Ferdinant Mount – I doff my cap to you, sir, for writing such a ripping yarn. If that sounds a bit plummy, forgive me. I have been reading The Pentecost Papers and am steeped in its language. If it sounds unladylike, I can only protest that I wasn’t reading it for long enough to lose my sense that women do more than waft about in red lipstick chatting up the wives of hedge fund managers. But enough about feminism – I am not too blue in the stockings to let the author’s flimsy female characters stop me enjoying a jolly good romp.

The novel begins – where else – on the golf course. Our narrator, Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent for a dying newspaper, is interrupted by the large, red-headed Timothy ‘Timbo’ Smith. When Dickie hits an ‘awkward little shot’, Timbo asks if he is feeling stiff. As it happens, Dickie has indeed been suffering such bad back pain – a tedious topic, he admits, and one his wife has banned at home – that when this relative stranger describes himself as a ‘healer’ and offers to have ‘a little go at it’, Dickie is desperate enough to agree. And it works. ‘How do you feel now, Dickie? A bit like after you’ve had a good wank?’ Timbo asks. Yes, agrees the narrator, ‘that was just what I had thought’. From then, despite a fair bit of eyebrow-raising from his wife, Dickie makes regular appointments with Timbo to temporarily cure his back, visiting him in the Mayfair office of a mysterious organisation where he seems to work as a security specialist, a ‘bottle of vino’ tucked under his arm as payment.

The two become something close to friends, so when Timbo asks if Dickie might ‘spare a couple of days to be my chauffeur, peaked cap not required’, he agrees. Timbo has tracked down the grandson of his grandfather’s war buddy and wants to deliver a small tin containing a pocket