Feeling a bit dazed, I press on. I can’t think what Garry from the pub is on about, or why he had told me this revolting story about Colin Watts. Why me? It doesn’t make any sense. Colin Watts doesn’t seem the type, and I’m a pretty good judge. I decide that Garry from the pub has made an early start at the Badger ale, in order to be ahead of his regulars when they arrive at lunchtime.

When I get home, I spend some time in the barns. Then I go through the front door, as I have been checking the beds in the front garden, using my key, rather than going through the back door which is always left open, unless we’re away.

The black-and-white-tiled hall is tidy, and just warm enough to linger in without going straight through to the kitchen. The bunch of flowers above the fireplace is still bouncy and fresh. The room accepts my gaze as if it knows all is in order. Everything is as I have left it, only the long-case clock, I notice, has stopped ticking.

It is one of Pierre’s few daily tasks to wind it. Like many men, he can only do things one at a time, and never completes any task without verbal signage. So he will announce he is going to wind the clock, wind the clock, and report back that he has wound the clock, as if he is participating in a television programme for pre-schoolers.

The leather riding boots are arranged in neat pairs in the open-fronted cupboard. Whips, umbrellas, walking sticks, Nordic track poles and shooting sticks are in the elephant’s foot. I go from the cool tiled hall to the warm fug of the Aga kitchen, to put the milk into the fridge.

There is no sign of Pierre, whose inactivity has become even more industrious of late. Nor of Jesse Marlon, for that matter.

I leave the kitchen for the back door, where I’d left my Spanish boots, the ones with a darling little fringed tassel at the zip, to go to the apple store out the back, and to pick some kale for tonight’s kale, bacon and chestnut soup.

I bend over, zip one leg of one boot, then the other, and when I come upright again, slightly out of breath, slightly dizzy, I see the shape of a man standing against the etched glass of the back door.

I scream. Not because a man is at my back door, but because I know who it is.

Colin Watts.

It is the same scream I let loose when I suddenly see a mouse looking at me beadily from the larder floor, a scream of sheer female shock.

At the noise, the man moves towards me. Through my open back door. I flatten myself against the wall and hold up my arms, screening my face, as if I expect blows to rain down on me.

Suddenly, Jesse Marlon appears from nowhere, running down the hall with his leather Blundstone boots thudding against the flagstones. He shouts, ‘Get away from her, get your hands off her!’ He flings himself so violently on Colin Watts that I scream again, this time in horror. What on earth has got into them?