In the end, the officers had departed with the petrol container sealed in a plastic bag, promising that it would be tested for fingerprints, to check against the records held on the Police National Database. But their attitude made it clear that I shouldn’t raise my hopes very high.

I didn’t. I knew that only a meagre 3 per cent of burglaries committed in England and Wales are ever solved to the point of a successful prosecution.

I had asked about the possibility of them providing me with some protection overnight in case the men came back. Sorry, they’d said, they didn’t have the manpower.

No manpower to prevent crime, or to solve it.

All they had done was leave me with a crime reference number, even though I wasn’t even sure that a crime had actually been committed.

I had been very fortunate. At Catterick, the cavalry had come to my aid, and here, without Rosie’s wondrous sense of smell, I would have walked straight into their trap. I didn’t fancy the men being third time lucky.

I lay awake for much of the night, thinking that it was high time I summoned some reinforcements.

At seven thirty the next morning, I called Chico Barnes.

Chico and I had first worked together after I’d been forced to retire from race riding. We had both been employed by the Hunt Radnor detective agency and had been sort of thrown together when I’d done him a favour by covering for him at a stakeout, so he could have an assignation of a romantic nature with a ‘bird’, as he called all women, but with affection, not malice.

As a result, I had ended up getting shot in the guts and, at the time, it had been touch and go as to whether I would survive. I knew that Chico had always felt slightly responsible, not that he’d ever let on to me.

‘Bugger me. It’s Sid Halley,’ he said, answering after two rings.

‘How do you know?’

‘Your number, mate, popped up on my phone. How are you? And how’s that fancy new paw of yours doing?’

‘It’s doing just fine, thank you.’

‘How about your gorgeous bird?’

Chico had a soft spot for Marina, something that was reciprocated after he had helped save her life.

‘She’s also fine,’ I replied. ‘She’s in Holland at the moment helping to look after her dying father.’

‘I’m sorry. How about your kid?’

‘She’s in good order, thanks. Over with her mother at the moment. How about you?’

‘Never better, well, except for a touch of bleedin’ arthritis in my knees. But at my age I shouldn’t grumble.’

I laughed. No one knew exactly how old Chico Barnes really was. He had been abandoned as a toddler in a stroller on the steps of Barnes police station, in west London—hence his surname.