‘I can’t see your face,’ he said, ‘but I can see your great arse. I’m putting a Lüger bullet into it in about three seconds flat unless you gimme a good reason why not.’

I stood up, coaxing my lungs back into service.

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘I am recommending you for the Woodcraft Medal. Your impersonation of a tree was most plausible.’

‘’Ullo, Mr Charlie.’

‘What do you have on your person, apart from that machine-pistol which I have repeatedly told you not to carry?’

‘Got a flat half-bottle of brown rum.’

‘Faugh,’ I said. ‘I’m not as thirsty as that. When you are next at the Wutherings end of your beat, be so good as to find and fill my pocket-flask; I shall patrol back to Belle Etoile Bay and meet you here again in, say, thirty minutes.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie. I dare say you’d like the sandwich-case, too?’

‘Very well, Jock, since you insist. I suppose I should keep my strength up.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie.’ He started to melt away.

‘Jock!’

‘Yeah?’

‘There should be a few scraps of cold pheasant in the fridge.’

‘They’re still there; I don’t like pheasant, do I?’

‘They will do for the sandwiches, but at all costs remember: pheasant sandwiches are made with brown bread.’

‘Yeah.’

He went on melting away, as I did.

Melting away from Chestnut Lane to Belle Etoile Bay involves getting lost, muddy and wet; not to mention breaking your shins against nameless bits of farm machinery left around on purpose by Jerseymen. When I got to the Bay the sea was making the same sort of hoarse, defeated noise: ‘Oh gaw-blimey,’ it seemed to be moaning, ‘’ow much longer ’ave I gotter go on wiv this meaningless to-ing and fro-ing?’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I assured it.

I turned back towards Chestnut Lane: unlike the sea, I could look forward to pocket-flasks and sandwich-cases. That was my error: the gods keep a sharp and jealous eye on chaps who hug themselves in such expectations.

Bursting cheerfully through a hedgerow, I saw a large and tree-like shape in front of me. I thought it was Jock.

‘Jock?’ I said.

The shape took a tree-like pace towards me and hit me very hard on the temple. I fell, more slowly than you could imagine, to the ground, my face smacking the mud as gratefully as though it were a pillow. I was incapable of movement but not really unconscious. A small flashlight was turned on to me; I shut my tortured eyes against it but not before I had noticed a shoe close to my face. It was a good shoe, the sort of heavy, tan walking-shoe that I might have bought from Ducker’s of Oxford in the days when my father paid my bills.