Down below, and a long way to the left, I could make out Calais. Calais passed by and then Boulogne began to appear. Dover passed by on my right, and then Beachy Head came into view. Scanning every inch of the sky with my eyes, I descended to eighteen thousand feet, and then banked sharply to the left and headed straight for the French coast. I didn’t bother to switch the radio on; I knew that a torrent of abuse would pour out from the French air-traffic control boys. I descended to ten thousand feet.

After a few minutes, I could see Dieppe dead ahead and very clear. I cut the airspeed to two hundred and fifty knots, and started a sharper descent. We crossed Dieppe at seven thousand feet, and the Illushyn was beginning to respond very sluggishly to my movements of the control column. It was twenty-one minutes past eleven.

Two gendarmes were operating a speed trap on the N27 Dieppe to Rouen road. They sat on their Motoguzzi 1,000cc motor bikes, one of them beaming a vascar detector down the empty road behind them. It was a long, straight and very wide stretch of dual carriageway, and it was busy only in the summer months.

Behind the gendarmes was a large cornfield, across which a tractor chugged, pulling a large covered trailer. It was a smart new Renault tractor, but neither of the gendarmes paid any attention to it. Their eyes were on a silver sports car, a kilometre up the road, and coming their way at what looked considerably faster than the one hundred and forty kilometres per hour that were permitted. The gendarme holding the vascar detector aimed the device carefully and squeezed the trigger. The needle raced past the one hundred and forty mark, and carried on, past the two hundred mark, hit the stop at two hundred and twenty and snapped off.

The driver of the Aston Martin DBS Vantage held the slim steering wheel tightly in his hands. The Super-Snooper radar detector on his dash screeched loudly as he rocketed past the articulated lorry at one hundred and forty-five miles an hour, and he then saw the two gendarmes up ahead, by the roadside.