“It was there, Giles, in our bed. Imagine!”

“Horrible,” he managed, but he failed to calm the Governor’s wife. She knew, as women do, what he thought of her husband.

On her behalf, Hoyter had been attempting to reach his governor. The Colonel of the Gibraltar Regiment also wanted to speak with him. He wanted to have the ape put down.

“Technically, of course, I don’t need his permission,” barked the Colonel who acted as Officer in Charge of Apes. Sharon, the regimental pet, had been named after his daughter – an honour he felt more keenly than his daughter did.

“But I’d be happier if HE knew what we planned.” The CO paused. In Colonel Jim’s pause – that was another thing about the military, their chumminess – Hoyter heard the unspoken contempt that had been his experience since arriving in Gibraltar: a contempt which spread from the Governor through the disbanding armed forces, to the staff in the Prince of Wales where Linda and Paul were famous for greeting everyone with their warm Welsh welcome, except Giles Hoyter – the contempt the whole of Gibraltar felt for the Diplomatic Service which had negotiated the Straits Tunnel Treaty.

“Jim,” said Hoyter sternly. In the absence of his master he assumed easily his master’s voice. “I’m in favour. Wholly. As HE will be. But is it such a good idea for the Gibraltar Regiment to be putting down its apes at the present time? People can be superstitious, Jim.”

But the Colonel was not in superstitious mood. There was a wounded ape running loose through the town, looking for a mate. He thought of Sharon. “Send a car if you like,” he said. “If you’re so concerned, I’ll make Sergeant Rossy available. He’ll fill you in.”

“OK,” said Hoyter. He refrained from asking why the Colonel could not himself send Rossy. He knew it was the Colonel’s way of implementing to the letter the defence cuts ordained by Hoyter and his ilk. Jim’s regiment had witnessed every conflict since the Jacobite rebellion. The contemporary rage for pacificism was achieving what no German or Spaniard had ever accomplished.

“I’ll send a car.”

Until six months ago, the ape-keeper had been a tough ex-sapper who could stop hockey balls with his padded head and uttered strange sounds which attracted the Middle Hill pack into a silent circle around him. He had known how to swear in their language and he had sworn at them for twenty years until the death of his dog, an Irish setter which had grown up among the apes and presumably supposing itself one of them had leapt for a branch in a gully behind Windmill Hill. The keeper retired the same day. That was in June, since when Sergeant Rossy had been appointed. He had spent a year on an uninhabited island north of the Shetlands investigating the kleptoparasitic interactions of field mice and another year among the macaques of southern India. The author of a paper on promiscuous brood parasites in Macaca sylvanus, Rossy was the choice of the regiment’s ecological lobby.