‘Ah, yes. I’ve put it out for you. It’s in a nice plain seventeenth-century cursive without contractions, so you shouldn’t have much trouble. I’ve also put out a plain Latin Missal; it’ll save you a lot of time, you need only copy out the variant passages.’

‘Thanks, you’re very kind.’

‘Not at all. That will be fifty pounds, please.’

‘Fifty pounds? But surely, that’s unheard of between fellow scholars. I mean, common courtesy …’

‘The Earl is not a scholar and common courtesy is outside his sphere of interest. He has just instructed me on the telephone that the fee is fifty pounds and that you have already had – I think he said racing tips – worth more than that.’

I reflected that George and Sam were sharing out-of-pocket expenses so I coughed up, although with ill grace. She wouldn’t accept a Diner’s Club card, she wouldn’t take a cheque, but she would send a footman round to Carlos Place, where squat the proprietors of my overdraft, buttock-deep in pieces-of-eight. The box-office formalities over, I spent a long and disgusting hour or two copying out the relevant passages of the Mass in a silence broken only by the fidgeting and snickering of the man who had arrived to read Green Girls in Paris – an aged person whose thoughts should have been on higher things.

‘Faugh,’ I thought.

Then I had a bath and a few drinks and things at my own club – a temple of light compared with Dunromin’s hell-hole – and flew back to Jersey.

Jock met me at the airport in the ‘Big Jam-Jar’ as he calls the Rolls. The news was not good. Johanna had not been raped but the wife of a friendly doctor, living a mile from us, had. A bogus call to a road-accident had lured her husband away. The rapist had unscrewed the bulb from the light over the porch and rung the door-bell. The other details were as before.

‘And I found out from the new gardener, the old geezer, what this sword on the belly means,’ said Jock.

‘So have I,’ I said. ‘Did he seem to connect it with Easter at all?’

‘Nah. He kept on saying it was because of the Pakis, which is daft, innit, ’cos there’s no Pakis on the Island except them shops in St Helier, where they sell the duty-free watches.’

‘Jock, the French word for Easter is Pâques: in the toothless mouth of an ancient Jerseyman it would, indeed, sound just like “Pakis”.’

‘Well, there you are, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. What’s the word on Mrs Sam?’

‘Well, not great. I hear she got worse and they took her off to the mainland ’smorning. Mr Davenant’s been ringing up to find when you’re expected back; he sounds in a bit of a mess.’

‘Oh dear, do you think he’ll be round this evening?’