‘I am trying to eat a boiled egg, if you don’t mind,’ Arthur Bryant complained. ‘I can’t imagine how long you cooked it. The yolk isn’t meant to be this colour, surely.’ He shut one eye and peered into the eggcup as if half expecting to find baby chicks nesting inside. ‘And your toasted soldiers are rudimentary, to say the least. You’re meant to use fresh bread.’

‘You can’t make proper toast with fresh bread. You’ve never complained before, and you’ve been eating it for over forty years.’ Alma bristled.

‘That’s because I used to be your tenant, and was scared of you. We all lived in fear of making the place untidy, only to have you come charging forward with your squeegee and your lavender polish. Well, now you’re my tenant, and I can finally take revenge.’

Arthur Bryant had conveniently forgotten that it was he who had persuaded his long-suffering landlady to part with her beautiful Battersea apartment, in order to live with him in a converted false-teeth factory set back from North London’s Chalk Farm Road. The area was peppered with warehouses, sheds, huts and light industrial manufacturing plants that had now been transformed into expensive loft-style homes. The difference was that Bryant’s place was the only one not to have been converted, for it still looked like a factory. He was too old and twinge-prone to start renovations himself, and as Alma could no longer be tempted up a ladder with a claw hammer and a mouthful of tacks, they were forced to make the best of things, carrying out odd bodge-jobs as the need arose. If the situation became desperate (as it had last month, when part of the kitchen ceiling fell, mostly into Alma’s casserole), Bryant would then head for the Peculiar Crimes Unit to make sad kitten-in-a-boot eyes at his colleagues, who could be relied upon to rally around at the weekend armed with tools and planks and electrical tape to aid a poor helpless old man. It was shameless, but a perk of being officially classed as elderly, and he knew he was sufficiently loved to be able to get away with it.

‘It would be nice if you could put the book down long enough to eat,’ Alma suggested.

Bryant’s great watery eyes swam up from his copy of The 1919 Arctic Explorer’s Handbook Volume II: Iceberg Partition. ‘This is fascinating stuff,’ he told her. ‘Maggie Armitage sent it to me.’

Alma harrumphed and made a face. Bryant’s theatricality was catching. ‘That woman is godless,’ she complained.

‘Quite the reverse. As a practising white witch she’s more aware of true religion than most Christians, whose experience usually only extends to miming “O God Our Help in Ages Past” during weddings and christenings.’