I’m sorry, but I shall have to explain about these chapels. There is a place in Grouville Parish, in the East of the Island, called La Hougue Bie. I believe no one is certain what the name means. It is a monstrous, man-made mound inside which, only excavated fifty years ago, there is a dolmen: a tomb made some five thousand years ago of great slabs of stone. To reach the main tomb-chamber you have to creep, bent double, for what seems a very long way indeed along a stone tunnel. If you are claustrophobic, or superstitious or simply a coward, then you will find it a dismal and grimly place indeed. I hate it for all three reasons and I hate, too, the thought of the brutish folk who built it; I loathe to speculate on what disgusting compulsion made them drag and raise those monstrous stones and then spade over them those countless tons of earth, all to encyst some frightful little prehistoric Hitler.

Nevertheless, I believe that we should all visit such a place from time to time, in order to remind ourselves how recently we sprang from the brutes.

Crowning the great mound and, curiously, exactly above the main tomb-chamber, someone in the twelfth century raised a decent little chapel dedicated to Notre Dame de la Clarté. A few centuries later another decent chap dug himself out a crypt in the pious – if mistaken – belief that it was a replica of the Holy Sepulchre itself, and then tacked another chapel onto the first. This latter is called the Jerusalem Chapel.

I didn’t go into the dolmen myself; once had been enough for me – I just don’t enjoy feeling my flesh crawl. Jock was prowling about the surrounding area looking absurdly like a professional crook but the nice tourists paid him no heed: they probably assumed he was a security-firm guard, there’s no telling the two apart, is there? Fr Tichborne, on the other hand, dived into the dank darkness of the tunnel with every sign of relish and emerged looking flushed and excited, like a young bishop with his first actress.

‘Do you have a portable tape-recorder?’ were his first words.

‘Of course I have, who hasn’t? But whatever for?’

‘Tell you tonight. After dinner.’ And with that he dived back into the hell-hole. I spent five instructive minutes in the excellent little Agricultural Museum near the mound, marvelling at the monstrous tools the tillers toiled with in the olden days. How they must have sweated, to be sure; it made me feel quite faint.

When Tichborne re-emerged we rounded up Jock and ‘cased’ the chapels. (‘Cased’, you understand, is a piece of thieves’ cant meaning ‘surveyed with intent to commit a felony’ – but I dare say that you, who must be the sort of person who reads this sort of story, would know that sort of thing already.)