Left in the house, except for the servants, Mrs Bradley sat at her window for some time looking out over the hilly fields and pastures. Then she gave one glance at her unanswered letters and went downstairs and out to the front door.

There she paused whilst she surveyed the scene. She returned to her room, put on walking shoes and an indeterminate ulster, and strode out into Jonathan’s drive. She followed the rough, downhill path as far as Will North’s house, and then struck up into Groaning Spinney. She walked on the soft humus and the fallen pine needles until she reached the sturdy tree in which Obury and Ed had rebuilt the badger-watching platform.

She took off her ulster and tossed it over a shrub, and then climbed up to the platform. Here she squatted like a benevolent toad and appeared to lapse into meditation.

Around her the signs of spring, in the form of shining buds and a lively blackbird, gave colour, perhaps, to her thoughts, for she descended from her perch after a while, and, taking out a small lens, diligently surveyed the trunks of various trees. She then transferred her scrutiny to the badgers’ sett and even poked experimentally into a hole with the end of a long rod which she fitted together from parts which she took from the pocket of her discarded ulster.

Obtaining no apparent results from these probings, she abandoned them, and, instead, began to scrape aside the layer of humus formed by the fallen leaves of the tree in which the platform had been built. She looked up to see Jonathan and Tiny approaching her. Tiny seemed to find the soft going difficult, and Jonathan had to give him a hand down the bank. Just as they descended, Mrs Bradley bent down, inserted a yellow claw into the hole she had previously probed, and popped into her skirt pocket an object which neither man, at that distance, should have been able to identify. She then looked up, grinned like a crocodile at them, and allowed Jonathan to help her on with her ulster.

‘And what are you supposed to be doing?’ he enquired. ‘I thought you stayed in to write letters? Never mind. You can come with us now to see Will’s ferrets.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘and then I must catch the bus.’ She accompanied them as far as Will North’s house and then hurried off down the lane for the village street and the bus stop. She grinned hideously at the recollection of Tiny’s face.

When she glanced back the two men had gone. Mrs Bradley dived into her skirt pocket, took out the object which she had secreted there, and, upon arriving at the mill-stream, she threw it in. It was a cardboard container which had surrounded a bottle of aspirin tablets. She leaned on the miller’s railing, and watched the small package float away downstream.