After the next turn I saw the other car had pulled up alongside Norton's MG. There were a couple of men in dark uniforms, and Norton started waving to me with wide urgent gestures. I checked the sail and rigging but couldn't see anything wrong. I didn't expect to: I had a rough idea of what had come up. At the end of the run I turned and moved inland again. All three of them were waving to me with flailing downward motions, putting a lot of expression into it; I could now see the white letters on the back of the second car. I didn't like it, any of it, because I'd been on leave only two weeks and my nerves were still trying to shake themselves out.

I made three more runs, trying to forget about them, but they began using the horns at me and a siren wailed into life and died again. They were still waving, so I compromised: I think I could have got enough height to come in and land on the grass and ask them what the hell they wanted, but I gave myself a final fling and put the nose down and swooped over their heads in a long arrowing dive across the cliff and the beach and the sea, wheeling against the beaten gold reflection and moving into wind again, lowering, the trailing edge fluttering near stalling point a few feet above the ground; then I put the nose down and ran in with my feet ploughing up the sand as I got the last of the wind out of the sail. I was still dismantling when Norton came sprinting along from the cliff path to help me.

'London,' he said.

'I'm frozen stiff,' I told him. 'Look after this, will you?' I left him and ran hard for a mile, as far as the pier and back, feeling better because I'd worked a bit of the frustration out: there was absolutely no point in getting annoyed just because he'd mentioned London. They couldn't send me out again, not this soon.

'Police escort,' Norton said as he strapped the spars together. 'Not my fault.'

'All I need,' I said, 'is a phone.'

'And the best of luck.'