“It was in Pemberton,” she said calmly. “ It’s a pretty village in Somerset. The house was called Cranmers. It’s right in the middle of the village, and we drive past it on the way to the pub.” Then, politely, as if making conversation to one of her husband’s business friends, she said, “ Do you know Pemberton, Mr. Palmer-Jones?”

George said nothing, but he knew the village. He and a friend had been invited there after an education and wildlife conference to share a meal with another of the conference members. He remembered the house because of the unusual name. The friend was Gwen Pullen, the curator of the Natural History Museum, and the man who had offered them hospitality was Duncan James.

George thought Anne James looked like the heroine of a Betjeman poem. She was long-legged, healthy, and very English. He could imagine her on the tennis courts. She would play a stylish but unshowy game, and she would not try too hard to win. He arrived at Cranmers with no clear idea what he would say to her, and when he saw her across the perfect lawn, he felt intimidated by her middle-class competence.

It was midafternoon. He had parked in the middle of the village and walked back to the house, passing the pub where the Franks ate steak and chips on the momentous days when Dennis took out his wife. Pemberton was surrounded by low, rich agricultural land with fields which flooded in winter.

There were black-and-white cows and black-and-white houses, and everywhere fruit trees. Cranmers was made of flat-faced stone, and it was square and more regularly proportioned than the other houses in the street. It had three storeys, and on one side there was a glass-and-wrought-iron verandah. A Virginia creeper which was just starting to change colour was climbing over one corner. The house was protected from the road by a stone wall and wrought iron gate.

He could tell while he was still on the pavement that a children’s party was taking place in the garden. He heard the tuneless singing of “ Happy Birthday” interspersed with giggles over the wall, and the gate was festooned with coloured balloons. By the time he had opened the gate, the tea was over. A trestle table with benches on each side had been set on the lawn, but the children had run away into the orchard and were climbing trees and pushing each other on a tyre strung by a piece of rope from an apple tree. The elaborate homemade birthday cake was still uncut.

Anne James approached him over the grass. She was wearing a sleeveless floral dress and sandals, and the courteous friendliness that comes with supreme confidence.

“Have you come to collect one of the little monsters?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ll be able to persuade them to leave yet.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not that.”