‘They have sentimental value?’ I ask (somewhat facetiously, I confess).

‘Sorry?’

‘The walnuts?’

‘Mrs Barrow tells me there’s a problem with the dining table,’ she says, swiping her short, unkempt, sun-bleached blonde hair impatiently behind her ear. I can instantly tell that she cuts it herself. She’s that kind of a woman. No make-up bar a light smear of Vaseline on the lips and the angular bone of either cheek. Dressed in a pair of men’s baggy, canvas trousers (rolled over at the waist and belted with what looks like a length of old rope) and a drab, linen blouse in grey or brown – or both, or neither – un-ironed but worn and worn into a flat shine, buttoned right up to the neck. Scuffed plimsolls on her feet, no socks. She has broad shoulders and is tanned. She is built like a swimmer. I see the German in her, and I see the Soviet.

Around the nose – the chin. Poor thing.

‘It collapsed,’ I say, screwing the lid back on to the walnuts. ‘I’d placed the television on top of it to try and improve the reception. It caved under the weight. The middle flap seems to’ve been constructed out of plywood. That or the woodworm’s got the better of it. Either way, the table is irretrievably damaged, although – on a positive note – the picture on the TV’s been much clearer ever since.’

‘Your wife left,’ she says, her eyes – the colour of a mean bruise, edged in octopus ink – slitting, infinitesimally.

‘The second week.’ I nod, studiedly indifferent. ‘Mrs Barrow mentioned it? One of the other neighbours, perchance?’

Of course nothing ever happens in this ludicrous place without the neighbours mentioning it! A fool might imagine it to be the kind of wonderful location where a person might be rendered invisible – somewhere an artist or a criminal or a film star might flee in order to cultivate a precious, fragile sense of anonymity; a place where you might melt into the fringes, the margins, the nothingness; a place of privacy – insularity – isolation – retreat. But Toot Rock is not like that. Oh not at all! Not a whit of it.

‘She ran over a cat,’ Carla Hahn says, inspecting my tie with a small frown, her hand lifting, unconsciously, to her own very slightly frayed collar.

Her hands are the colour of boiled gammon! Extraordinary! Raw-looking. I quite pity her those awful hands.

‘Yes. The tail,’ I confirm, ‘in broad daylight. The cat was immensely fat. She was reversing at high speed, drunk as a skunk.’

‘The tail’ – she nods, slightly baleful, now – ‘was later amputated, and at some considerable cost to the owner, I’m told.’

‘You heard all about it, then?’ I smile, sarcastically.

‘He’s my father’s cat.’ She shrugs.

‘Oh. Mrs Barrow didn’t mention that,’ I murmur, somewhat perturbed by this sudden, quite unexpected, turning of the tables.

‘I think you’ll probably discover, on further acquaintance, that Mrs Barrow generally prides herself on leaving out the most important detail in any story. In fact you could almost say it’s her speciality.’ She smiles. Good, straight teeth. But the eyes … Tsk! Watch out for those eyes! Dead as a dodo’s! Deader still! A predator’s eyes (the dodo, to its eternal credit, was a humble vegetarian). These are a carnivore’s eyes. These are the eyes of a pterodactyl, a tyrannosaurus rex.