Clearly, the Jersey Evening Post must have done me proud and, indeed, when my copy at last arrived, so it proved. Bannered and splashed across the front page was all the Mortdecai that was fit to print. The photograph sent Johanna and Jock lurching and staggering across the floor in ribald mirth: senile, scholarly old Mortdecai, be-poodled and be-piped, beamed pottily out at one in the most diverting way. Miss H. Glossop, the young lady reportress, had evidently done her homework, for her facts were clear and well-researched. Erudite, unworldly old Mortdecai, it appeared, anxious to help friends in distress, had fought fire with fire to such effect that the very celebrant of the rites had dropped dead – to everyone’s regret – at the climax of the performance. ‘What,’ the story implied, ‘would the harvest be for the guilty target, when even the innocent gunner, so to speak, couldn’t take the recoil?’ Miss Glossop went on in an exceedingly well-informed way to recount the marvellous powers attributed to the Mass of S. Sécaire, and to pity the witch who pitted his paltry powers against it. No literate diabolist could possibly have missed the point. Moreover, apart from a slight tendency to freely split infinitives, her style evidently derived from the best models: not a single ‘subsequently transpired’ marred her pellucid prose. I was well pleased. Indeed, I got up in time for dinner and made a few telephone calls myself. Sam was out – no one knew where – but George grudgingly admitted that the ploy seemed to be going well. Solly, his mouth full (solicitors dine much earlier than barristers), admitted that my image might well be a little better for the publicity, and let me know that one or two of the charges had been dropped and only four or five fresh ones had been thought of.

I began to feel positively chipper. Apart from the prospect of a few score years in prison the horizon was pretty clear. Peals of laughter wafted through from the kitchen, where Jock, I suppose, was showing my photograph to his dominoes-friend and the cook. I beamed indulgently.

Dinner was announced.

I need hardly say that I am not one of those whose minds dwell continually on foodstuffs: but when I do, once in a while, turn my mind in that direction it is with a certain single-mindedness, particularly when, as in this case, the grocery under advisement proves to be a guinea-fowl, that triumph of the poulterer’s art. This particular feathered friend was an uncommonly well-poultered example: it must have led a beautiful and sheltered life. Hand-in-hand tripped a bottle of Barolo, singing wistful lays of the gravel slopes of the Piedmont. Seldom have I spent a happier and more innocent hour but, as the Master himself tells us, it is at times like these that Fate creeps out of a dark alley, fingering a stuffed eel-skin destined for the back of one’s neck.