Back to the manor: Beyond the grounds, there is a small wood that rises to the horizon; the surrounding farmland is made up of rolling fields which grow wheat and barley. There are racing stables and gallops and, on the higher ground where the Downs are steep, flocks of sheep. Just to the south, there is a hamlet that bears the same name as the manor. It has an inn and a small church with a graveyard where those who have lived in the house are usually buried, those who did not die in foreign wars or marry into families who claimed them for their own.

We are close to the Ridgeway here and not far from the White Horses, the stone circle at Avebury, various long barrows and Iron Age earth fortifications. Marlborough is three miles as the crow flies; the nearest train station is in Kendon, two miles to the north.

On the night the diamonds go missing, all is swathed in snow. Overnight a thick layer has fallen to blanket the house, the fields, the lichen-speckled graves. All is white, save the shadows, which are blue, and the lake, which is black in parts and gray where the ice is spreading, growing over the surface like a cataract forming over an eye.

It is the dead of winter, and the dead of night, and there are tracks, human footprints, in the snow, beginning in the courtyard, at the door to the library. At first, they follow the path toward the outbuildings and then past the stables, moving in the direction of the road, but at the foot of the drive they falter and then halt, perhaps contemplating the drifts of snow ahead, the likelihood of any vehicle at all being able to reach the manor, no matter what plans have been made, no matter how vital the mission.

After that, the footsteps double back, briefly disappear into the tack room adjoining the stables, and then reemerge, this time leading down through the drifts to circle the lake, tracking across the film of snow that has blown over the floor of the little temple, until at its center they turn and, very distinctly, the toes point out over the lake, as though their maker paused here to contemplate the frozen reeds and thickening film of ice.

When they leave the temple, something new starts to happen. The drifts on the lawn are, in places, knee deep and as the tracks return in the direction of the house, they begin to wander. Here and there, the snow is greatly disturbed and, once back within the walls of the kitchen garden, the tracks become smears. Finally, by the stone bench in the rose garden, they stop.

The scene is one I have visited in my dreams, both sleeping and waking.