A possible candidate for the missing son is found in a Catholic orphanage and Hilary starts on the disagreeable business - for a fastidious communisant intellectual - of interviewing the members of the escape line who may or may not have helped the little boy. For Hilary, even after the Liberation, de Gaulle is 'that fascist'. Now he is faced with a cast ranging from sweaty members of the reactionary, Catholic working class to a disdainful and frighteningly competent Reverend Mother. Meeting the child in question, Hilary realises that there are no points of family resemblance whatever. He only saw his real son once, when the baby was one day old, and, as the nun points out, a child of five has forgotten what it could remember at two. It is a hopeless task.

Nevertheless Hilary, who has started a new life in England with a new wife, comes under pressure to do the decent thing. He is expected to save this boy from a childhood spent in an overcrowded and apparently callous institution where there is no medical treatment and very little food. As he continues this journey across France towards a decision Hilary learns about some of the surprising complexities of life under occupation. Pierre, the resister, says that he is already tired of the word 'collaborationist' as a term of abuse.

We each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing; what that was, was settled long before they arrived É Some found they were better than they thought, some worse É.
And another resister says:
We have thought for years in terms of movements and groups É I know now that that was wrong. The only good thing we can do É [is] the good we can do individually É
But no one is listening. In the cafZs and the committee rooms the French, unable to face the historical reality of what happened, are already re-forming their groups and have already started the long process of self-justification and mutual recrimination and deceit.

But Little Boy Lost is not just a historical portrait of France or a journey in self-discovery. It is primarily a mystery story. Its opening words are, 'It was on Christmas Day, 1943, that Hilary Wainwright learnt that his little son was lost.' From then on the reader himself is lost in the world of Hilary Wainwright, and Marghanita Laski maintains the tension and the suspense of her hero's quest right up to the last line.

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