‘One or two things that caught my EYE.’

He was perhaps in his seventies, a tartan shawl knotted across his stained coat, his jaw constantly moving as if chewing tobacco, his speech peculiarly uncontrolled, so that every phrase started slowly and accelerated into a gabbled shout. Winnie only knew him as Jim. It was possible, she thought, that he also only knew himself as Jim.

She peered into the bucket. Two-thirds of a china shepherdess lay supine across a few lumps of coal and a smashed clock.

‘So you going to arrest me?’ His eyes flickered, as if Winnie were a train going past.

‘I’m not, but you know quite well if the police see you, you’ll be straight down the station and in front of the beak.’

‘I’d plead my case, I’ll tell them who’s boss, I’ve done it BEFORE.’

‘I bet you have. If you come to the Post, I’ll make you a cup of tea, if you like.’

‘No, no, you won’t try to trick me that way.’ He coughed; the noise was like mud being shovelled.

‘Your chest sounds bad, Jim.’

‘Blame the Boche for that, THE BOCHE. Dirty way to fight.’

‘You should get in the warm.’

‘That’s what that bugger on Falcon Road said to me, he said, “Why are you standing in the COLD?”’

‘Which bugger’s that, Jim?’

‘The one who’s living there.’

‘Living where?’

He flapped a vague arm and then stumped off, eyes scanning the ground like a beachcomber.

Winnie turned to go, and then hesitated. At the Post, they kept lists of the occupants of each address in the sector, but Falcon Road had been deserted for weeks, half the street obliterated and the remaining houses roofless and windowless, three storeys of Edwardian solidity reduced to crenellated bungalows. She glanced back at the empty road, and immediately saw the cat again. It was sitting on a gatepost; not hunting, but waiting, and it stood as she approached, and pushed its face into her cautiously outstretched hand.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. No gate hung from the gatepost, and the house beyond was just a façade, the ground-floor window framing a tree in the back garden, but the front path had been partially cleared, the plaster and broken slates pushed to one side, so that one could easily reach the gap in the wall that led to the basement steps. Which had also been cleared.

‘It was very neat,’ she said to Basset, later, warming her hands on a mug of cocoa. That had been her first impression, when no one had answered her shouted greeting and she had first knocked, and then tried the door. Whoever was living there had arranged the remaining furniture into a snug, the items clustered around the kitchen fireplace, in which the ashes were still warm. A bowl and a plate had been washed, and beside them on the table, a shining teaspoon sat in a clean cup, though when, out of curiosity, she went over to the sink and tried the tap, there was no water, only a hollow thudding from the pipe. Three blankets had been folded and placed on the sofa. A duffel bag hung over a chair.