When I had finished he lay back in his chair, but his eyes stared up at me with a kind of dead look, like half-closed eyes in a coffin.

'I knew that you were rescued from the island,' he said.

'But I thought you were long since dead.' "That statement surprised me.

I asked him how he had learned of it.

He told me it was through the medium of an overheard conversation in a London hotel nearly thirty years before.