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railways. The station at which Fen had arrived consequently stands, futile and alone, at a place from which no human dwelling is even visible, and though amended laws would now permit the railway to carry out its original project, it has long since lost interest in the matter.
    In the normal way Fen would have made Sanford Morvel his headquarters, since it is admittedly the central point of the constituency. But he had entered the political arena cavalierly and late, to find the housing shortage in Sanford Morvel so acute that neither a committee room nor a bedroom could be found for him. He had therefore been obliged to choose between Sanford Angelorum and a slum-like place, twelve miles to the north of Sanford Morvel, named Peek. Peek, an affair of mean, grey, semi-detached houses, sprang up in the eighteen-fifties as a result of the discovery of a seam of inferior coal. It declined, some twenty years later, as a result of the working out of that seam, which to the irritation of those who had financed it proved to be minute. The mining community, for which Peek had been built, departed; the more thriftless elements of the district took over and Peek, its raison d’être gone, decayed with startling rapidity.
    Of all this Fen had deviously apprised himself. Peek, for his purposes, was clearly impossible. And, surveying Sanford Angelorum in the clear summer light, he was glad he had elected to stay in that charming, unpretentious village.
    He admired it as he walked along the main street in the direction opposite to that of the railway station. Like most such places, it was assembled, he saw, round the church, a medium good example of the decorated style, whose ornamental conceits, being carved in red sandstone, were a good deal blurred by weathering. The Rectory, built large for an age more opulent and more philoprogenitive than this, adjoined it. There were one or two shops; there was a green with a war memorial; there was a row of delightful eighteenth-century cottages; there was, obstinately Victorian, ‘The Fish Inn’.
    Outside the gate of one of the cottages Fen saw Diana talking earnestly to a young man in shabby tweeds. She waved to him, but her conversation seemed engrossing, and he did not venture to interrupt it.
    Before long he reached the edge of the village and came to a spot which he suspected might be the scene of Mrs Hennessy’s encounter on the previous evening. Resisting the temptation to root about for traces of the lunatic, he passed on, and soon arrived at a miniature cross-roads, with a sign-post which added to its total illegibility the even graver defect of pointing in no particular direction.
    After some hesitation he entered the lane on the left.
    It was the height of summer. The hips of the dog-rose were ripe in the hedges. Barley was being cut, flecked with the scarlet of poppies. Copper butterflies roamed fragile as thistledown through the hot air. Spiders’ webs draped the twigs and leaves. In the distance a heat haze was forming, but a line of white smoke enabled you to follow the progress of a distant train.
    Fen began to walk more briskly. The country, a place with which he was not normally infatuated, seemed particularly winning today. . . .
    But he had not gone a hundred yards before a startling spectacle halted him in his tracks.

CHAPTER 4
    H E had come to a five-barred gate giving access to a large, irregularly-shaped field. Its hedges were mainly of thorn. It had a dank-looking pond – much diminished now by the lack of rain – in the middle of it. And at the pond’s margin a duck, its snow-white plumage somewhat marred by the green slime which clung to its underside, was hobbling slowly about.
    But it was not these things that had caught Fen’s attention. It was a man who was entering the field through a gap on the far side.
    He was short, stout, harassed-looking, middle-aged. He wore gloves, a reefer jacket inside out, and pale purple