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car revved distantly. I got up and padded over to draw a curtain. Margaret lives in a flat right in the town centre. You could just see the shops. Yellow street lights were being doused in strings. A bobby stretched an extravagant yawn on the cobbled shopwalk below, probably thinking of a warm bed.
    It was the hour when Chandler’s private eyes light cigarettes, but I don’t smoke. Just my luck. A clatter, suddenly muffled, told me Margaret was up and about. Val’s face misted into my mind. Her and Leckie. Tinker said because I’d taken up with Janie that time. Dear God. If I’m good at antiques, how come I am so bad at everything else?
    Margaret came in, smiling at my modesty as I hurtled back into bed. She left the light off.
    ‘You’ve forgotten I’m part of your Dark Past, Lovejoy.’
    ‘I’ve not,’ I said. ‘I remember you. Rapist.’
    ‘Cheek.’
    She put the tray on a chair and faced me from the bucket seat. Oho, I thought. Here it comes. Coffee and grill.
    ‘Leckie’s dead. Tinker phoned to tell you last night.’
    ‘That’s terrible,’ I said, even-voiced, taking the cup carefully. Margaret goes mad if you spill things.
    ‘A road accident.’ Her eyes never left my face.
    ‘Shame.’
    ‘Will the police be round?’ she asked, too casual.
    ‘Late as ever, I suppose.’ I can be as casual as her any day.
    She rose and twitched the curtains back for more light. ‘Are you in trouble, Lovejoy?’
    That’s all people ever say to me. I shrugged.
    ‘How did you know?’ she pressed.
    ‘Who says I did?’
    ‘Me.’
    I slurped her gunge and collared all four biscuits to avoid her challenge.
    ‘Do me a favour, Margaret,’ I said. ‘If Old Bill calls, act surprised.’
    ‘How did it happen, Lovejoy?’
    ‘When did Leckie leave the auction?’ First things first.
    ‘He was still there when I left.’
    ‘Talking to anybody?’
    ‘Loading his stuff, like always.’
    I’d forgotten that. Leckie took his purchases with him after auctions, the big stuff strapped under plastic covers on his roof rack. But he hadn’t put them in Val’s cran, and he didn’t have them when he’d crashed. The two tough nuts had gone off empty-handed. So where had Leckie been, between leaving Medham and hitting the tree? Answer: where his escritoire, book and doctor’s case now reposed. But where the hell was that? Val’s was his only cran.
    ‘Come back, Lovejoy.’ Margaret adjusted the curtains and put the lights on.
    ‘If you played your cards right,’ I said fluttering my eyelids temptingly, ‘you could have me. I’d not tell.’
    ‘Cheek,’ she said. ‘Breakfast in twenty minutes.’
    ‘Then drive me,’ I called after her. She paused to ask where. ‘Past a ditch I know,’ I said.
    Margaret went quiet at that, but finally said all right.
    St Osyth village has pretentions to class, but its recent marriages of styles show, so to speak. Bungalows designed in 1930 council meetings, hopeless wartime forgetfulness in architecture and latish fifties concrete styles are jumbled about the feet of great Tudor houses and this ancient Priory, making a posh shambles. People go there for holidays, presumably under sentence. There are lovely walls, though, flint and mortar. I got Margaret to take me to Leckie’s house. I knew where it was from dropping something off there for him once, but that was all. It’s a windmill. It’s not as daft as it sounds. It is set back from the road on an ancient mound, looking vaguely like a large dome-topped shed with a rectangular base and steps up to its one door. It only has two sails now, projecting at right angles to the main building. They never go round. Margaret tried dissuading me from going in but I wasn’t having any.
    ‘The police, Lovejoy,’ she tried soulfully.
    ‘You’ve missed the point, love,’ I said unpleasantly. ‘They’re not here.’
    I swarmed up the struts to the door, to save leaving any signs of me on the steps. Leckie’s alarm’s the same as