He gave a grunt as he stuck his fingers inside a knothole in the wooden boards that filled in the spaces between the flagstones. It came up without much effort. He reached inside and started twisting at something in the darkness. I heard the sound of rushing water and then the gurgle as it slowed. He grunted again as he pushed himself back and I offered my hand to help him up. He took it and as I got him to his feet he sort of fell into me. His clothes were stinking and there was muddy water all over his front but it felt nice to hold him for a moment, to feel the sturdiness of him against me. It made the things I’d been thinking seem silly. He was my John. He was a decent lump of a chap: dependable and a bit of a grump. Writing poetry? Picking up parcels for a government spy? All that stuff was the work of a stranger. This man, this man in my arms, this was the real John and I could have kissed him for just briefly being himself.

‘Here,’ he said, and handed me a length of ceramic pipe. He wielded one himself too, a hefty great truncheon with an unscrewed brass cog at the end. ‘If anybody touches you again, wallop them with the hard end.’

I looked at the length of piping. Turned it over. ‘I think they’re both hard ends,’ I muttered, feeling lost. ‘John, I said … they’re both hard ends … don’t go sniggering, you …’

When I looked up, John had one foot in the sink and was pulling himself upwards with a hiss of pain. He stood on his tiptoes and without so much as a look back, he rammed the length of pipe into the hole in the ceiling. Plaster and timber and horse-hair rained down.

Then he was reaching both hands into the gap. Bracing himself, he hauled himself up like he was a gymnast – albeit a gymnast in pyjama trousers and a nasty gash in their belly.

‘John Goose, come down, you silly beggar, you’re going to tear yourself open!’

He tumbled back into the sink, his knee jarring as he slipped sideways and half cartwheeled down onto the floor, the air coming out of him in a great, painful thump.

‘What the blazes did you do that for?’

He held his hand in front of his face. Opened his fist as if he held a jewel on his palm. The device was a couple of inches by a couple of inches: a little black square with a thick wire protruding an inch or two from the top. I’d watched enough spy movies to know what it was.

‘John?’ I asked. ‘John, how did you know …?’

Even through the pain I could detect the faintest whiff of pride; a little smile at having a secret and of having kept it well.