Greg slumped into the passenger seat, and remembered to pull his safety belt across. "I suppose I ought to sniff around the rest of the village," he said reluctantly. "Make sure there aren't any premier-grade apparatchiks lurking around in dark corners."

"That is one of the things we came here to get away from." She swung the EMC Ranger round the triangular junction outside the church, and headed back the way they came. "You and I, we've done our bit for this country."

"So now we leave it to the Inquisitors?"

Eleanor grunted in disgust.

They met Corry Furness on the edge of the village. Eleanor stopped the Ranger and lowered her window to tell him it was all right to use his bike again.

"Mr Collister wasn't one of them, was he?" Corry asked.

"No," Greg said.

Corry's face lit with a smile. "I told you." He pedalled off down the avenue of dead trees with their lacework of vines and harlequin flowers.

Greg watched him in the mud-splattered wing mirror, envying the lad's world view. Everything black and white, truth or lie. So simple.

Eleanor drove towards the farm at half the speed she'd used on the way in, suspension rocking them lightly as the wheels juddered over the skewed surface. The clouds on the southern horizon were starting to thicken.

"You'll have to give me a hand to get the lime saplings into the barn when we get back," Greg said. He was watching the way the loose vine tendrils at the top of the trees were stirring. "I'll never get them planted before the storm now."

"Sure. I've nearly got the undercoat finished on all the firstfloor windows,"

"That's something. It's going to be Monday before I'm through with the saplings. After this downpour it'll be too wet to get into the field for the next couple of days, and then we'll have to spend Sunday clearing up, no doubt."