‘I don’t rightly know, except that Blackman was in cahoots with the previous incumbent, before everything seemed to go very sour and the poor man lost his mind. Eli knows more about it than anyone, so perhaps he threatened to tell. Who knows?’

‘And your own disagreement with Blackman?’

‘A stupid thing, really. Where I park my car is actually common land. I’ve used it forever. But they decided to start charging me for the privilege.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I couldn’t afford the legal fees, so I threatened to go public. In the end we agreed to compromise.’

‘That’s the thing, Miss Calver,’ Kit said now. ‘What do you think would happen if we went public about Eli’s hut?’

As he explained our plan to occupy the hut, she became increasingly animated. ‘My dears, what a simply splendid idea. I’m all ready to join you. My goodness, I love a bit of practical protest,’ she said, rubbing her hands with evident glee. ‘You’ve come to just the right person. We’ll write a stonking press release they won’t be able to ignore.’

She poured herself another generous slosh from the whisky bottle and pulled out, from beneath a mound of papers, a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook and a pencil.

A fluent line of spindly hieroglyphs – shorthand, she called it – spooled out from the end of her pencil across the page as she talked. ‘Protestors in Wormley near Colchester are chaining themselves to a shepherd’s hut – note the present continuous, always makes it sound more urgent – to save the home of an elderly war veteran.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Kit said, as I quailed at the thought of Pa’s fury. ‘The hut, on church-owned land, has been inhabited by Mr Eli Chadwick . . .’ She looked up. ‘Any idea how old he is?’ I shook my head. She wrote, ‘Check age’ and then continued ‘. . . since tragedy struck the village in December 1940. His cottage was bombed and his wife killed. Now the church committee wants to rehouse him in the new council estate being built on the Colchester road. They say the hut is not fit for year-round occupation.’

‘Eli told Molly they’d have to carry him out in his coffin,’ Kit said.

‘Excellent. Always paint a picture with words. “They’ll have to carry me out in my coffin,” Mr Chadwick says.’ She sucked the end of her pencil. ‘I suppose you’ve checked with Eli that he’s okay with this?’

‘We will, of course. Tomorrow morning.’

‘Then we can press the Go button. I might even drive into the newspaper offices and drop it in.’ She emptied her glass and plonked it down on the table with a thud. ‘Ooh, we’re going to have such fun. Feels like old times.’

As we walked back down the street, Kit said, ‘Good old Miss Calver. Coming up trumps like that. What do you think, Molly?’