It had taken a while to find a tenant, but then curious eyes had seen a tall, middle-aged man with sparse, sandy hair and a hunted look, appear with his grey whippet and a small amount of furniture in a Thrifty self-drive van.

Augustus Halfhide had so far avoided Miriam Blake, though she had made several approaches to him over the garden fence. Now he watched her return from a visit to the shop. He sighed. She peered into his window and gave a little wave, accompanied by a hopeful smile. “Oh, God,” he said to his little dog Whippy, “it’s just my luck to move in next to a predatory female.”

It looked as if his hopes of having a period of peace and quiet were under threat.

Recently, after his wife had finally left him, he had taken a hard look at himself and decided to begin again. After a life so far filled with action-packed missions in foreign lands, nothing, he had decided, would be better than a remote village, in a community that would not regard him as one of their own for at least twenty-five years. He could spin them a good story, and they would leave him alone to adjust to a different way of life.

Augustus Halfhide, Gus to his friends, could not have been more mistaken.

Two

GUS MET IVY Beasley in church. It was an unlikely place for him to be, but he had felt a sudden urge to observe some of his fellow villagers without necessarily being accosted. He planned to slip into the back pew in the darkened interior and indulge himself by inventing identities for the people in front. Although he wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, he was missing congenial company.

There were very few in church for the service, and among the mostly elderly parishioners his eye was taken by a woman in a solid black coat covering her broad shoulders, and topped with an extraordinary black felt hat like an upturned pudding basin, reminiscent of photographs of his grandmother in a distant past.