But that still wasn’t good enough. All the old niggling criticisms, which at another time she might have found amusing, were dragged into the row. There was the lack of ironed shirts, her failure ever to cook anything that hadn’t come out of a microwave or a freezer, the drawer in his chest full of odd socks.

“Didn’t you realise that Mrs. Newby’s on holiday this week?” he demanded. Mrs. Newby came in twice a week to dust and Hoover and empty the dishwasher. “ The house is collapsing around us. And damm it! I had a meeting of the round table, and I couldn’t go.”

Then she was joyously and rewardingly furious. He was like a little boy, she said, deprived of some treat. Why did men never grow up? Was he incapable of ironing shirts and cooking meals? And when it came to priorities, she happened to think that catching a murderer was a little more important than the bloody round table. She stormed to the bedroom and fell suddenly and deeply asleep. When he came to bed some time later to make his peace with her, to make love to her, she was so exhausted that he could not wake her. It was only much later that the sound of the telephone’s ringing disturbed her. She picked it up half-asleep, hardly aware of where she was, and some unfamiliar voice informed her that George Palmer-Jones had been the victim of a hit-and-run accident and was in a Bristol hospital.

Chapter Eleven

George was rescued by a woman with a passion for foxes. She lived in a basement flat in the house nearest to the alley and put out food for them. Each night she would sit in the dark watching the foxes come into the small backyard to pick fussily at the chicken bones and leftover meat she laid out for them on the dirty flags. She claimed she could easily recognise individuals. Sometimes they were too hungry for her delicacies and went straight to the bins left out in the alley. Then she would leave the flat and go out into the yard to look at them there. She led a nocturnal existence, staying awake late into the night and not getting up until lunchtime.

So, when she heard the clatter of dustbins late that night, she thought it was her foxes and went out immediately to see them. The sight of the man, obviously injured, lying where the animals should have been playing confused her. She had little contact with people. She did not know what to do. When he opened his eyes and looked at her, she felt trapped.

“Are you ill?” she called from a safe distance. She was still wearing her carpet slippers. George, lying in pain with his head close to the ground, could see them.

“I think you should call an ambulance,” he said.