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experience.”
    La looked at the man standing in front of her, a tall, well-built man with sandy-coloured hair and a bemused expression. She wondered whether she had misinterpreted the evidence. But the wood had been splintered on the outside; if you pushed on the door from the outside, it would have broken on the inner part of the jamb.
    The policeman frowned. “Which way does the door swing? Out or in?”
    La thought for a moment. She could not answer, and thepoliceman’s frown became a tolerant smile. “You see? Sometimes things look black and they’re really white. And the other way round.” He paused, watching the effect of his remark on her. He was one of those men who treated women with well-meaning condescension, thought La. She had encountered them first in Cambridge, amongst the undergraduates who were the products of all-boys schools, whose only contact with women had been with their mothers or domestic staff. And there had been college fellows and professors, too, who had taken the same approach, and appeared vaguely irritated that the times required of them to engage intellectually with women.
    There was a silence. It made more sense for the door to have been forced from outside; otherwise … the thought appalled her. If it had been forced from inside that would have been because she had locked somebody up in the house when she had gone to see Mrs. Agg. So the intruder, the person who had moved the tea caddy, would have been hiding in the house and then, finding himself locked in, would have had to force the door to get out.
    “I shall come and take a look,” said the policeman. “I’d be obliged if you would take me in your car. Otherwise I should have to ride my bike and that would take a little while.”
    “Of course.”
    In the car, La asked him whether there had been burglaries in the district. “I can count on the fingers of thishand,” he said, raising his right hand, “the number of burglaries we’ve had in the last eight years, since I came to this job. And most of those were carried out by Ed Stanton over at Stradishall.” He gazed out of the window and laughed; he was relaxed now in her company, and La was warming to him.
    “Ed left the district after the last one,” the policeman went on. “He was roughed up by the victim’s son, who happened to be a boxer. That sorted him out. That, and his missus giving him his marching orders. Burglars are usually cowards, in my experience. Say ‘boo’ to them and they turn and run. That’s where women go wrong, in my view.”
    La was puzzled. “How do women go wrong?”
    The policeman looked straight ahead at the road. They were almost there, and perhaps, thought La, it was the wrong time to get involved in a debate about what women did or did not do; men thought they knew, but how strange that their view of what women did was often so different from the view held by women, who did it. He continued, “Burglars are scared of people who aren’t scared of them. That’s human nature, isn’t it? But if you’re scared of burglars, then they sense it, like animals do. You know how a dog will push its luck if it can tell that a person is frightened of it? Have you seen that?”
    La nodded. They were on the edge of her village now, and she slowed the Austin down.
    “Well,” said the policeman, “if women stood up to burglars, then they’d back down. Scarper. Burglars have mothers, you see. No burglar likes getting a tongue-lashing from his mum.”
    She had to laugh, and he laughed, too. Then, in a few moments, they arrived, and La pulled the car off the road onto the drive. The gravel was vocal underneath the tyres of the car, a crunching sound, like waves breaking, thought La.
    “So this is where you live,” said the policeman. “Some people by the name of Stone own this place, I understand.”
    “My husband’s parents,” La began. She could tell, as she spoke, what he was thinking. “He lives in France now, my husband. It’s just