Bingham shared the feeling of exhaustion he saw in the youth's face as he relived the day his mum ran away, and that was what Bingham wanted. Soon, he hoped, memories would be stirred, old loyalties and disloyalties restored: the passing of time and the slip of the tongue. Slowly, a picture of this woman was forming in his imagination. Bingham wasn't one to be hurried. 'There will be time ... to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet'. Eliot's phrase came back to him as he sat in the family's kitchen pondering and watching the son of Helen Sanders.