The three cars that followed him in the morning, changing places every few miles, were different makes and colours from the ones that followed him in the evening, and none of the cars was ever used more than once in the same week. At six twenty as usual the three cars that followed him in towards central London heard him turn on Radio 4, keeping the volume control low as he listened to the end of the Farming Report, and then turning the volume up to listen to the news headlines. The men thought perhaps he’d turned it up louder than usual on this particular morning, but they couldn’t be sure.

The first item on the Monday morning headlines was the shooting of four soldiers in Belfast. The second item was a sharp fall in the cost of living. The third item was the disappearance of the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Sir Isaac Quoit. He had last been seen, the announcer informed listeners, on Saturday afternoon, walking his pointer across Ashdown Forest, near his Sussex home. The dog had returned home alone, but nothing had been seen or heard of Sir Isaac. The breakfast programme newscaster gave the information to the nation, or at least to that portion of the nation that were up at this hour, tuned into Radio 4 and actually listening to their sets, with a degree of gravity in his voice that was ideally suited to the occasion, and had been selected from a file of fifty different tones of gravity for fifty different types of serious announcements stored in the memory banks of his brain after a quarter of a century doing this job. The police, he stated, were treating the matter as ‘foul play’, and left his audience to decide for themselves whether this implied that the police were intending, shortly, to arrest the dog.

By the time the blue Cavalier’s radio reception had faded into nothing but a crackle as the car descended the ramp to the car park underneath the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s Charles II Street headquarters, Horace Whalley and the six men who were following him had listened to the newscaster report the same story, in the same tone, five more times. They had also listened twice to Sir Isaac Quoit’s wife relating precisely what Sir Isaac was wearing when he set off, what he had said to her, which was pretty much what anybody who was setting off to walk the dog for forty-five minutes might say to his wife, and debating whether the fact that he had had a second helping of pudding might indicate he had been stoking up for a long journey. They had also listened to her relate how the dog had come home with someone else’s frozen leg of mutton in its mouth, which didn’t indicate anything at all, except that either the dog was underfed or it was a kleptomaniac.