Ged Adams of Middleton spared Sykes the longest time. He was one of the smaller growers, and grumbled that earning a living from the rhubarb came hard. There were so many in the game and the big boys had the advantage. They sat in the doorway of a little hut that held spades, candles and a couple of long leather aprons. Ged poured strong sweet tea into tin mugs. He looked out across all the land they could see, mist just clearing from the frosted and furrowed earth.

“Why would I put a body on a train, with acres of land to choose from?”

When they had finished the tea, and Sykes had learned how the rhubarb was taken to the station, he asked to see where the forced rhubarb grew.

“Looking for a body?”

“Just interested.”

Ged lit a lamp. He opened the door into a shed with such a low ceiling that Sykes had to bend. It was warm inside, heated from a stove at the back and pipes that ran the length of the shed. In the eerie lamplight, he saw row upon row of crimson stalks with large heart-shaped leaves.

Beginning to feel he would learn nothing at all of value, Sykes next talked to Stanley Ambler of Hope Farm. Stanley tended his raised strawberry beds as he talked. “Don’t believe a word of it, gov. It’s a tale to give government an excuse to send spies in and see how much we’re growing.”

By noon, Sykes had visited nineteen of the growers whose produce went on the train that fateful Friday night. He learned that the growers started work at dawn, finished at dusk, and that nobody knew a thing, and not a single man among them noticed anything unusual.

By then, the car was filthy, the windscreen decorated with dead insects. Sykes stopped for petrol, and to have the car washed.

He drove home for a bite to eat and to warm up. Rosie was out. That’s why she doesn’t want a telephone, he thought as he cleaned his shoes. She thinks it would do nothing but ring when she goes out and stop the minute she comes back.

Opening his road map on the table, he checked the route to Moortown Golf Club.

He drove out of the city towards the suburbs, a pleasant enough journey. Green space, lots of trees, fresh air. This made a change from his insurance jobs. It beat visiting stuffy offices. The drive gave him time to think of how they should best go about this odd business of the man in the sack, but no inspiration came.

He had never visited a golf course. As far as he was concerned, golf was for people who didn’t understand cricket. Hitting a small ball with a long stick seemed to him the worst kind of pointlessness. If the unidentified man had suffered a head wound, attributable to a blow from the sharp end of a golf club, that would be different. It would be a reason for being here. As things stood, Sykes had no great faith in Mrs. Shackleton’s idea that the unknown man might have been a golfer. Golfers, guns and Russian gold did not make a good fit.