Monty came to the front door with him. He always had and always would, though his hind legs were stiff with rheumatism. We all have to get old, Dick thought, I’ll have to face up to it, I’m going to lose him this year or next . . . he knelt down by the door and did what he’d never done to a man, woman or child, performed that disgusting act which sickened him when he saw it done by human beings to human beings. Holding Monty’s head in his hands, he pressed his lips to the wrinkled forehead. Monty wagged his tail and emitted little grunts of happiness. Dick closed the door and got his car out of the garage.

He drove it two or three hundred yards down the street to the phone box. For business he never used his own phone, but one or other of the call boxes between his house and the George Tavern. Five minutes to go and the bell inside it would begin to ring. Unless something went wrong again, of course. Unless, once more, things weren’t working out the way she’d planned them. The stupid – what? Dick hated the habit of using the names of female animals – bitch, cow, mare – as insulting epithets for women. When he wanted to express his loathing for the sex he chose one of the succinct four-letter words or the five-letter one that was the worst he could think of – woman. He used it now, rolling it on his tongue. Stupid, bloody, greedy, Goddamned woman!

When his watch showed nearly a quarter to seven, he went into the box. He only had to wait sixty seconds. The bell began to ring on the dot of a quarter to. Dick lifted the receiver and spoke the password that would tell her it was he and not some interfering busybody answering phones for the hell of it.

He’d never heard her voice before. It was nervous, upper-class, a thousand miles from any world in which he’d ever move. ‘It’s going to be all right tonight,’ she said.

‘About time.’ All their previous transactions had been arranged through his contact and every plan had come to grief through a hold-up at her end. It was six weeks since he’d had the tip-off and the first instalment. ‘Let’s have it then.’

She cleared her throat. ‘Listen. I don’t want you to know anything about us – who we are, I mean. Agreed?’

As if he cared who they were or what dirty passions had brought her to this telephone, this conspiracy. But he said contemptuously:

‘It’ll be in the papers, won’t it?’

Fear thinned her voice. ‘You could blackmail me!’

‘And you could blackmail me, come to that. It’s a risk we have to take. Now get on with it, will you?’

‘All right. He’s not been well but he’s better now and started taking his usual walk again. He’ll leave this house at half-past eight and walk through the West Heath path towards the Finchley Road. You don’t have to know why or where he’s going. That’s not your business.’