A Winter Vignette T he park was a patch of lawn fenced in by black iron railings and a privet hedge. It was a green oasis sandwiched between three rows of mews houses in a quiet housing estate. The people who lived there were mostly childless, so few kids at play disturbed the neat rows of chrysanthemums, carnations and hollyhocks. Every morning, the girl in the window used to crank up her recliner bed. She would get into the wheelchair parked by her bedside and wheel herself to the big bay window at the end of her bedroom. The park below was as desolate as a cemetery in the pale fog of a cold December morning. At 7 o’clock sharp, the man from the Central Reserve Police Force wheeled his battered old bicycle down the gravel path from the main gate. On this morning, like so many others, he propped his locked bike against a tree and went into the gardener’s shed. The policeman came out a few minutes later, wearing a tracksuit with the letters CRPF stenciled o...