The volunteers of the Wyndlesham & District Fire Service, called to a house on Coldmorton Lane when smoke was seen rising just after dawn, attended with a turn-of-the-century pumping unit on a Man chassis and their even older Mercedes turntable (some local enthusiast’s ‘big society’ donation, salvaged from the corner of a field in southern France and lovingly restored), to find the occupier, a fifty- or sixty-year-old woman naked and with an inexplicable smile, half in and half out of a small wooden structure at the end of her garden. She was dead. Preparing to damp down, they also discovered that though it had collapsed in on itself in a curiously chaotic way – as if blown about by brief, whirling, highly localised gusts of wind – the structure, a lapboard shed about the same age as their Mercedes, had clearly never been on fire. There was no heat. There was no charring. There was no smell. The banks of glowing embers that had appeared to surround it when they arrived turned out to be only its contents, piles of colourful household stuff which had burst from the damp cardboard boxes inside when the roof fell in.

Police, paramedics and the dead woman’s GP all turned up at once. By then, the turntable had returned to its garage in the derelict agricultural college buildings at Plumpton; and the team leader – a raw-looking Yorkshireman called Weatherburn with hacked-off grey hair, thirty years’ experience and his own sense of humour – was rocking the Man pump about in front of the house, trying to get it back out into Coldmorton Lane without cutting up the lawn. Weatherburn stuck his head out of the cab’s side window and told the doctor: ‘Whatever the caller spotted, it wasn’t a fire.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘We can usually recognise one when we see it.’

The doctor grinned whitely and, already sick of shouting to be heard over the roar of the diesel, failed to reply.

Not long later he rolled off his powdered nitrile gloves and informed the attending police officers: ‘A stroke. Massive.’ Everyone at his practice knew Anna Waterman.

‘What’s that in her hand?’