Alarmed, Redfyre immediately asked, “Dying?”

“Oh, no need to sound the alarm! Put your bugle down and stand at ease, copper. There’s nothing to interest you here! I was speaking figuratively. I meant in the sense of ‘moribund.’ Elderly, stuck in their last-century ways. Some are over eighty, some are just eighteen, but they’re all stiff-collared stuffed shirts. Nasty, hide-bound, misanthropic old fossils! Have they engaged you to spy on me? You wouldn’t believe how—”

“Hang on a minute!” He interrupted her outburst. The girl was clearly deluded, if not completely loopy. “Copper, did you say?” he asked. “But how on earth . . . ? You can’t see my flat feet from down there!”

“My bedroom window overlooks your front door.” Another vague wave in the direction of the upper storeys of the master’s lodge gave an explanation. “I see you coming and going with your little white dog and your tall dark sergeant. The handsome chap . . . looks like an advertisement for Dr. Benson’s Beef-U-Uppo pills. Before starting the treatment.”

“Ah yes. His figure, indeed, lacks substance, but his moustache makes up for it. It is much admired about town. Name of Thoday. The man, I mean . . .” he burbled.

“So glad you changed the colour of your front door,” she said inconsequentially. “Green is a much more suitable colour for that house. The shiny black was too . . . citified. This isn’t Downing Street in London, though the troops of helmeted bluebottles you attract to your doorstep give the impression of Bow Street. All you lack is the blue light above the door.”

Redfyre had heard enough.

This was an entirely predictable, overexcited reaction to being discovered engaging in what she clearly judged to be a dubious activity, he reasoned, but he decided to call a halt to her outpouring. Wiping the smile from his face and raising an eyebrow in an expression he hoped would give a stern dignity to his demeaning posture teetering atop a water butt, he cut short her stylistic evaluations. “I see my life is under the microscope, or should I say telescope?” he said, meaning it to cut. “Is this the moment when I ask you: Have they engaged you to spy on me? Well? Miss, er . . . ?”

“Oops!” Suddenly speechless, she smiled, recognising and acknowledging her mistake with a shrug. “Fair cop, Mr. Copper!”

“Ah! Then we are each confessing to episodes of Peeping Tommery?” he asked lightly. “Shall we find ourselves guilty and let us off with a caution?”

She smiled again and he realised he was speaking to a very pretty girl with an uncontrolled fuzz of light brown hair, large brown eyes and a trim figure. Not quite doolally perhaps, though he could not be certain about the concealed catapult.