I left the window and ran back out to the road. Diagonally across from the pub, backed deep into a gap in the bushes, was the Morris Ital, Ethel. I walked over and spoke to the driver, then went to my car, opened the boot, and removed the items I needed. Then I ran back down to the pub and looked in through the window. Whalley had finished his sandwich, and was draining the last of his beer.

I went to the car park, opened the Cavalier’s door with the duplicate key I had had made a couple of weeks back, and wedged myself down onto the floor behind the front seats, carefully stretching the black blanket I had brought over me. I positioned a gas mask close to my face, and removed the safety cap on the tiny cylinder that I gripped in my hand.

Some moments later, I heard footsteps approaching the car, the sound of a key in the lock, the sharp click of the black lock-pin popping up, and the sharp creak of the driver’s door opening – it was in desperate need of oil on its hinges. Even under the black blanket, the glow from the interior light seemed as bright as a floodlit cup-replay football pitch. I felt the seat-back sag as Whalley lowered his body with all the gentleness of an elephant bouncing onto a trampoline.

The door slammed shut, and the interior light, mercifully, went out. Whalley belched, then let out a loud fart.

I heard the click of a seat belt, and then the sound of the engine starting, followed by the sound of an unsuccessful attempt at marrying a motionless gear cog with a rotating gear cog without the assistance of a clutch. There was another belch. Whalley to me sounded dangerously drunk on his one pint of bitter. He finally got the sequence right, and I felt the car begin to move forward. We slowed, and then accelerated out, onto what I presumed was the main road. Several hundred yards behind, and without front lights, I knew the Morris would be starting to follow.

I secured the gas mask over my nose and mouth, and then turned the valve. Whalley would have had to have been listening very closely indeed to have heard the tiny hiss, and right now the organs that conveyed sound waves to his brain were flooded with the sound of one Welsh and seven French radio stations in rapid succession, as he struggled to find the elusive one that played music that was not accompanied by undulating wailings and distant Germans holding earnest conversations.