James Benson had an astute eye for a good deal, or a shapely leg. Shrewd appreciations of circumstances were his benchmarks. He wasn't right all the time but he accepted that as a natural part of life. The important thing to him, as he grew older, was being rarely, if ever, badly wrong. The facts were that he had been hugely unobservant and grievously wrong about diabolical events and characters close to him, and his life had run parallel to a monstrous evil he had not even suspected.