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admiration.
    ‘Your wife enjoyed romantic fiction, did she, sir?’
    ‘Enjoyed? No,’ I said. ‘Not as far as I know.’
    We both turned again to look at the body – a few moments ago a nameless thing found by a dog, now Geraldine Tressider. A real person again with a unique identity, a bank account, a national insurance number, an ex-husband. (She currently had no credit cards, passport or driving licence, but she probably wouldn’t be needing them.) I wanted to stroke the forehead, to smooth away the pain as one does, I would imagine, with a sick child. But of course, I didn’t do any such thing. We Tressiders don’t.
    ‘How long had she been there?’ I asked.
    ‘We still have to wait for the pathologist’s report, but we think just a couple of nights – which fits with when her car was left at West Wittering.’
    Or to put it another way, when I was in France. ‘Excellent,’ I said.
    ‘Excellent?’
    ‘I mean, I assume that is all for the moment?’
    ‘Just one or two more questions, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘But not here.’ He nodded in the direction of the body. I doubted that she would either hear or interrupt, but he was still calling me ‘sir’ and I reckoned that the questions would not be too difficult to handle. Accordingly I allowed myself to be led out of the gleaming room and back along the corridor to the world of the living.
    ‘A man walking his dog’ – the phrase kept recurring to me in the taxi back to Greypoint House. It always brings a very clear picture to my mind. The man is dressed in a tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers and heavy brown brogues. He has a small, carefully trimmed moustache and quite possibly a peaked cap. The dog is quite large – an English setter or a pointer. It capers around, tail wagging, ears flopping stupidly, then dives into some bushes. Suddenly there is frantic barking. The man frowns and calls the dog. ‘Jess! Come here!’ There is no response. ‘Jess, come!’
    He turns and starts to stride purposefully towards the bushes, little suspecting what is to follow.
    To be quite honest, I too, at that point, had little idea of what would happen next.

Five
    My father spent his life perfecting failure.
    I imagine that, in his youth, his ambition must have been a chair in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford or Cambridge. By the time I was old enough to be aware of him as a possessor of ambitions, he had considerably lowered his sights to a lecturership at one of the new universities that were then springing up. He faced the problem however that, even for one of these quite plentiful appointments, he would require published work. But, at the same time, no reputable journal was likely to publish his papers unless he had a university post or some other evidence of academic credibility. While he was trying to see a way round this little difficulty, he taught English at a local state secondary school.
    There he blighted many A-level prospects by insisting that all of his pupils received a thorough grounding in Beowulf before he was prepared to introduce them to other texts that merely happened to be part of the curriculum. It is perhaps surprising how long the school was willing to tolerate this eccentricity. It took four or five years before he was relegated to teaching the lower forms, where it was felt he could not inflict any significant damage on young minds. Nevertheless, several generations of bemused first and second formers still had to endure Widsith, Deor, The Ruin, The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon as their introduction to secondary school English.
    I can still see him quite clearly (because for one excruciating term I was in a class that he taught), his tall frame perched precariously on the edge of his desk, his glasses balanced equally precariously on the end of his nose, his book held stiffly in front of him, declaiming verse.
    I dwelt with Franks, with Frisians and among Frumptings the Rugians I knew, and the Gloms and Rome-Welsh.
    It was from