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he’d be glad to get away – anywhere. He’s in a pretty nervous state, sir.’
    â€˜What about?’
    â€˜A spot of girl trouble, I expect. And desk fatigue.’
    â€˜Oh, I can understand desk fatigue. We’ll see what we can do for him.’
    â€˜I am a little anxious about him.’
    â€˜I promise you I’ll bear him in mind, Castle. By the way, this visit of Muller’s is strictly secret. You know how we like to make our little boxes watertight. This has got to be your personal box. I haven’t even told Watson. And you shouldn’t tell Davis.’

CHAPTER II
    I N the second week of October Sam was still officially in quarantine. There had been no complication, so one less danger menaced his future – that future which always appeared to Castle as an unpredictable ambush. Walking down the High Street on a Sunday morning he felt a sudden desire to give a kind of thanks, if it was only to a myth, that Sam was safe, so he took himself in, for a few minutes, to the back of the parish church. The service was nearly at an end and the congregation of the well-dressed, the middle-aged and the old were standing at attention, as they sang with a kind of defiance, as though they inwardly doubted the facts, ‘There is a green hill far away, without a city wall.’ The simple precise words, with the single tache of colour, reminded Castle of the local background so often to be found in primitive paintings. The city wall was like the ruins of the keep beyond the station, and up the green hillside of the Common, on top of the abandoned rifle butts, had once stood a tall post on which a man could have been hanged. For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief – it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah’s child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader’s helmet which hung on a pillar, and he Was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page – ‘Child’s Body Found in Wood’.
    In the afternoon he took Sam and Buller for a walk across the Common, leaving Sarah to sleep. He would have liked to leave Buller behind, but his angry protest would have wakened Sarah, so he comforted himself with the thought that Buller was unlikely to find a cat astray on the Common. The fear was always there since one summer three years before, when providence played an ill trick by providing suddenly a picnic party among the beech woods who had brought with them an expensive cat with a blue collar round its neck on a scarlet silk leash. The cat – a Siamese – had not even time to give one cry of anger or pain before Buller snapped its back and tossed the corpse over his shoulder like a man loading a sack on to a lorry. Then he had trotted attentively away between the trees, turning his head this way and that – where there was one cat there ought surely to be another – and Castle was left to face alone the angry and grief-stricken picnickers.
    In October however picnickers were unlikely. All the same Castle waited till the sun had nearly set and he kept Buller on his chain all the way down King’s Road past the police station at the corner of the High Street. Once beyond the canal and the railway bridge and the new houses (they had been there for a quarter of a century, but anything which had not existed when he was a boy seemed new to Castle), he let Buller loose, and immediately, like a well-trained dog, Buller splayed out and dropped his crotte on the edge of the path, taking his time. The eyes stared ahead, inward-looking. Only on these sanitary occasions did Buller seem a dog of intelligence. Castle did not like Buller – he had bought him for a purpose,