Like I say, I’d decided to tear Miss Hahn off a strip but it was just a question of … of finding the damn woman to facilitate this process when … uh … that curiously muffled response originating from … uh … was it … uh … was it …? I delivered a sharp rap to the shed door and then yanked it open. Even as I did so I was reprimanding the poor creature in no uncertain terms (I’d built up quite a head of steam by this stage – which, in retrospect, was rather appropriate given that Miss Hahn was sitting, all but naked, inside a tiny sauna).

‘I’m astonished by your complacency, Miss Hahn!’ I snapped, and then … Oh yes. Then the awful, dawning realization that … uh … As I already mentioned. Ho-hum.

Miss Hahn was tying a towel around herself. My glasses immediately fogged up. But not before I’d had the chance to note, internally, that she was slightly pink, all over, and that she had very beautiful shoulders. The particular jut of her pinkened collar bones was extraordinarily …

‘My complacency?’ Miss Hahn sprang to her feet. I took a couple of steps back (quite risky in this location with absolutely no – zero, zilch – visibility).

‘Yes,’ I persisted, slightly losing the thread of my thoughts, ‘to voluntarily set up permanent camp in such a …’

‘I’m having a sauna, Mr Huff.’ Miss Hahn’s voice was quite clipped (Germanic. Even more so than normal – although it isn’t that clipped normally. Nor Germanic). ‘Do you honestly think it’s appropriate behaviour to barge in on a lone female while she’s … while … in the privacy of her own home and then accuse her of … of …’

She waved her pinkened arm.

‘Complacency,’ I repeated.

‘Complacency,’ she finished off. But there was a slight question mark in her voice. This was probably because there is nothing specifically complacent about the act of taking a sauna, I suppose. Although saunas strike me as such ridiculous things. To sit in a tiny room and sweat. It’s so ludicrously Swedish. And the Swedes are – by and large – a somewhat supercilious, ridiculously reasonable, utterly dull and, one might easily say, maddeningly complacent tribe. Although not so bad as the Norwegians with their sanctimonious Peace Prizes and their pesky trolls and their endless bucket-loads of North Sea oil.

‘Now if you’ll kindly excuse me,’ Miss Hahn continued, ‘the sauna is all fired up, so I must head back inside.’

Well the sauna wasn’t the only thing that was all fired up! What a prickly woman Miss Hahn is! And slightly humourless, to boot. Ha! So much for her determinedly bohemian exterior. Didn’t take very long to scratch the surface of that particular paper-thin badly glued-on walnut veneer.

‘There’s a hole in your towel,’ I informed her.

It was perhaps the oldest, tattiest towel I had ever set eyes upon. Of indeterminate hue and – worse still – of questionable hygiene.