I slapped him again. Harder this time, leaving my red mark livid on his skull-like head.

‘Where?’ I said.

‘With the dogs,’ he said. ‘With the bloody dogs.’

‘The dogs?’

‘You’ve hurt me now,’ he said, edging away from me, gathering his kimono in his long bony fingers. ‘Truly. I’m very upset. Police brutality.’ And then he began to snivel with self-pity. He turned to King, pleading. ‘May I change? Before we leave? Ben?’

‘Look at me,’ I said quietly.

Waugh looked at me.

‘What did you do to her?’ I said.

He gathered the neck of his kimono. ‘I never touched the little tart!’ he said. ‘Not until it was time to put her down. Nobody else had the stomach for it.’

King was looking at me, struggling to breathe.

‘My God,’ he said, white-faced with shock. ‘My God.’

‘Your keys,’ I said to Waugh. ‘I need all the keys to this place. Move!’

He moved stiffly across to his desk, rummaged for a while in a drawer then gave me two sets of keys. One was a little domestic set for Waugh’s front door and car. The other could have been a gaoler’s keys from a fairy tale, perhaps two dozen of every shape and age on a rust-flecked metal hoop – apparently the means of access to every door in Potter’s Field.

When I had double-locked them inside Waugh’s rooms I stuffed both sets of keys in my pockets and went quickly down to the chapel and round the back to the old graveyard.

I saw now, and for the first time, that there were many gravestones so old that time and weather had erased every word of their epitaphs. Their blank faces stared back at me. My pace slowed and faltered when I saw what someone had done to the tomb of Henry’s dogs.

I could see it through the ancient trees and the rusting iron railings that guarded the grander tombs; I could see it quite clearly waiting for me on the far side of the leaning headstones and the forest of crosses and the cracked grey vaults. Watched by the sightless eyes of stone angels, I walked towards a great splash of red and black.

Poppies.

Someone had completely covered the tomb of King Henry VIII’s dogs with poppies.

There were poppies in the shape of a cross, and poppies in round wreaths of every size, the wreaths of old soldiers and young children, all of them coming apart after spending long winter weeks out in the elements resting against monuments to the glorious dead.

And there were single poppies that had come astray from the wreaths, or perhaps been worn for that week of remembrance in November and then discarded.

Where had they all come from? Some must have been collected from the war memorial at Potter’s Field, but others must have come from war memorials in the town itself, and in surrounding towns.