‘Well, I do call that splendid,’ he chortled, rubbing his big, pink hands together. (Can you chortle, by the way? I can giggle and snigger but chortling and chuckling are quite out of my range. It’s a dying art, some modern Cecil Sharp should go around recording the last few practitioners.)

‘How do you mean, splendid?’ I asked when the chortling was over. ‘My friends and their wives don’t think it’s a bit splendid, I can tell you.’

‘Of course, of course. Forgive me. My heart goes out to them. What I meant was that in the midst of all this bogus satanist revival that’s going on it’s rather gratifying to a scholar that a serious recrudescence of the real tradition is taking place in just the sort of base and backward community where one had hoped the last embers of the Old Religion might, indeed, still be glowing.’ (What lovely sentences he constructs. I wish I could write one half so well as he talks.)

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it’s all there: the desecration of Easter for a start. It probably starts at Easter every year, you know, but few victims of ravishment ever complain to the police for reasons which doubtless spring to your mind; the counter-accusations and cross-examinations at the trial can be most shaming in cases of this kind. Moreover, the sturdy native Jersey women would, for the most part, appreciate that they had been singled out for what amounts to a religious rite – it is just as if an Englishwoman were told by the Vicar that it was her turn to do the flowers in Church for Easter: a nuisance but an honour. Do you follow me?’

‘So far I’m abreast of you.’

‘Then there’s the inverted cross –’

‘What inverted cross?’ I interrupted.

‘Why the one on the witchmaster’s belly, to be sure; hadn’t you twigged? The ladies would naturally have thought it to be a sword and it may well have been pointed at the top to represent the woven crosses they give out in churches on Palm Sunday, this combining an insult to Christianity and an ancient sex-symbol. Do you happen to know what colour it was?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Try and find out, there’s a dear boy. And find out whether it left any paint marks: it would be quite splendid – that is to say, very interesting – if it proved not to be painted at all but pyschosomatically produced. The body can do wonderful things, as I’m sure you know, under hypnosis or auto-induced hysteria. The stigmata, of course, springs to mind, and levitation: there’s far too much evidence to dismiss.’

I shot him a furtive look. He was displaying just a little too much zeal for his hobby-horse; committedness is next to pottiness, especially in elderly dons.