Henri still wagged his head reprovingly at her, and then he shrugged and laughed.

‘The dogs on the record, they are magnificent, madame. The man might have broken his neck.’

‘I am rather sorry he did not. It would have saved trouble in the end,’ Mrs Bradley responded. She returned to Jonathan’s manor house next day, taking her small revolver with her. The injured man had been carrying a Commando knife, and although he declared, probably truthfully, that he always carried it, and that it was a souvenir of the war, she had thought it best to deprive him of it.

‘I shall not keep it,’ she had told him. ‘That might seem dishonest. But if you want it you will have to get it.’ And she had given a flick of her supple wrist and lofted the handy little weapon on to her roof. ‘And only just in time,’ she had added severely, ‘for here come the police, and a nice thing for you if they found that on you and I charged you with breaking and entering! The next time you become my guest, Mr Fullalove, I shall be obliged if you will leave your weapons at home!’

‘I’d forgotten the damned thing!’ growled Tiny. ‘And the police will have to call an ambulance. I’ve busted my knee again!’

Mrs Bradley took no special precautions on the journey down to Jonathan’s house, except the special precaution of going by car instead of by train. She drove by way of Maidenhead, Henley and Oxford, and told George not to hurry. The flat Middlesex fields faded into the sky. The landscape between Hounslow and Maidenhead was green-grey, blue-grey and brown with the promise of spring. There were, on both sides and in front, the ineffable width of the sky and right to the dim horizon the bright March ploughing.

Maidenhead was a bridge across a river, a congested High Street, and the witchcraft of Maidenhead Thicket, all scrub and hawthorn bushes and muddy, secret little paths. Henley was old houses and a straight stretch of water, followed by a Roman fair-mile of slightly uphill road.

Broad roadside boundaries of weeds and nettle, deep, straight-sided ditches, grass which would later grow as high as hay, woods through which the early spring sunlight was chequered and dazzled the eyes, accompanied the car to the bridge at Dorchester and past the long length of Dorchester Abbey. Soon the car passed the strange flat buildings of Littlemore, and so through Iffley and over Magdalen Bridge to the Mitre.

Mrs Bradley would have preferred to spend the evening in Oxford, and to have visited the theatre, (which was giving Great Catherine and Androcles and the Lion on the same bill), but she was anxious to reach Jonathan’s house at a reasonable hour so she compromised by visiting friends in North Oxford and staying to tea. She set out for Cheltenham at six.