I shut the door firmly. Then I raced up to the nursery floor in the attic, the old servants’ quarters, but all was quiet and empty up there, too, so I went back downstairs. Feeling mightily relieved and, actually, faintly ridiculous, I went outside. I walked round to the stable yard where the Land Rover was usually parked, at the far end, ready to tow the horse box. Still there. OK, so one of the other cars, then? These would be parked at the back. Belinda's, Hugo's and Roger's were indeed on the hard standing. I shrugged. OK, so he'd walked. Or maybe taken the new quad bike, bought for the grandchildren, that would be sensible.

I went back to the yard and opened the stable door where it was kept: there it was. As I shut the door pensively, two of Iris's beautiful horses, who'd sensibly been keeping away from the flies, came from the back of their stables where it was cool and dark to poke their elegant noses over the doors and prick their ears curiously. I stroked their velvety noses thoughtfully and let them blow into my hand. One old hunter licked the salt. The thing was, if he'd walked, I'd have passed him, surely? I frowned. And all those pans of food. So heavy. Suddenly I had a thought. A rather mad one, because why on earth would anyone with any sense take one of those much flashier forms of transport? Nevertheless, I set off down the back drive to the agricultural barn some few hundred yards away, with its three or four loose boxes beneath the hay loft.

At one time the barn had been Iris's overflow block, but she no longer kept horses there as she'd done when Shona and I were young. They all were stabled at the house, so it was where Roger, and to a lesser extent Hugo, kept their classic cars. I say classic, and in the plural, but in Hugo's case it was actually just one, and a modern one at that. A Ferrari, which, to his credit, he was embarrassed about and rarely used. It had been a present from Belinda on his thirtieth birthday, one which Peter, upon discovering its existence a few years ago, was obviously fascinated by. Hugo had even let him . . . Oh dear heavens.