Jack wanted to laugh out loud at Oaks’s naïve honesty, but instead kept a straight face. ‘Why are you telling me?’ he asked in the sternest tone he could muster.

‘’Cos, I changed my mind. This B&B we’re heading for now is no way to welcome you.’

When Jack finally smiled, his entire face softened and his eyes glowed. Oaks knew immediately that he was forgiven. ‘My cousin, Blair, runs The Fox Hunters in the centre of town. Lovely place. I’ll take you there.’

Jack nodded happily. ‘Let’s go the scenic route, please, DC Oaks. I want to get a feel for the area.’

The Cotswolds were sprinkled with chocolate-box houses, hedged fields and a variety of roaming animals. ‘Them hedges look easy to nick sheep over, right?’ Oaks’s upbeat tone when posing the question made it obvious that them hedges held a secret. ‘From roadside, they’re waist height, but on the field-side most have got a wide trench filled with brambles. No way you can get sheep out over that. I had to cut a tourist’s dog out of a bramble trench once. He’d spotted the sheep, leapt the hedge and landed in, well, it’s like barbed wire once you’re in the middle of it. Poor thing had to be put down . . . should have been the owner who was put down, in my opinion.’

Everywhere Jack looked there were roads and pubs that gave a proud nod to their long-gone yesteryears – The Railway Tavern was no longer anywhere near a working railway, The Horse and Groom pub had converted its stables into a car park now filled with Land Rovers, and Jack was 100 per cent certain that Oaks’s cousin who owned The Fox Hunters was not, in fact, a fox hunter.

All in all, old and new seemed to co-exist relatively neatly. Even old decommissioned red phone boxes had been reassigned and most now contained defibrillators – presumably to save the lives of overweight, city-dwelling ramblers when they succumbed to heart attacks after thinking that one week of healthy living in the fresh air could make up for fifty-one weeks of a sedentary lifestyle.

Jack noted that a lot of the villages and small towns tended to be served by one main road, meaning there was only one way in and out, so, unlike London burglars, the perpetrators here would not be able to escape like rats in a maze. Which prompted the question, why had Gifford and his team not caught them yet?

As Oaks turned the next corner, he was pulled up by temporary traffic lights. From the opposite direction, three lorries carrying farming equipment and supplies rumbled past, followed by a couple of horseboxes and a half dozen cars. ‘Where’s all of this traffic coming from and going to? How do you keep track of these bigger vehicles?’ Jack asked. ‘Do you recognise all of them?’