A remark such as his last might just have been enough to get a guy busted out of the Training Academy. Axel did not apologize, he seldom made apologies.

The man driving the cattle stared hard at them, at two guys in an American Cherokee Jeep, wrong-side drive, peculiar number- plate, one white with a goddam pony-tail of hair, one black as a dark night.

'I get the feeling we're noticed/ Axel said in bitterness.

Daniel Bent, farmer, sixty-nine years of age, working the land of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, who had maintained the development of the twin Friesian and Holstein herds

10 to championship status, cursed Axel Moen and Dwight Smythe. He cursed them richly, obscenities and blasphemies, because he saw the risk of one of his cows falling from the bank between the road and the hedge, plunging under the body of the four-wheel-drive and breaking a leg. He noticed, too fucking right, the bastards and recognised them for Americans, and wondered what was their business late in the day on the lane to the coast.

When the big vehicle, too big for these roads for sure, going at speed and ignoring the 30 mph limit, came past her, Fanny Carthew saw them.. Mrs Carthew, artist of sea views in oils, eighty-one years old, muttered the protest that in the moment afterwards gave her a tremor of shame and would have shocked her fellow worshippers 11 at the Baptist Hall in Kingsbridge if they had heard her utter such words. The cause of her protest – she had to heave at the leash on which she walked her venerable Pekinese dog right off the lane and into the nettles of the verge. She knew them to be Americans, the scowling white one with his hair ridiculously pulled back

… and the coloured one who drove. She noticed them and wondered

… I the business that brought them down the lane that led no wh e r e.

Because the Jeep was slowing, moving as if with hesitation past the houses, Zachary Jones saw them.