She had a white pompom attached to the belt loop of her leather pants. I couldn’t stop staring at it. The object was supposed to be a keychain, I think, but Merry seemed to be wearing it for purely decorative reasons.

Bruce broke the silence that had fallen.

‘You like puzzles?’ he said to Tate. ‘Games?’

‘Bruce loves games,’ Merry said. I realised she’d crumbled her biscuit into dust on her saucer. I thought with anticipatory pleasure of shutting the door behind her and switching on the dust buster.

‘I love games,’ said Tate. He leaned forward, made eye contact. ‘What do you play?’

‘Oh, a bit of everything,’ Bruce said, coy all of a sudden. He licked his finger and stuck it to his chest, where crumbs adhered to his fingertip. He ate them, then used his fingers to number off his areas of expertise. ‘Board games. Card games. Jigsaw puzzles. Murder mysteries. Strategy. War games.’

‘He just loves games,’ said Merry.

‘Do you play?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, I’m no good,’ she said. Her lipstick was printed on the coffee mug; in the print I could see the squished ridges of her lips. ‘Bruce is always looking for someone to play with. But it all goes straight over my head!’

‘No use playing with women,’ Bruce said.

‘Well, I’d love to play sometime,’ said Tate.

‘Don’t make that offer lightly,’ said Bruce. ‘You should know: I’m undefeated.’

‘In what?’ asked Tate.

‘In everything,’ said Bruce. ‘Undefeated.’

Tate nodded. ‘That’s very impressive.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

Tate smiled, a hyena smile of self-abnegation.

‘Of course I believe you. I’m just impressed.’

‘You want a game now?’

Tate laughed. Merry laughed.

‘I’m serious,’ said Bruce.

Soon we stood in Merry and Bruce’s house, admiring Bruce’s selection of games. He had not been exaggerating. In the library – they had a library – the only books were those Bruce thought worth possessing: a single shelf of biographies and histories relating to the two world wars.

Everything else was games. There were games lined up on shelves, games in glass-fronted cabinets, and a long conference table on which sat a completed jigsaw puzzle of Monet’s waterlilies. Bruce explained that he planned to spray it with adhesive and have it framed. He then went to a locked wooden cabinet and opened it, revealing stacks of other framed, completed puzzles. I saw the pyramids, a William Morris print, and ironically, a puzzle that showed the long corridors of a library, the shelves filled with red- and bottle-green gilt-edged books.

Bruce lifted up a frame that held a huge puzzle showing an assortment of overlapping Dalmatians.

‘This is the hardest puzzle ever made,’ he said.

He inhaled deeply, as if smelling his own success, while I looked into the sad dark eyes of the dogs.