My plan to call on Bert Evans next morning was thwarted by Maisie and her washing machine.

‘It’s done it again!’ she wailed at me on the phone. ‘It won’t open. It won’t let me have me washing!’

‘Don’t try and force the door, Maisie, not again. We don’t want another flood. Just wait till I get there. OK?’

Maisie was muttering as she put the phone down. She believed her washing machine to be possessed of a malign spirit. It wasn’t of course, she’d just pressed the wrong button, again, but why washing machine manufacturers can’t understand that elderly people cannot see tiny white buttons on a white background, is a mystery to me. By the time I’d gone round to her cottage, drained the washing, sorted out the correct cycle, let the machine do its stuff and hung her clothes out on the line for her, it was lunchtime.

I was promised to Ricky and Morris for the afternoon, but I phoned them and cried off, promising to work tomorrow instead. This left me free to call in on Mr Evans, unannounced. His place was a little way away in Lustleigh, in a pretty village where many of the properties were detached, thatched and worth a small fortune.

I drove around a couple of times before I eventually found the private road leading to his house. There was a board on the corner with the name of three properties on it, Teniriffe being one. It seemed Bert couldn’t spell either. But whatever Tom Smithson had meant by dabbling in murky waters, Bert was doing very well out of it. His gravelled drive led to an impressive house with mullioned windows, a pretty front garden surrounded by mature trees, and a double garage with two cars and a large motorhome parked outside.

I pulled the van up behind it, got out, rang the doorbell and waited. There was no response and no noise from within. After a minute or so I peered nosily through one of the mullioned windows, shading my eyes with my hand to try and cut out my reflection, but I couldn’t see anything between the gap in the curtains except the raised lid of a grand piano.

I followed a path around the house, through a wrought iron gate at the side. I called out a couple of times but except for a wood pigeon flapping off in alarm from the branch of a fir tree, there was no sign of life.