Telling myself I should be late for work anyway if I struggled along in this traffic jam, I parked the car as soon as I could at a meter. I’ll knock on old Reeve’s door, I thought, and get him to make me a cup of coffee. There was no answer. But as I looked once more at that window I was almost certain those curtains had been moved again, and in the past ten minutes. I rang the doorbell of the woman in the flat upstairs. She came down in her dressing gown.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘But do you happen to know if Mr Baker’s come back?’

‘He’s not coming back till Saturday,’ she said.

‘Sure of that?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said rather huffily. ‘I put a note through his door Monday, and if he was back he’d have come straight up for this parcel I took in for him.’

‘Did he take his car, d’you know?’ I said, feeling like a detective in one of my favourite crime novels.

‘Of course he did. What is this? What’s he done?’

I said he’d done nothing, as far as I knew, and she banged the door in my face. So I went down the road to the row of lock-up garages. I couldn’t see much through the little panes of frosted glass in the door of Reeve’s garage, just enough to be certain the interior wasn’t empty but that that greenish blur was the body of Reeve’s Fiat. And then I knew for sure. He hadn’t gone away at all. I chuckled to myself as I imagined him lying low for these three weeks in his flat, living off food from the deep freeze and spending most of his time in the back regions where, enclosed as those rooms were by a courtyard with high walls, he could show lights day and night with impunity. Just wait till Saturday, I thought, and I pictured myself asking him for details of his holiday, laying little traps for him, until even he with his writer’s powers of invention would have to admit he’d never been away at all.

Gwendolen was laying the table for our evening meal when I got in. She, I’d decided, was the only person with whom I’d share this joke. I got all her attention the minute I mentioned Reeve’s name, but when I reached the bit about his car being in the garage she stared at me and all the colour went out of her face. She sat down, letting the bunch of knives and forks she was holding fall into her lap.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ I said.

‘How could he be so cruel? How could he do that to anyone?’

‘Oh, my dear, Reeve’s quite ruthless where women are concerned. You remember, he told us he’d done it before.’

‘I’m going to phone him,’ she said, and I saw that she was shivering. She dialled his number and I heard the ringing tone start.