In the fifth race, a two-and-a-half-mile handicap chase, Jimmy finished a poor third on a grey that had simply not had the puff to stay close to the front pair on the climb to the finish, but, as far as I could tell, it wasn’t from any lack of judgement or effort from its jockey.

‘Fancy a whisky?’ I asked Charles as I turned off the television after the last race.

He looked at his watch.

‘That would be lovely.’

‘I’m afraid I only have blended Scotch. No single malts.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll just have a small one anyway. I have to drive home.’

‘You could always stay the night,’ I said, echoing his earlier words to me.

‘Would you like me to?’ he asked seriously.

Did I? Would it make me feel safer? But was it fair to place Charles in potential danger just because I would feel more comfortable with some company?

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine. You don’t have any overnight stuff anyway.’

Such as your pyjamas, I thought.

‘I could always go home now and collect a few things. My shotgun, for instance. Si vis pacem, para bellum.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s Latin. Motto of the Royal Navy. If you wish for peace, prepare for war.’

The shotgun was certainly a tempting offer. But I’d been in trouble with the police before for using Charles’s shotgun, even if, without it, he and I, plus Marina and Saskia, would have all been murdered.

Eventually, the police had agreed that my use of it was in self-defence and therefore justified under the special circumstances we had encountered, but they hadn’t been at all happy and had subsequently tried to revoke Charles’s shotgun certificate. But he had successfully argued in the Crown Court on appeal that he still needed it to control vermin.

Could men in balaclavas with baseball bats be considered as vermin?

Definitely.

‘What a good idea,’ I said.

It would surely be foolhardy to turn down such an offer now, and then find out in the night that I had no defence against unwelcome intruders carrying more petrol. I could hardly ask them to wait patiently in my garden while I completed the four-mile round trip to Aynsford and back to collect it.

What was the old adage our politicians often use to justify the billions of pounds spent on maintaining and updating our country’s nuclear weapons?

Better to have them and never use them, than to get rid of them and only find out later that you really needed to keep them after all—as a deterrent, of course.

Perhaps I could also do with a deterrent, and maybe the discharge of a couple of twelve-bore shotgun cartridges over balaclava-clad heads would do the trick.