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drove with care, and we did at last pull up in a semicircular drive outside their front door. Greg fortunately still had the house keys in his pocket, and I didn’t think it was exactly the moment to speculate aloud as to whether the thieves had acted on the knowledge they must have found in their possession and come to rob and destroy while their victims were in the hospital.
    Telling the couple to stay where they were for a moment, I got Greg to give me the key, and fed it into the lock with some foreboding. All was dark and quiet inside, however, and when I felt around and found the light switch, all was also revealed as undisturbed.
    Feeling exposed to predators and half-ready for another attacking rush from the many surrounding bushes, I tried to hurry Greg and Vicky into the house without actually scaring them into paralysis, but they were agonizingly slow. It wasn’t until we were all safely inside with the door locked behind us that I began in any way to relax.
    They lived in a one-story house, most of the rooms flowing into each other without doors. No heating problems, of course, in South Florida. I went round checking that all the curtains were drawn, finding that the Wayfield taste in interior decorating ran to bright floral prints and mahogany.
    Returning to find them both sitting in the chairs nearest the front door, as if their legs could take them no farther—the life force at its lowest ebb—I suggested they make themselves a hot sweet drink before they went to bed. I, I said, would phone for a taxi.
    They looked at me in horror.
    “Oh no,” Vicky said, near to tears. “Stay here. Please do. I hate to say it, but I feel so shaky and shivery. And I’m scared. I can’t help it. They might come here. I’ve realized they must know our address.”
    Greg reached across for her hand and squeezed it. He didn’t actually say he was scared but he too begged me to stay.
    “You chased them off before,” Vicky said. “They won’t come if you’re here.”
    I thought with longing of a quiet bed in the airport hotel but saw I couldn’t abandon them to a panic-filled night. I’d known them for less than six hours: felt I’d been with them forever.
    “I’ll stay,” I said, “but it wasn’t I who chased them off. You,” I said to Vicky, “you did it yourself with that brilliant scream.”
    I remembered her as she looked then, a white-haired witch with scarlet raking nails and brilliant eyes, the personification of all the dark female powers that had petrified men from prehistory.
    “You were magnificent,” I said: frightening, I might have added, if I’d wanted to admit it.
    She brightened a little at the memory, a movement in the eyes. “It wasn’t just the scream,” she said. “It was the kick.”
    I asked in awakening understanding, “Where?”
    She looked down at her shoes, high-heeled with sharply pointed toes.
    “Where do you think?” she said. “I used to be a dancer too. High kicks. I was behind him. I aimed for just below the bottom of his spine. I was so angry I’d have killed him if I could.” She looked up, a smile somewhere near, full of revengeful satisfaction. “I was right on target. It was a doozie, hard and straight. He had his legs apart, balancing himself to clobber you.” She paused, then finished it with a nod. “I got him in the balls.”

2
     
     
     
     
    T wo nights later I flew to England. Across the aisle
    Vicky and Greg slumbered peacefully, blanketed to their chins, heads together, babes in the wood.
    “Peter, it wouldn’t hurt you to put your journey off for one more day,” Fred had said. “It isn’t as if you’ve got anything to go to, especially. And Greg and Vicky are badly shaken by all this, you know they are.”
    Fred was at his most earnest, almost evangelical in his desire to do good. Rather, in his desire that I should do good. I thought of a T-shirt I’d once owned that read, “Stress is what happens when your gut says NO and your mouth