How much history would you like? Maybe just a very little. The Manor itself dates back to the thirteenth century, or at least bits of it do. The bits are all that remain of the original monastery, inhabited for a couple of centuries or so by a devout order of calligraphers and pederasts. Then Henry VIII got his mitts on it and handed it over to a courtly scumbag called John Ranting, in return for some spectacular piece of loyal villainy. He knocked it down and rebuilt it after his own pleasure, which was probably pleasing enough, seeing as the architects of the Tudor period pretty much knew what they were doing: stout beams, nice plasterwork and leaded windows, all the things we now value enormously but that John Ranting’s descendants, unfortunately, did not—especially the Victorian rubber magnate Sir Percy Ranting, who, in the 1860s, tore much of it down and rebuilt it as a hunting lodge. These Victorian “hunting lodges” were built because the immensely wealthy merchants of the age were not supposed to parade their actual penises around in public, instead of which vast tracts of pretty and innocent English countryside had their erections inflicted upon them. Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational condom.

The nineteenth century was, in aesthetic terms, disastrous enough for Ranting Manor, but right slap-bang after it, of course, came the twentieth, with all its architectural theories and double glazing. The main additions during this period were, in the thirties, a sort of large Nazi billiard room and in the sixties an indoor swimming pool, tiled in orange and purple, to which were now added various clumps of brightly coloured fungus.

The thing that binds all these different styles together is a general air of dampness and decay and a sense that if a public-spirited citizen tried to set the place alight, it would go out well before the fire brigade arrived. What else? Oh yes. It’s haunted.

Enough of the wretched building.

At about ten-thirty in the evening, which would make it roughly the same time that the car was being stolen on Sunset Boulevard, a small perimeter gate squeaked open. The main iron gates to the estate were kept locked at night, but the side gate was usually to be found unfastened. A reputation for being an unwholesome and troublesome place was usually enough to deter any intruders. An old sign on the main gate said BEWARE OF THE DOG, beneath which someone had scrawled, “Why single out the dog particularly?”