I walked back across the main courtyard, round the side of the college chapel and into the graveyard. There was a flurry of sound and movement. A squirrel skittered across my path and swiftly up a tree. I reached the grave of Henry’s dogs as another shot split the silence. And there was the epitaph.

Brothers and sisters,

I bid you beware

Of giving your heart

To a dog to tear.

Weather and time had etched the words in green moss.

I turned at a shuffling sound behind me and saw Len Zukov coming slowly down the path. Checking up on me.

‘What you want?’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be in here. You should tell someone you’re coming. Get permission.’

‘Those words on the grave,’ I said. ‘I never realised until today that they’re only a hundred years old. But the grave is five hundred years old. So they had to be put there within the last century.’

His mouth moved as if to say and so what?

‘I just wondered how I missed it,’ I said, talking to myself as much as him, and looking up at the sound of another gunshot. ‘Noticing things – it’s sort of what I do, Len.’

He didn’t take his eyes from me.

‘What’s that shooting?’ I said. ‘Twelve-bore?’

‘Sounds more like a .410,’ he said. ‘Better for close range, thick-cover shooting. Vermin.’ He rubbed his hands on his overalls. They were locked in permanent fists by his arthritis. He saw me looking at his hands and pushed them deep into his pockets. ‘Rats, rabbit and fox,’ he added.

‘Where you from, Len?’

He frowned at me. ‘I told you – I’m from here,’ he said.

‘Originally, I mean.’

‘Russia.’

‘Russia? They didn’t call you Len over there, I bet.’

‘Lev,’ he said. ‘Near enough.’

‘What part of Russia?’

We both looked up at the sound of another gunshot. Closer now. The long, drawn-out, rolling sound of a large-gauge shotgun fired in open countryside. The noise just went on and on.

‘Who’s shooting?’ I said.

He shrugged, like that was another subject he couldn’t care less about.

‘Farmer,’ he suggested.

‘So you came over after the Second World War?’

‘No,’ he said, not quite smiling. ‘I came over after the Great Patriotic War.’

I smiled. ‘Same war. Different names.’

‘No,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Very different wars. Very different wars for your people and my people. In Russia there were twenty-five million dead.’

We both stared at the grave. I wondered what he thought about an English king who built a tomb for his pet spaniels. Not much, probably. Not if he had been in Russia during the war. He had to be somewhere in his seventies, I guessed. That would have made him a boy of eleven or twelve at the end.

‘You must have been too young for the war,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Nobody in Russia was too young for the war.’