She shakes her head, forlornly. ‘I mean there was holes dug all over the lawn, Carla! The leeks was all pulled up! It was chaos – pure chaos! But he just cusses and rolls about, belly-aching like a big girl! I mean imagine a man such as that surviving in the tundra, Carla, where there’s no laws and no pavements and no manners and no taps? Doesn’t bear thinking of!’

‘The dining table …’ I persist.

‘Later on I see as he’s thrown some old soup tins, a fly paper and a broken milk bottle into the flower bed by the little girl’s shrine,’ she adds, scowling. ‘I thought, Well that’s as why you ended up arse-over-tit, Mr Huff! Shrunken heads or no! You don’t need to be messing around with forces beyond your ken, my friend. The tundra’s your business, Mr Huff, but we has our own ways of going about things up here on Toot Rock. Wispy and prarochial, indeed! Ignore ’em at your peril, sir!’

She shakes her head, scowling.

‘I suppose I should have a quick word with him,’ I murmur, registering the hungry grumble of the Rye bus on the Fairlight Road as Mrs Barrow takes out a scarf and ties it around her head, forming a small knot under the chin and pulling the two ends tight with such a jerk that one might almost imagine the cosmopolitan Mr Huff’s head compressed between them.

‘I won’t pretend as I’m not prone to having the odd grumble about the quality of the furniture in Mulberry,’ she confides. ‘I know as it has historical value, Carla, and all the rest of it’ – she raises a jaundiced brow – ‘but it’s just a pile of old driftwood and matchsticks for the most part. Even so, how one middle-aged man on his lonesome-ownsome can cause so much mess and mayhem is quite beyond me, I swear!’

She reaches out her hand towards the oncoming bus and it slows to a gradual halt with a blood-curdlingly cacophonous squeal of brakes, as if each of her calloused fingers has summoned a banshee from between its wheels.

‘All as I can say is: I hope his poor wife paid you the full deposit – in cold hard cash – before she upped and ran off!’ Mrs Barrow barks over the engine noise, then clambers on board. I pass over her old shopping trolley. It has a tricky wheel on the right-hand side which is sometimes given to seizing up. She grabs it, gives the offending wheel a practised kick, then disappears into the bus with a sharp – and suitably conclusive – bantam-like cluck.

2

Mr Franklin D. Huff

In the end it was Carla Hahn who approached me. I knew the only way to draw her in – the only way – would be to ignore her completely. It had taken six weeks, in total. I was sitting on top of the gun emplacement eating a stale, unbuttered roll and a jar of pickled walnuts. She was slightly out of breath after cycling up. I’d seen her from atop my airy lookout talking to Mrs Barrow at the request bus-stop on the Sea Road. Mrs Barrow – like so many of the permanent residents on Toot Rock, not to mention those of Pett Level in the flatlands below (although the weekenders, I confess, are of a different complexion altogether) – appears to hail from an indeterminate epoch. She seems to have no presentiment whatsoever that she’s living in a modern age: the 1980s for heaven’s sake!