Although the weather was dry, a long wet spell had only just ended. Deeply indented footprints, one set of a size eight shoe, the other of a size twelve, had ground into the flowerbed under the balcony. These same prints crossed the rear lawn to where there was a gate in the tall wattle fence, and alongside them went parallel grooves about two inches apart.

‘I reckon,’ said Burden, ‘they had a set of those wheels people have for pushing heavy luggage along. That’s what they used. The sheer cheek of it!’

Loring shone his torch. ‘They rested it down here, sir, in front of the gate. Must have been a bit of a blow when they found their motor gone and they had to keep on wheeling.’

In vain they searched the lane, the ditches and the copse which bordered the lane on one side. They didn’t find the safe and no fingerprints were found on the window ledges or in the study at Baron’s Keep. The thieves had worn gloves.

‘And Big Feet,’ said Burden in the morning, ‘should have worn snow shoes. There aren’t going to be many villains about with great plates of meat like that.’

‘I’d think of Lofty Peters first thing,’ said Wexford, ‘only he’s inside.’

‘Well, he’s not actually. He came out last week. But we were round at his place, knocking him up at midnight and waking all the neighbours, and there was no doubt where he’d been all evening. He was blind drunk, smashed out of his mind. I reckon this lot came down from London. Old Pollard’s been shooting his mouth off around the City about his missus’s diamonds and this is the outcome.’

‘The van was nicked,’ said Wexford. ‘I’ve just had a call from the super at Myringham. They found it ditched on the edge of a wood with the licence plates missing.’

‘What a lively time we are having,’ said Burden, and he looked out of the window at the geraniums on the forecourt and the shops opening, striped awnings gradually being unfurled, shoppers’ cars moving in, the July sun spreading a great sheet of light and warmth across the Pomfret Road – and a little figure walking through it in unseasonable black. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe it, not another one!’

Wexford got up and came over to the window. The small stout man in the black cassock was now on the forecourt, walking between the geranium tubs. In his arms was a bundle that was undoubtedly a baby. He was carrying the baby very confidently and securely as might be expected in one who so often performed the sacrament of baptism. Wexford watched him in silence, craning out to follow the priest’s progress under the overhanging canopy and through the swing doors into the police station.

He said in a distant speculative voice, ‘You don’t suppose, do you, Mike, that this is the latest craze? I mean, we’ve had wife-swapping, are we going to have baby-swapping? Maybe it’s something that bored young housewives are going to take up instead of going to evening classes or playing with their deep freezes.’