‘The wood,’ Colin answers, as if we are both simple. He hands me back the red-stained tea-towel. Even though it’s one of my favourite soft Irish linen ones, which are brilliant for polishing glasses, I say, ‘No no, keep it.’ He lights another Rothman.

‘Mrs Musgrove, oy would’ve mentioned it down the shop, but what with the arrests this morning… Your old man left a message on moy mobile. Ordered two loads of wood. Oy only toike cash, and unless you want me to make trouble for your toy boy here, oy think you better pay me for three loads ’stead of two.’

He draws on his cigarette, and he says something under his breath about how JM has ‘got wood, too’, at which Jesse Marlon hisses, for some reason cross, ‘Just shut up, will you, you fucking nonce, or I’ll deck you.’

And then Colin Watts says, ‘If you ever so much as touch me again, sonny boy, you’ll end up in prison, and oy don’t need to tell you why,’ and Jesse Marlon scowls at him.

Obviously, Pierre had called Colin Watts, and ordered some wood. I can’t think why, as we usually have it delivered from our regular supplier, who can be relied on to sell us bone-dry tinder that goes up like Buncefield Oil depot rather than the saturated new pine he saves for Londoners like the Flemings and the Kinmonths.

I tell Colin we (as in me and Pierre, not me and Jesse Marlon) don’t actually need it – we were long on wood as it happened – but as he was here, could he put it as neatly as possible please in the barn.

When Colin Watts had sloped off, after grinding a Rothman butt carefully in the middle of my back steps, I ask Jesse Marlon why Colin had called him a ‘rancid’.

‘Because that’s what the village calls us,’ he answers. ‘Rancids.’

I see exactly why the eco-villagers might be called this, having seen them trail glumly around the village in their knitted woollen weeds and having stood a little too close to them as they stocked up on Rizlas in the Stores, but said of course that they weren’t rancid at all, what a silly thing to say, and offered to make a fresh pot of coffee for us both. I certainly needed it.

It’s not every day, after all, that the village rapist (though I have only Garry-from-the-pub’s word on that) comes to call.

And it’s certainly not every day that Jesse Marlon comes up behind me while I am fussing over the Aga (I was wiping a spill – if you don’t remove them straightaway they burn themselves in, like branding scars on to the enamel) and slowly turns me round, so I’m facing him.