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blaming yourself, about the boy’s death, I hope, eh? No need to, my dear fellow. Rrrm. Dangerous to brood about it, though. A lonely man’s an easy target for the devil. Well, come over and see me soon. Magnificent crop of raspberries this year. Made a pig of myself yesterday. Goodbye.’
    He’s as sharp as a needle, that old boy. That rambling, abrupt stage-military idiom is all my eye. He probably adopted it as camouflage from behind which he could surprise and rout his less talented colleagues, or just in self-defence. ‘You start quarrelling with yourself’, not yet, at any rate. I’ve got another quarrel on hand, and bigger game to hunt than tigers or anonymous letter-writers.

5 July
    ANOTHER ANONYMOUS LETTER this morning. Very disagreeable. I cannot have this person distracting my attention, just when I most need to concentrate on the main business. Yet I feel unwilling to put the matter into the hands of the police. I feel that, if I knew who it was, I should stop worrying about these stupid little pinpricks. Will go to bed early tonight and set my alarm for 4 a.m. That ought to be early enough. Then I’ll drive in to Kemble and catch the breakfast train to London. Have arranged to lunch with Holt, my publisher.

6 July
    NO LUCK THIS morning. The anonymous ill-wisher failed to put in an appearance. A good day in London, though. I told Holt I wanted to lay my new detective novel in a film studio. He gave me an introduction to a chap called Callaghan, who is something or other in British Regal Films Inc – the company that Lena Lawson works for. Holt was mildly facetious about my beard, which is now at the awkward age – a kind of raw and gawkish stubble. Told him, equivocally, that it was for purposes of disguise. Since I should be looking over the studio in the character of Felix Lane, and might have to hang about there quite a lot for material, I didn’t want to risk being recognised as Frank Cairnes. I might, after all, run into some acquaintance of my Oxford or civil service days. Holt lapped it all up, looking at me in the slightly worried, proprietary way that publishers do look at their more successful authors – as though one were a temperamental performing animal which might any moment begin to sulk or try to escape from their circus.
    I’ll get a bit of sleep now. The alarm is set for 4 a.m. again. I wonder what I’ll find in the net.

8 July
    NO LUCK YESTERDAY . But this morning the stinging fly walked into the parlour. And what a fly! – grey, draggled, winter-sleepy. Ugh. I’d speculated quite a lot, off and on, who could be the author of those letters. They’re usually written either by subnormal illiterates (which mine obviously weren’t) or by respected, ‘respectable’ people with a hidden kink. I’d thought of the vicar, the schoolmaster, the post mistress – even Peters and General Shrivenham; that’s the detective writer’s mentality – choose the most unlikely person. Of course, quite rightly and properly, it turned out to be the most obvious one.
    The latch of the garden gate clicked faintly just after four thirty this morning. In the dim, shabby light I saw a figure coming up the path. It moved slowly at first, indecisively, as though plucking up courage or fearful of discovery, then it broke into a curious little sort of rapid, consequential trot, like the gait of a kitten carrying a mouse.
    I could see now it was a woman, and it looked remarkably like Mrs Teague.
    I hurried downstairs. I’d left the front door unlocked, and as the envelope dropped into the letter box I flung the door open. It was not Mrs Teague at all. It was Mrs Anderson. I might have guessed. That day she avoided me in the street, her widowhood and lonely life, her starved maternal instinct that had been poured out upon Martie. She was such a quiet, harmless, nondescript old thing – I’d never thought about her at all.
    There was a very painful scene. I said some wounding things, I’m afraid.