San Juan was already on the map when he found it: both literally and figuratively—lying off the north-west coast of Italy and having a prominent place on the tourist itineraries of all the more enterprising travel bureaux. In an earlier novel,* recounting the events that befell Inspector Cockrill there, several summers before the present narrative (Inspector Cockrill being Cousin Hat’s brother) it has been described as follows: “The island of San Juan el Pirata lies some twenty kilometres off the coast of Tuscany, about level with the topmost tip of Corsica, in the Ligurian Sea. It is perhaps seven or eight miles across† and largely composed of volcanic upheavals of rock: a republic, self-contained, self-controlled, self-supporting, with a tiny parliament and a tiny police force and a quite remarkably tiny conscience in regard to its obligations to the rest of society: but with a traditionally enormous Hereditary Grand Duke. Juan the Pirate appropriated his foothold there two hundred years ago.
