It wasn’t very helpful. Jonty Hargrave had passed it on to Threadneedle, he said, but we hadn’t found it when we searched Threadneedle’s house. It could have been stolen; borrowed and not returned; sold to someone else in the animal-killing business or simply lost. I decided to have a drive east for a word with Jonty. He was in the Alice, clutching a hand of dominoes, opposite Jackdaw, his eternal rival, like the chess players in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. He’d enjoyed two years in the South of France, imbibing the local flavours, but given it up to spend the remainder of his days beating a candidate for the title of Village Idiot at a game of chance. I imagined a snapshot of him sitting in the sunshine on a tiled patio, still in his hacking jacket and cravat. A buxom gypsy lady leant over his shoulder to replenish his glass and the bougainvillea was in full blossom. ‘The gun,’ I said, twisting a chair round from the adjacent table and sitting down. ‘I need to know where it went.’ He downed the remainder of his pint with much smacking of the lips and plonked the empty glass on the table with a show of approval.
