Several years ago, in a moment of madness, Marina had paid a small fortune to buy me the number plate MYS 1D, and had then spaced the letters illegally to read MY S1D.

‘How do you know about that?’ I asked.

‘Like I said before, I keep my eye on you. That plate’s too distinctive. Have you got anything else?’

I’d thought of Marina’s car sitting unused on the drive.

‘My wife has a grey Skoda. That’s if I can find the key.’

‘Perfect. Come in that. Park it well off the road near the pond and I’ll find you. And don’t let anyone see you. Wear a disguise or something. We don’t want to put the bastards on the alert, now, do we?’

I’d thought he was being rather overdramatic but here I was, at half past eleven, driving Marina’s grey Skoda into Middleham wearing dark glasses and with a cap pulled down over my forehead.

I had found the Skoda key thanks to my Christmas present to Marina—a NeverLoseIt tag, a fancy new electronic tracking device designed to help you find your stuff. She was always losing her car key—indeed we had permanently lost one of them—so I had given her a bright-red leather key ring with the NeverLoseIt tag included to ensure we didn’t lose the other.

On this occasion, she had left the key ring in the top drawer of her dressing table and the NeverLoseIt app had taken me straight there. I’d been worried that it might have shown the key to be in Fryslân but my fears had been unfounded.

I drove the Skoda past the wide Middleham cobbled marketplace, where there was a Sunday market in full swing, with two lines of brightly coloured stalls and lots of people milling around.

I pulled the cap even further down over my eyes.

The previous evening, I had looked up the town on the internet.

After the Norman invasion of 1066, great swathes of land in the area were given by William the Conqueror to his cousin Alan Rufus, and the town itself was included in the Domesday Book, the 1086 great survey of England. But it was the building of Middleham Castle at the end of the twelfth century that put the town properly on the map, and it is still dominated by the medieval castle, although the buildings themselves are mostly ruins today, with no roofs.

The castle and the town became a centre for commerce and politics, especially during the lifetime of King Richard III, who spent many of his teenage years living as a guest at Middleham, and he later acquired the castle for himself by marrying the former owner’s daughter.