"What d'you think?" Ross asked eventually.
"It's obvious," I replied, "There must have been a hole in the rain clouds - probably one, oh - a foot by a foot and a half, what you saw ..."
But I didn't get chance to complete my smart response. He switched on his bedside lamp, and was sitting up looking at me, a furrow of concern on his forehead.
"Stop it! I know what I saw, I'm not making this up! It can't do that. Rain just can't leave a patch of dry!" Ross stood up, and walked slowly to the window, his hand near his mouth.
"When I knocked on Bill's door, I looked around, and this patch started to get spattered. By the time Bill actually opened the door, it was wet, just like all the rest of the yard."
"Did you tell Bill about it?" I asked, serious because of his agitation.
"No."
There was little further comment, it was late, and we both had to be up early next day. The business was forgotten, I gave it no more thought until perhaps two years later.
Part of my degree course was to interview people I knew, and try to create a documentary radio programme using my source material. As ever, I left it very late to attend to, and finally found my way to Bill's house in Victoria Street, armed with tape recorder and microphone.
After an initial wariness, and several times being told that I wasn't recording when in fact I was, Bill relaxed a little, and started into his stories. I knew many of these almost by heart, and was able to coax him into telling familiar ones. Including the one about the shooting incident.
When he was a boy, Bill's family had a dog, a mongrel - no one in Basford in the early 1920s could have had any other sort of dog. It had been his older brother's originally, but his brother joined up to fight the Kaiser, and never returned from Flanders, so the dog had to adapt to Bill as a new companion.
Here it came, the story I was seeking - Bill's stories of the dog, how he had been hunting, shooting rabbits, and the dog had gone with him, how the dog had been present when, on an estate nearby, Bill had shot at a rabbit moving in long grass, only to see a cat leap several feet into the air. To his horror, when the dead creature was found Bill realised that he had in fact shot dead the local vicar's cat. How the dog had won the day by the way it sat on the doorstep of the Parsonage as Bill made his explanation, how it looked more sorry than him. It had caught the eye of the vicar's wife, and had somehow softened the blow of the cat's death. The woman had commented, 'I could swear that dog is in mourning for our cat. If a dog could weep, well, you'd swear that 'un is weeping right now.'