legend.

I started for the door, forgot what I was going downstairs for and fell asleep on the bedroom window-seat. Eggs woke me.

"Blast," I said, creaking downstairs.

Mercer sat reading one of his abominable socialist rags, eating omelette. "On the stove," he said with his mouth full. What had I been going to ask him? Oh, yes.

"Niblick was a blond chap, wasn’t he?"

"Niblick? The one who disappeared? Yes…had a little blond mustache. Frightfully well-built young fellow: boyish-looking. Innocent, you know."

"I don’t remember how he disappeared," I said apologetically. "Would you mind telling me?"

"I should have thought you’d know more about it than I would," said Mercer, with a slight peevishness in his tone. "He was always hanging round you."

"I…" I forgot what I was going to say. "Was he?"

"I never had much of a look-in. I suppose I was just the old man pottering about in the kitchen. You were off bicycling with him for days on end, it seemed. He had a red machine. Surely you remember."

Country roads – laughter. A blond head and wind. Something else – what was that thing.

"It has slats," I said helplessly. "You put things in it – food, bottles. A tablecloth."

"Picnic basket? Yes, you took lunch. You were out all day."

"When did we come back?" I asked.

"The last day he was here? Not till after dark. I don’t know where you’d been, but I suppose I can guess." Mercer made a wry face. "You’re not likely to inherit in any case, so you haven’t got to be as careful. It’s one thing I’ve always envied you."

"I’ve never liked hotels," I said. "The bellboys have silly uniforms."

I could tell Mercer was still thinking about that black stuff, the stuff that comes in little rolls. He looked disturbed, but I couldn’t remember why. I took a bite of the yellow stuff.

"Eggs," I said. That solved it.

"You’re tired," said Mercer, frowning. "Better go back upstairs."

"Finish telling me about Niblick, though," I said. "Please?"

"There isn’t much to tell. I thought you both looked funny when you came in, but it wasn’t my business to ask. The next morning he’d left. His bicycle was gone and he’d just left the note. That was all."

"What note?" I was beginning to have a headache.

"Just a scrap of paper. ‘Unexpectedly called away – Niblick’ or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. We didn’t save it."

Through my headache I could half-see a field at midnight, two bicycles collapsed on each other in a metal prevision of love-making. Had he been afraid of me, his beautiful blond face suddenly twisted in disgust? "I suppose I made a pass at him," I said resignedly, "and he got offended and went away."

"You know, sometimes I wonder," said Mercer, getting up and going to the sink, "if he did go away."

My headache exploded precipitately, as though I had been coshed. "I’m going to lie down now," I said.

Mercer’s voice followed me up the stairs. "I always wondered why he left his hiking-boots here."

Some time that night I got up, stumbled to the bathroom and drank a glass of something wet, leaning on the basin. Then I went downstairs – past Mercer’s door; there was no snoring – and almost fell into the boot-closet. Half-open, filled with rubber…things. I pulled them out pair by pair, the laces knotted together in monstrous coils, tossed them behind me, heard them echo dully on the parquet. Finally I found two smaller ones with spikes: not ours. Someone had worn red laces: someone had written "KN" on the tongues in indelible marker.

The front door opened and Mercer came in, half-extinguished in a hat and ulster but still breathing…something. Vitality.

"Where have you been?" I asked Mercer.

"Where’s the bicycle?" Mercer asked me.

"How would I know where…" I trailed off, surrounded by boots. A dark night, like this one. Wheeling a machine carefully round the side of the house. My head swam.

"The…the."

"Of course it’s probably anywhere by now. At the bottom of a pond. It’s been what. Five years – seven?" Mercer hung up his hat and ulster in the closet and strode towards the stairs. "Corrosion works wonders."

"Why would I have…" I struggled to stand up, struggled to remember. "So he turned me down. I’ve been turned down before. Why…?"

"Blackmail?" Mercer shrugged. "You, of all people, understand that."

The hall was black and white in a curious checkerboard pattern of moonlight. I couldn’t quite remember who I was talking to, but I was angry at him. "You’re mad," I sputtered. "If I… then where. The bicycle is one thing, it will just go to…red…flakes."

"Rust."

"Yes, but Niblick. Not so easy. Where…if I…then where is…?"

"Try the cellar," said the man on the stairs. "You used to be a good deal more interested in the wines than you are now."

"You’re a liar," I cried. "A damned liar." The remembered earthy scent of the cellar rose around me even as I stumbled through the hall, through the kitchen, to the unlatched door. It swung inwards beneath me and I stepped forward. One step – two. Then air. Then stairs again, after the missing step, but I was no longer in a position to appreciate them.

Into the darkness, from which I had a suspicion I should never emerge, creaked a wedge of yellow light. "What about it, Morris?" came Mercer’s voice. "Is there a body down there?"

A little too late, I understood. "There never was any Niblick," I said. "You just wanted to get rid of me."

Mercer smiled and shut the door.