The gun had jumped due to the recoil, and some of the propellant gases escaped through the tiny gap between the revolving cylinder and the barrel, scorching my fingers, but still I didn’t let go, pushing it further away to my left. But I could feel that I was beginning to lose this battle, not least because Asquith had now dropped his own flashlight and was trying to get hold of the revolver with his left hand as well as his right.

‘For God’s sake, Chico,’ I shouted, ‘do something.’

‘I’m bleedin’ tryin’,’ he shouted back at me.

In the light from the dropped flashlights, I watched as Chico grabbed at Asquith’s face, sticking his fingers into his eyes.

‘Get off me!’ Asquith shouted.

‘Then drop the gun,’ I shouted back at him.

He didn’t drop it, but he was now back holding it one-handed, as he tried to prize Chico’s fingers out of his eyes with the other.

In the far distance I thought I could hear a police siren. Come on, you cops, I thought. Hurry up. We need you.

I was beginning to lose strength in my left hand. I could feel it beginning to shake with the effort, but still I wouldn’t let go of the barrel. To do so was to die, and I wasn’t yet ready for that.

In this moment of great peril, I thought of Marina and Saskia. How would they manage if I died here? Somehow, it gave me extra strength.

I placed my right forearm against my left wrist to help push the gun barrel further to the side, away from my body.

Asquith fired the Webley again and, once more, the escaping gases burned my fingers, but that was the only damage it did to me, and that wouldn’t kill me.

I thought way back to the politically incorrect days of my childhood in South Wales, when my classmates and I had endlessly played games of ‘cowboys and Indians’ in the woods behind our street. I’d always been a cowboy with my shiny toy revolver, and it had had a lever on the side to open it, so that I could load it with endless rolls of pink paper caps.

Did this gun also have a lever to open it?

While not easing up on the sideways pressure I was applying to the barrel, I felt around for a lever, imagining it would be where the thumb would rest for a right-handed person holding the grip.

I found a protrusion and pushed it down.

Amazingly, the revolver opened, the barrel and cylinder hinging down from the hammer and the grip, and for an added bonus, the Webley patented automatic extraction system emptied the cylinder of both the four empty cases and the two remaining live rounds, dropping them all onto the grass at my feet.