‘Are there no just-pub pubs around here?’ I asked.

Dominic blamed Ludlow which, having become a major foodie centre, had raised the pretentions of all the eateries within a fifty miles radius.

‘Even the places in Wales,’ he said.

‘Good for business, if you can get plugged into the supply network,’ said Victor who, bizarrely, turned out to be a vegetarian. ‘I don’t mind raising and slaughtering them,’ he’d said when I asked him about it. ‘I just draw the line at eating them.’ He had the roasted shallot tarte Tatin, roasted pepper, goat’s cheese, artichoke and roasted pepper salad.

‘That’s one too many roasteds in the menu,’ said Dominic.

I checked my mobiles at regular intervals – both of them – the disposable and my second-best Android which Call Me Al had rigged to alert me if anything tripped a detector.

Neither made a sound for the rest of the evening, until me and Beverley were back at the cowshed putting the flagrant back into in flagrante when, in accordance with the iron principles of Sod’s Law, my Android rang. Since Beverley was the only one with at least one hand free at the time, she got to the phone first, glared at it, and stopped bouncing long enough to read it.

‘It’s just three numbers – 659,’ she said, over her shoulder.

‘It’s one of the detectors,’ I said, and extricated my right hand from under her bum and held it out. Instead of handing the phone over, she lifted her hips a fraction and pivoted around to face me – a sensation that managed to be both hugely erotic and uncomfortably weird at the same time. When she finally let me have the phone, I confirmed the numbers.

‘I’ve got to check this out,’ I said.

Beverley sighed and flopped forward onto my chest.

It took me ten minutes to get out of the cowshed, and it probably would have been longer if Beverley hadn’t decided that she wanted to come with, and so obligingly dismounted without an argument.

The detector that had gone off-line was the northernmost, planted on the Roman road where the lane from Yatton crossed and became a public footpath. Dominic had attached it amongst the bushes by the stile, so there was a good chance it might have just been vandalised.