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of these household effects you’re holding includes some old stereo equipment?”
    â€œCan’t help you there, I’m afraid. But if you have any items in storage with Rapid ’n’ Reliant they’ll show up on the C47, of which you should have a copy. It’s a yellow flimsy.”
    Mr. Ransome started to explain why he didn’t have a flimsy but Christine cut him short.
    â€œI wouldn’t know that, would I, because I’m in Newport Pagnell? This is the office. The storage depot is in Aylesbury. You can be anywhere nowadays. It’s computers. Actually the person who could help you at Aylesbury is Martin but I happen to know he’s out on a job most of today.”
    â€œI wonder whether I ought to go down to Aylesbury,” Mr. Ransome said, “just to see if there’s anything there.”
    Christine was unenthusiastic. “I can’t actually stop you,” she said, “only they don’t have any facilities for visitors. It’s not like a kennels,” she added inexplicably.
    Mr. Ransome having told her the storage firm was in a business park, Mrs. Ransome, who was not familiar with the genre, imagined it situated in a setting agreeably pastoral, a park that was indeed a park and attached to some more or less stately home, now sensitively adapted to modern requirements; the estate dotted with workshops possibly; offices nestling discreetly in trees. At the hub of this center of enterprise she pictured a country house where tall women with folders strode along terraces, typists busied themselves in gilded saloons beneath painted ceilings, a vision that, had she thought to trace it back, she would have found to have derived from those war films where French châteaux taken over by the German High Command bustle with new life on the eve of D-Day.
    It was as well she didn’t share these romantic expectations with Mr. Ransome who, the secretary of several companies and thus acquainted with the reality, would have given them short shrift.
    It was only when she found herself being driven round a bleak treeless ring road lined with small factories and surrounded by concrete and rough grass that Mrs. Ransome began to revise her expectations.
    â€œIt doesn’t look very countrified,” Mrs. Ransome said.
    â€œWhy should it?” said Mr. Ransome, about to turn in at some un-Palladian metal gates.
    â€œThis is it,” said Mrs. Ransome, looking at the letter.
    The gates were set in a seven-foot-high fence topped with an oblique pelmet of barbed wire so that the place looked less like a park than a prison. Fixed to an empty pillbox was a metal diagram, painted in yellow and blue, showing the whereabouts of the various firms on the estate. Mr. Ransome got out to look for Unit 14.
    â€œYou are here,” said an arrow, only someone had inserted at the tip of the arrow a pair of crudely drawn buttocks.
    Unit 14 appeared to be a few hundred yards inside the perimeter, just about where, had the buttocks been drawn to scale, the navel might have been. Mr. Ransome got back in the car and drove slowly on in the gathering dusk until he came to a broad low hangarlike building with double sliding doors, painted red and bare of all identification except for a warning that guard dogs patrolled. There were no other cars and no sign of anybody about.
    Mr. Ransome pulled at the sliding door, not expecting to find it open. Nor was it.
    â€œIt’s locked,” said Mrs. Ransome.
    â€œYou don’t say,” Mr. Ransome muttered under his breath, and struck out round the side of the building, followed more slowly by Mrs. Ransome, picking her way uncertainly over the rubble and clinkers and patches of scrubby grass. Mr. Ransome felt his shoe skid on something.
    â€œMind the dog dirt,” said Mrs. Ransome. “It’s all over this grass.” Steps led down to a basement door. Mr. Ransome tried this too. It was also locked, a boiler room