‘I guess what we oughta do,’ he murmured playfully, ‘is shake down that old moon.’

The Forest was laid out before them: darkening storybook hills, bearded with bracken. There were few trees — misleadingly, it had been named forest in the medieval sense of a place for hunting. Betty wondered how much of that still went on: the lamping of hares, the baiting of badgers. Maybe some night Robin would be standing up here and would see a party of silent men with guns and dogs. And then the shit would fly.

‘So, uh, how would you…’ Robin straightened up, slapping moss from his hands, ‘… how would you feel about that?’

‘You mean now, don’t you?’ With both hands, Betty pushed back her wild, blonde hair. She backed away from the edge, which had got her thinking about the death of Major Wilshire. Down below, about six feet out from the base of the tower, two flat tombstones had been exposed beneath a bush blasted back by the gales. That was probably where he’d fallen. She shivered. ‘You actually mean out here?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’ He wore his orange fleece and his ludicrous flattened fez-thing with tiny mirrors around the side. The way Betty saw it, Robin Thorogood, having grown up in America, had yet to develop a functioning sense of the absurd.

‘Why not?’ Betty didn’t remember exactly when ‘shaking down the moon’ had become his personal euphemism for sex, but she didn’t altogether care for the term. ‘Because this is, you know, January?’

‘We could bring up blankets.’ Robin did his abandoned puppy face.

Which no longer worked on Betty. ‘Mother of God, I bet it’s not even safe! Look at the floor… the walls! We wind up down in the bloody belfry, in a cloud of plaster dust, with multiple fractures, what happens then?’