Lesley was to his right, continuing her search of the parked cars. I couldn’t see the Renault from here but the white Humvee it was hiding behind stuck out half a metre over the line. She continued her search of each vehicle in turn, going round to the back of every car and blowing the lock off the boot, checking inside with a quick scan of the front and rear footwells to ensure nothing was stowed in there. About thirty seconds a car, counting walking time.

‘So apart from the face,’ I said, ‘why are you working with this guy?’

Lesley ignored me, but the question obviously irritated Martin Chorley.

‘Because she’s properly English,’ he said.

‘And I’m not?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not that I blame you for that, you understand. Your mother was no doubt enticed over to fill some vacancy in the NHS or to drive a bus, or some other job that the working man was too feckless to do himself.’

Or because she was jazz mad and couldn’t get a ticket to New York, I thought. He must have known a bit of my family history. I know he’d checked up on me, and had to have asked Lesley what she knew. My mum, who’d had a good job at the American library in Freetown, had unfortunately caught jazz off the radio and headed for the bright lights of the city, any city, and had found London and my father.

Or perhaps he thought being a jazz mad groupie was something only young white women did, or even more likely he just couldn’t be bothered to fit his intelligence together into a proper assessment. Thank god, because if he had he would have known about the Renault that was six cars down the line from where Lesley was currently, and carefully, blowing the bloody doors off a rather tasty silver Porsche.

‘But Lesley is a proper Brit,’ said Martin Chorley, who I realised had probably been waiting years for an audience. ‘That wonderful blend of Romano-Celt and Anglo-Saxon with a flavouring of Dane and a pinch of Norman French. That happy breed that conquered the world and could again if all their children were kind and natural.’

‘Henry the Fifth,’ I said. ‘You’re doing the bit where Derek Jacobi introduces the traitors.’

‘There was a time when the monarchy meant something more than tea parties and sex scandals,’ said Martin Chorley. ‘Before the Saxe-Coburgs or the Tudors or anyone else American TV has done a miniseries about.’

‘Alfred the Great?’ I asked.

‘I’ve always thought you were suspiciously well-educated for a boy from a sink estate,’ he said.

‘What can I say – I watched a lot of Time Team growing up.’

‘That’s not real archaeology,’ said Martin Chorley. ‘Talk to any proper professional archaeologist and they’ll tell you Time Team was a joke.’

‘You know a lot of archaeologists, then?’ I asked.