He rings off. As she drives back to town she tries to imagine why he is so cautious. Is he a speculator? You can’t buy shares in a private, family-owned firm. So how could he make money out of this? It must be revenge. As the editor said, he may have been fired. He wants revenge but he doesn’t want to be named at any cost. She wonders if Mr Tredizzick isn’t a little obsessed with a kind of revenge too, having suffered at the hands of this Mr Maxwell all those years ago.

Cupcakes and macaroons. It’s St Piran’s Day soon, and she has found a piece of Chaucer, from ‘The Cook’s Tale’, about pasties, or ‘pastees’ as Chaucer spelled it in the fourteenth century. Now telle on, Roger, looke that it be goode/For many a pastee hastow laten blood. Cornwall will be glad to know that pasties leaked back then, seven centuries ago. Artair’s coffee and the blog and the huge events she’s somehow, improbably, stumbled across are making her light-headed. Actually, Alan39 stumbled across her. And that is her best defence.

As she drives through this placid countryside with its mean bungalows and guileless cows in rounded, infantile fields, she starts to compose the blog:

A psychiatrist recently claimed that women in an adulterous relationship with a married or attached man were likely to leave an item of clothing behind in the marital bed or in the bathroom. Sexy knickers – what he called lingerie, pronounced ‘lounger-ay’ – are, research has shown, the favourite items. But is this a conscious act or an unconscious act springing from a primitive instinct to oust a rival, asks Dr Reginald S. Katz, celebrity sexologist in Bel Air, California. His speciality is sex addiction, apparently very common in California. Quite popular at my uni too, but that is another matter.

There are two questions I would like to put to Dr Katz: one, how did you do your research? And two, have you considered the women involved here have far less to lose, so they can’t be bothered to look for their knickers? I know I can’t always keep track of mine.

And so to cupcakes: I have been swamped by recipes (she has had two). I didn’t realise that they had become such an obsession in Cornwall. I think there is a connection with the piece about lost knickers: sex. It seems to me, as I said, that cupcakes look like pert breasts. They suggest that the cook, most often a woman, is sending out an unconscious message: come and sample my cupcakes. What do you think of that, Dr Katz? And I don’t even have a PhD.