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fancy a walk through the woods.’
    The cottage, brick-built and well proportioned, was set back from the stream and, with his hand on the wooden gate, Madden paused to admire the neat garden in front, whose principal showpiece was a pair of rose beds planted on either side of the path leading up to the front door. Formerly occupied by a widow named Granny Meacham, a near-mythical figure thought by generations of village children to be a witch, it was now the home of a personage no less terrifying (or so Helen averred): none other than Angus Sinclair, lately a chief inspector with theMetropolitan Police in London and a man with a string of notorious murder investigations behind him.
    â€˜Your name is spoken in whispers in the village, Angus,’ Helen had teased him. ‘You are held in awe. Wicked children are warned by their mothers that if they’re not good, the chief inspector will come to call.’
    A detective himself in his younger days, Madden had learned his trade under Sinclair’s eye and, despite differences of age and rank – and even after he had left the force to become a farmer – the two had remained friends; so much so in fact that when the latter had retired from his post at the end of the war he had elected to make his home in Highfield and, at Helen’s urging, had bought the vacant Meacham cottage, which was near to the Maddens’ own house.
    With its occupant away at the moment – he was spending three weeks with his sister in Aberdeen – Madden had volunteered to see that Sinclair’s roses were kept watered and, after parting from George Burrows, he had walked down to the bottom of his land, crossed by a set of stepping stones the stream that ran there and continued along a path bordering the rivulet until he reached the cottage.
    Ten minutes spent with a watering can were enough to see the job done and, having cast a quick eye on the shuttered windows of the cottage to see that all was in order there, Madden resumed his walk home, choosing a roundabout route, however, turning his back on the stream and climbing the ridge until he struck a familiar path, one he had walked many times, but so overgrown now that in parts he had to pick his way through the overhanging branches of bramble and holly. He was just negotiating one such barrier when a movement in the ferns clustered about the trees below him caught his eye and he froze; then he sank silently to his haunches. As he watched, the handsome red head of a fox appeared, ears pricked forward. It was a vixen whose presence in the woods he had noted previously.She had a dead rabbit in her jaws and stood motionless, sniffing the air for long seconds, before emerging fully into the small clearing in front, followed by three cubs that tracked their mother, nose-to-tail, across the leaf-strewn ground. In a moment all four had vanished behind the thick trunk of a horse chestnut. Madden expelled his breath in a sigh and stood up. A countryman at heart, he had never felt at home in the city despite his years with the Met and, at moments such as these, with the last rays of the evening sun piercing the dark greenery above him like golden spears and the deep, rich scent of the woods filling his nostrils, he was not above counting his blessings, which seemed many to him.
    Twilight had fallen by the time he unlatched the gate at the bottom of the garden, and as he walked up the long lawn from the orchard he was greeted by the baying notes of a basset hound; and, seconds later, by the beast itself as it came galloping down the lawn to meet him.
    â€˜For heaven’s sake, Hamish – don’t you know me yet?’
    A chance acquisition, the animal had belonged to a patient of Helen’s who had died the previous winter, childless and without close relations. Discovering that the dog was destined for the Guildford pound, Helen had decided to adopt it instead, and its good-natured, albeit noisy presence was now a