"In a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea," said Auberon Quin, "there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been to Wimbledon.

His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange look in his eyes.

But one day they repented their neglect, for they heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing patent leather boots.

As it happened, it turned out not to be the minister at all.

But in the dead man's pocket there was a return ticket to Maidstone." There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens.