'I must have got it wrong,' I said. 'I noticed you'd put on weight, and thought it must be because you'd cut out the jogging.'

'You're a bloody shit-stirrer,' said Dicky. 'Do you enjoy making mischief? Is that it?'

'There's no need to get upset, Dicky,' I said, trying to look pained.

'I'll show you who is out of condition. I'll show you who is puffing and collapsing. Come on, Bernard, it's no more than three miles.'

'You start. I'll go upstairs and put on my other shoes,' I said. My accusations about his lack of exercise had aroused something in Dicky's metabolism, for he began running on the spot, and punching the air around him to fell imaginary assailants.

'You'd better hurry,' he called and, with no further prompting, went jogging across the cobbled courtyard through the gate and along the path that led through the woods. I watched him slow as he entered the meadow that was now knee-high with dead ferns and weeds. They produced a crisp puffing sound as Dicky jogged through them. The impression of a choo-choo train was completed by the white vapor his breath left on the cold air.

I went inside the house to the kitchen. There was no one in evidence. I helped myself to a cup of warm coffee and toasted a slice of dark bread before following Dicky down the forest path at a leisurely pace. There were starlings, blackbirds and sparrows foraging for food. I understood their shrill cries; being without food in Poland was a grim plight. I was moved enough to toss a few bite-sized fragments of my breakfast bread to them, and decided that if I started to believe in reincarnation I'd go for something migratory.

'My God, where have you been?' Dicky said when I got to him. He had joined some men standing around looking at a shallow ditch. It was where they had been digging when we passed them the previous day. Accompanying the men there was a brown shaggy-haired mongrel dog; presumably it was Basilisk, the noted truffle-hound. It was sniffing at Dicky's running shoes that were now caked in mud.

'I took it easy; it was icy,' I explained.

'I know, I know,' agreed Dicky, gently kicking the dog's nose aside. 'I slipped on a patch of it near the stream. I went full-length and hurt my back. But still I was here half an hour before you.'

'It's just as well that one of us remains uninjured,' I said.

'Very droll,' said Dicky. Then, turning his dissatisfaction upon the laborers, he said: 'They say they got a part of a leg yesterday — not an arm, the old man got it wrong — but it's gone off to the police station.'

'What kind of leg?' I kicked at the ground. Here under the trees where no sunlight ever came, it was hard, very hard. 'What kind of leg?' Dicky scoffed. 'How many kinds are there? Left and right?' He coughed. His exertions seemed to have exhausted him and now he stood arms akimbo and breathed in and out slowly and deliberately, smiling fixedly while he did it, like those girls who sell exercise machines on television.

'Young? Old? Decomposing? Mall? Short? Hairy? Smooth?'

'How do I know?' said Dicky, abandoning his breathing exercises. 'It's gone to the police.'

I turned to the men and tried my inadequate Polish on them but got only vague answers. Their attitude to the dismembered corpse was not unlike Dicky's; a leg was a leg.

'You didn't change your shoes,' said Dicky accusingly. 'No,' I admitted. 'I only brought the pair I'm wearing.'

'You said you were going to change.'

'I forgot. I'd not brought spares.'

'You're a bloody scrimshanker,' said Dicky.

I didn't deny it. I singled out the German-speaking Blackbeard and said: 'Show me the leg.' Before he could start his excuses I added, 'These are human remains. I'll bring the priest. If you try to prevent me arranging proper Christian burial I'll see you damned in hell.'

He stared at me angrily. After a moment in which we stood motionless he pointed to a battered old wooden box. I pulled the top off it to see a shoe, a wrinkled sock and a grotesque hunk of chewed flesh that was undoubtedly a leg.

'The dogs got it,' explained Blackbeard. I glanced at the sleepy Basilisk. 'Not this one . . . dogs from the village. They run wild in packs at night.'

I leaned over to see the well-chewed piece of flesh the men had discovered. It was chafed and grazed as if it had been scraped with a wire brush. Chunks of flesh were bitten away deeply enough to reveal the tibia bone. The big toe had been entirely torn off, leaving some of the small neighboring gray bones visible. The four other toes were intact, and complete with toenails. I reached into the box and turned the remains over to see where it had been detached from the upper leg. Surrounding the rounded stump of the bone there was a mop-like mess of ligaments, cartilage and tendon. 'It's a human leg all right,' I said, carefully replacing it in the box. 'And it looks like the dogs made a good meal of it.'

'Uggh!' said Dicky. 'How repulsive.'

I picked up the shoe. Despite being damaged it was an Oxford brogue of unmistakably English origin. It was the expensive handmade sort of shoe that George Kosinski liked, and the leather had a patina that comes when shoes are carefully preserved by servants, as George's shoes were. Such shoes, in such condition, were not commonly to be found in Poland even on the feet of the most affluent. The sock was silk, and although I couldn't decipher all the markings, there was enough to establish that it was English too.

'George Kosinski?' said Dicky.

'It looks like it,' I said as I leaned over to estimate the size of the shoe against the foot.

'You don't seem very surprised.'

'What do you want me to do . . . ? No. In fact, someone in Warsaw told me he had been killed.'

'In Warsaw? Why don't you bloody well confide in me?' said Dicky in exasperation.

'You don't want me to repeat every last stupid unlikely rumor I hear, do you?'

'How did you know?' Dicky turned to glance at the men. 'That these buggers still had it, I mean. They told me the police had collected it.'

'The police?' I said. 'You think the police would have come out here, parceled up a bloodstained section of cadaver, said thank-you, and then gone quietly back to the barracks to think about it? In this part of the world, Dicky, the cops come complete with armored cars and assault weapons. Fresh human remains dug up out here in the sticks would have had them interrogating everyone in the house. We would have been paraded in our nightclothes in the courtyard, while search and arrest teams tore up the floorboards and kicked shit out of the servants.'

'Yes, yes, yes, you're right.'

'That's why no one sends for the bastards. That's why I knew they were still thinking about what to do with this.' I tossed the shoe and the sock into the box with the severed leg, and then put the lid on it. I looked round and found the diggers looking at me.

'Where did you dig it from?' I asked them.

'That's the problem,' said Blackbeard. 'The dogs had it here, under the beech tree. It could have come from anywhere. It could have come from miles away.'

'So why are you digging here?'

'The ground was disturbed. Shall we stop digging?'

I wasn't going to fall for that one. 'No, keep digging. We'll keep it to ourselves,' I suggested. 'Tell no one. When Mr. Stefan returns he'll know what to do.'

This wait-and-see solution appealed to the men. They nodded and Blackbeard picked up the wooden box and placed it further back in the darkness of the forest.

'Are you jogging back for lunch?' I asked Dicky.

'Can't you see I've hurt my back?'

'We'll walk then,' I said. 'I'll show you the ruins of the generator house and traces of what must be the German fortified lines from the Tannenberg battle in 1914.'

'Tannenberg?' said Dicky doubtfully.