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your driving licence with you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then perhaps you might let me see it. Sir.’
    To extract his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans Jack had to pull himself out of the cab. No bones broken, it seemed, though his head spun unpleasantly. He steadied himself against the side of the van, watching the policeman’s every move. It was a scene he’d played a dozen times in one TV series or another.
    After examining the licence, checking its details conscientiously against me Contract of Hire for the van, the constable began to enter it all up in his notebook. He took his time over it too, asking a few routine questions along the way, but showed no interest in the moths.
    ‘Now let’s get this straight, sir. You helped your friend move house.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Lugging furniture about can be thirsty work, specially on a warm day. She must have offered you a drink. Hit the vodka bottle, did you? A house-warming libation, you might say?’
    ‘I don’t drink vodka.’
    ‘Oh? I’d have taken you for a vodka-and-tonic type.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘That shows how wrong one can be. But we’ll just check if you don’t mind. Sir.’ He fetched his breathalyser kit from the panda and instructed Jack to blow into the little tube. ‘A long steady breath. I’ll tell you when to stop.’
    The result was negative. Obviously. His tongue had been hanging out all day but all Ginny had offered was tea, brewed on her camping stove.
    The policeman seemed disconcerted, to say the least. Muttering under his breath about having the machine overhauled the moment he got back, he packed it away, then enquired if Jack felt up to driving after that knock on the head.
    ‘I feel fine. But you haven’t asked about the moths.’
    ‘Ah, the moths!’
    ‘You can see on the road where the tyres ran over them. Look here… and here…’
    He pointed to what remained of their fat, sausage-like bodies, squashed flat against the tar together with fragments of their wings, as delicate as ash, which disintegrated at a touch. The policeman squatted down to examine them.
    ‘Must be the weather,’ he mused philosophically when he stood up again. ‘Brings out a lot of insects, this weather. They like the warmth, d’you see?’
    ‘I think I heard one squealing like a bat.’ Jack tried to recall those last seconds before the crash.
    ‘Could have been your brakes.’
    ‘I remember them coming at me, trying to settle over my eyes, almost as though they deliberately wanted toblind me. It was an odd experience, I can tell you.’
    The policeman shook his head doubtfully. ‘Can’t say it would stand up in court, not that story. Not as a defence for losing control of the vehicle. Wasps might, but moths? Never.’
    ‘Court? Is there any question of –?’
    ‘You can set your mind at ease, sir. Nobody was hurt. Nothing on the breath. The landowner might claim something for damage to his tree, but otherwise…’ He shrugged, then turned his attention to the van. ‘Bodywork’s taken some punishment. Couple of bad dents here. But you should be able to get home all right. You’ve been lucky.’
    ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’
    Something in his voice must have alerted the policeman’s sense of duty. ‘If you’d like someone to give you the once-over our nearest hospital is fifteen miles from here in Lingford, but we’ve a doctor in the village who may be able to help.’
    That would be Ginny’s brother-in-law, Jack thought. He said he was okay. A couple of paracetamol before creeping into his lonely bed, that’s all he needed. Certainly no doctor. But those moths –
    ‘The size of them,’ he persisted. ‘Surely you don’t often get them that big?’
    ‘Discover something new every day, that’s the countryside for you. Not like London down here. Now that cottage your friend’s bought – that would be straight through the village, third lane on the left after you pass the Plough?’
    ‘Let me guess. You’ve got second