Douglas Adams

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

For Jane


AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh II and an Apple 
LaserWriter II NTX. The word processing software was FullWrite Professional from 
Ashton Tate. The final proofing and photosetting was done by The Last Word, 
London SW6. 

I would like to say an enormous thank you to my amazing and wonderful editor, 
Sue Freestone. 

Her help, support, criticism, encouragement, enthusiasm and sandwiches have been 
beyond measure. I also owe thanks and apologies to Sophie, James and Vivian who 
saw so little of her during the final weeks of work. 


CHAPTER 1

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the 
expression ‘as pretty as an airport’. 

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can 
only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports 
are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their 
luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to 
this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to 
reflect this in their designs. 

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal 
shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating 
the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the 
traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or 
the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to 
expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the 
location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not. 

Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise, Kate 
Schechter stood and doubted. 

All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from doubt. She was not a 
superstitious person, or even a religious person, she was simply someone who was 
not at all sure she should be flying to Norway. But she was finding it 
increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was 
remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of 
particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directing 
traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble 
with the tickets, finding a next-door neighbour to look after the cat, then 
finding the cat so it could be looked after by the next-door neighbour, the 
sudden leak in the roof, the missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death 
of the next-door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat -- it all had the semblance 
of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had begun to assume godlike 
proportions. 

Even the taxi-driver -- when she had eventually found a taxi -- had said, 
‘Norway? What you want to go there for?’ And when she hadn’t instantly said, 
‘The aurora borealis!’ or ‘Fjords!’ but had looked doubtful for a moment and 
bitten her lip, he had said, ‘I know, I bet it’s some bloke dragging you out 
there. Tell you what, tell him to stuff it. Go to Tenerife.’ 

There was an idea. 

Tenerife. 

Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home. 

She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry tangles of traffic and 
thought that however cold and miserable the weather was here, that was nothing 
to what it would be like in Norway. 

Or, indeed, at home. Home would be about as icebound as Norway right now. 
Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of steam bursting out of the ground, 
catching in the frigid air and dissipating between the glacial cliff faces of 
Sixth Avenue. 

A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course of her thirty 
years would reveal her without any doubt to be a New Yorker. For though she had 
lived in the city very little, most of her life had been spent at a constant 
distance from it. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and a period of distracted 
wandering around South America five years ago following the loss of her newly 
married husband, Luke, in a New York taxi-hailing accident. 

She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in 
fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but 
the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them 
to. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a 
table staring at red paper napkins for wasn’t real pizza however much extra 
pepperoni and anchovy they put on it. 

London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza 
problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one 
understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived 
at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of 
greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the 
fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn’t 
grasp this simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she 
could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once a month or so 
she would get very depressed, phone a pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most 
lavish pizza she could describe -- pizza with an extra pizza on it, essentially 
-- and then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it. 

‘To what?’ 

‘Deliver. Let me give you the address --’ 

‘I don’t understand. Aren’t you going to come and pick it up?’ 

‘No. Aren’t you going to deliver? My address --’ 

‘Er, we don’t do that, miss.’ 

‘Don’t do what?’ 

‘Er, deliver...’ 

‘You don’t deliver? Am I hearing you correctly...?’ 

The exchange would quickly degenerate into an ugly slanging match which would 
leave her feeling drained and shaky, but much, much better the following 
morning. In all other respects she was one of the most sweet-natured people you 
could hope to meet. 

But today was testing her to the limit. 

There had been terrible traffic jams on the motorway, and when the distant flash 
of blue lights made it clear that the cause was an accident somewhere ahead of 
them Kate had become more tense and had stared fixedly out of the other window 
as eventually they had crawled past it. 

The taxi-driver had been bad-tempered when at last he had dropped her off 
because she didn’t have the right money, and there was a lot of disgruntled 
hunting through tight trouser pockets before he was eventually able to find 
change for her. The atmosphere was heavy and thundery and now, standing in the 
middle of the main check-in concourse at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, she 
could not find the check-in desk for her flight to Oslo. 

She stood very still for a moment, breathing calmly and deeply and trying not to 
think of Jean-Philippe. 

Jean-Philippe was, as the taxi-driver had correctly guessed, the reason why she 
was going to Norway, but was also the reason why she was convinced that Norway 
was not at all a good place for her to go. Thinking of him therefore made her 
head oscillate and it seemed best not to think about him at all but simply to go 
to Norway as if that was where she happened to be going anyway. She would then 
be terribly surprised to bump into him at whatever hotel it was he had written 
on the card that was tucked into the side pocket of her handbag. 

In fact she would be surprised to find him there anyway. What she would be much 
more likely to find was a message from him saying that he had been unexpectedly 
called away to Guatemala, Seoul or Tenerife and that he would call her from 
there. Jean-Philippe was the most continually absent person she had ever met. In 
this he was the culmination of a series. Since she had lost Luke to the great 
yellow Chevrolet she had been oddly dependent on the rather vacant emotions that 
a succession of self-absorbed men had inspired in her. 

She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even shut her eyes for a second. 
She wished that when she opened them again there would be a sign in front of her 
saying ‘This way for Norway’ which she could simply follow without needing to 
think about it or anything else ever again. This, she reflected, in a 
continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably how religions got 
started, and must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking 
for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and 
perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance. 

Kate opened her eyes again and was, of course, disappointed. But then a second 
or two later there was a momentary parting in a long surging wave of cross 
Germans in inexplicable yellow polo shirts and through it she had a brief 
glimpse of the check-in desk for Oslo. Lugging her garment bag on to her 
shoulder, she made her way towards it. 

There was just one other person before her in the line at the desk and he, it 
turned out, was having trouble or perhaps making it. 

He was a large man, impressively large and well-built -- even expertly built --
but he was also definitely odd-looking in a way that Kate couldn’t quite deal 
with. She couldn’t even say what it was that was odd about him, only that she 
was immediately inclined not to include him on her list of things to think about 
at the moment. She remembered reading an article which had explained that the 
central processing unit of the human brain only had seven memory registers, 
which meant that if you had seven things in your mind at the same time and then 
thought of something else, one of the other seven would instantly drop out. 

In quick succession she thought about whether or not she was likely to catch the 
plane, about whether it was just her imagination that the day was a particularly 
bloody one, about airline staff who smile charmingly and are breathtakingly 
rude, about Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower prices than 
ordinary shops but -- mysteriously -- don’t, about whether or not she felt a 
magazine article about airports coming on which might help pay for the trip, 
about whether her garment bag would hurt less on her other shoulder and finally, 
in spite of all her intentions to the contrary, about Jean- Philippe, who was 
another set of at lest seven subtopics all to himself. 

The man standing arguing in front of her popped right out of her mind. 

It was only the announcement on the airport Tannoy of the last call for her 
flight to Oslo which forced her attention back to the situation in front of her. 

The large man was making trouble about the fact that he hadn’t been given a 
first class seat reservation. It had just transpired that the reason for this 
was that he didn’t in fact have a first class ticket. 

Kate’s spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and began to prowl around 
there making a low growling noise. 

It now transpired that the man in front of her didn’t actually have a ticket at 
all, and the argument then began to range freely and angrily over such topics as 
the physical appearance of the airline check-in girl, her qualities as a person, 
theories about her ancestors, speculations as to what surprises the future might 
have in store for her and the airline for which she worked, and finally lit by 
chance on the happy subject of the man’s credit card. 

He didn’t have one. 

Further discussions ensued, and had to do with cheques, and why the airline did 
not accept them. 

Kate took a long, slow, murderous look at her watch. 

‘Excuse me,’ she said, interrupting the transactions. ‘Is this going to take 
long? I have to catch the Oslo flight.’ 

‘I’m just dealing with this gentleman,’ said the girl, ‘I’ll be with you in just 
one second.’ 

Kate nodded, and politely allowed just one second to go by. 

‘It’s just that the flight’s about to leave,’ she said then. ‘I have one bag, I 
have my ticket, I have a reservation. It’ll take about thirty seconds. I hate to 
interrupt, but I’d hate even more to miss my flight for the sake of thirty 
seconds. That’s thirty actual seconds, not thirty “just one” seconds, which 
could keep us here all night.’ 

The check-in girl turned the full glare on her lipgloss on to Kate, but before 
she could speak the large blond man looked round, and the effect of his face was 
a little disconcerting. 

‘I, too,’ he said in a slow, angry Nordic voice, ‘wish to fly to Oslo.’ 

Kate stared at him. He looked thoroughly out of place in an airport, or rather, 
the airport looked thoroughly out of place around him. 

‘Well,’ she said, ‘the way we’re stacked up at the moment it looks like neither 
of us is going to make it. Can we just sort this one out? What’s the hold-up?’ 

The check-in girl smiled her charming, dead smile and said, ‘The airline does 
not accept cheques, as a matter of company policy.’ 

‘Well I do,’ said Kate, slapping down her own credit card. ‘Charge the 
gentleman’s ticket to this, and I’ll take a cheque from him. 

‘OK?’ she added to the big man, who was looking at her with slow surprise. His 
eyes were large and blue and conveyed the impression that they had looked at a 
lot of glaciers in their time. They were extraordinarily arrogant and also 
muddled. 

‘OK?’ she repeated briskly. ‘My name is Kate Schechter. Two ‘c’s, two ‘h’s, two 
‘e’s and also a ‘t’, an ‘r’ and an ‘s’. Provided they’re all there the bank 
won’t be fussy about the order they come in. They never seem to know 
themselves.’ 

The man very slowly inclined his head a little towards her in a rough bow of 
acknowledgement. He thanked her for her kindness, courtesy and some Norwegian 
word that was lost on her, said that it was a long while since he had 
encountered anything of the kind, that she was a woman of spirit and some other 
Norwegian word, and that he was indebted to her. He also added, as an 
afterthought, that he had no cheque-book.

‘Right!’ said Kate, determined not to be deflected from her course. She fished 
in her handbag for a piece of paper, took a pen from the check-in counter, 
scribbled on the paper and thrust it at him. 

‘That’s my address,’ she said, ‘send me the money. Hock your fur coat if you 
have to. Just send it me. OK? I’m taking a flyer on trusting you.’ 

The big man took the scrap of paper, read the few words on it with immense 
slowness, then folded it with elaborate care and put it into the pocket of his 
coat. Again he bowed to her very slightly. 

Kate suddenly realised that the check-in girl was silently waiting for her pen 
back to fill in the credit card form. She pushed it back at her in annoyance, 
handed over her own ticket and imposed on herself an icy calm. 

The airport Tannoy announced the departure of their flight. 

‘May I see your passports, please?’ said the girl unhurriedly. 

Kate handed hers over, but the big man didn’t have one. 

‘You what?’ exclaimed Kate. The airline girl simply stopped moving at all and 
stared quietly at a random point on her desk waiting for someone else to make a 
move. It wasn’t her problem. 

The man repeated angrily that he didn’t have a passport. He shouted it and 
banged his fist on the counter so hard that it was slightly dented by the force 
of the blow. 

Kate picked up her ticket, her passport and her credit card and hoisted her 
garment bag back up on to her shoulder. 

‘This is when I get off,’ she said, and simply walked away. She felt that she 
had made every effort a human being could possibly be expected to make to catch 
her plane, but that it was not to be. She would send a message to Jean-Philippe 
saying that she could not be there, and it would probably sit in a slot next to 
his message to her saying why he could not be there either. For once they would 
be equally absent. 

For the time being she would go and cool off. She set off in search of first a 
newspaper and then some coffee, and by dint of following the appropriate signs 
was unable to locate either. She was then unable to find a working phone from 
which to send a message, and decided to give up on the airport altogether. Just 
get out, she told herself, find a taxi, and go back home. 

She threaded her way back across the check-in concourse, and had almost made it 
to the exit when she happened to glance back at the check-in desk that had 
defeated her, and was just in time to see it shoot up through the roof engulfed 
in a ball of orange flame. 

As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking dust, trying 
to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved to be able to think 
that she hadn’t merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she 
passed out. 


CHAPTER 2

The usual people tried to claim responsibility. 

First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed 
out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, 
that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive 
leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location 
for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it 
wasn’t actually anything to do with them at all. 

No cause could be found for the explosion. 

It seemed to have happened spontaneously and of its own free will. Explanations 
were advanced, but most of these were simply phrases which restated the problem 
in different words, along the same principles which had given the world ‘metal 
fatigue’. In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden 
transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, 
which was ‘non-linear catastrophic structural exasperation’, or to put it 
another way -- as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following 
night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career -- the check-in desk 
had just got ‘fundamentally fed up with being where it was’. 

As in all such disastrous events, estimates of the casualties varied wildly. 
They started at forty-seven dead, eighty-nine seriously injured, went up to 
sixty-three dead, a hundred and thirty injured, and rose as high as one hundred 
and seventeen dead before the figures started to be revised downwards once more. 
The final figures revealed that once all the people who could be accounted for 
had been accounted for, in fact no one had been killed at all. A small number of 
people were in hospital suffering from cuts and bruises and varying degrees of 
traumatised shock, but that, unless anyone had any information about anybody 
actually being missing, was that. 

This was yet another inexplicable aspect to the whole affair. The force of the 
explosion had been enough to reduce a large part of the front of Terminal Two to 
rubble, and yet everyone inside the building had somehow either fallen very 
luckily, or been shielded from one piece of falling masonry by another, or had 
the shock of the explosion absorbed by their luggage. All in all, very little 
luggage had survived at all. There were questions asked in Parliament about 
this, but not very interesting ones. 

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these 
things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world. 

She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as 
far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which 
she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, 
about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or 
uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of 
penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was 
dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She 
had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their 
brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but 
she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing 
penguins. 

Gradually the trunks, the memories and the penguins began to grow indistinct, to 
become all white and swimmy, then to become like walls that were all white and 
swimmy, and finally to become walls that were merely white, or rather a 
yellowish, greenish kind of off-white, and to enclose her in a small room. 

The room was in semi-darkness. A bedside light was on but turned down low, and 
the light from a street lamp found its way between the grey curtains and threw 
sodium patterns on the opposite wall. She became dimly aware of the shadowed 
shape of her own body lying under the white, turned-down sheet and the pale, 
neat blankets. She stared at it for a nervous while, checking that it looked 
right before she tried, tentatively, to move any part of it. She tried her right 
hand, and that seemed to be fine. A little stiff and aching, but the fingers all 
responded, and all seemed to be of the right length and thickness, and to bend 
in the right places and in the right directions. 

She panicked briefly when she couldn’t immediately locate her left hand, but 
then she found it lying across her stomach and nagging at her in some odd way. 
It took her a second or two of concentration to put together a number of rather 
disturbing feelings and realise that there was a needle bandaged into her arm. 
This shook her quite badly. From the needle there snaked a long thin transparent 
pipe that glistened yellowly in the light from the street lamp and hung in a 
gentle curl from a thick plastic bag suspended from a tall metal stand. An array 
of horrors briefly assailed her in respect of this apparatus, but she peered 
dimly at the bag and saw the words ‘Dextro-Saline’. She made herself calm down 
again and lay quietly for a few moments before continuing her exploration. 

Her ribcage seemed undamaged. Bruised and tender, but there was no sharper pain 
anywhere to suggest that anything was broken. Her hips and thighs ached and were 
stiff, but revealed no serious hurt. She flexed the muscles down her right leg 
and then her left. She rather fancied that her left ankle was sprained. 

In other words, she told herself, she was perfectly all right. So what was she 
doing here in what she could tell from the septic colour of the paint was 
clearly a hospital? 

She sat up impatiently, and immediately rejoined the pen guins for an 
entertaining few minutes. 

The next time she came round she treated herself with a little more care, and 
lay quietly, feeling gently nauseous. 

She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened. It was dark and blotchy 
and came at her in sick, greasy waves like the North Sea. Lumpy things jumbled 
themselves out of it and slowly arranged themselves into a heaving airport. The 
airport was sour and ached in her head, and in the middle of it, pulsing like a 
migraine, was the memory of a moment’s whirling splurge of light. 

It became suddenly very clear to her that the check-in concourse of Terminal Two 
at Heathrow Airport had been hit by a meteorite. Silhouetted in the flare was 
the fur-coated figure of a big man who must have caught the full force of it and 
been reduced instantly to a cloud of atoms that were free to go as they pleased. 
The thought caused a deep and horrid shudder to go through her. He had been 
infuriating and arrogant, but she had liked him in an odd way. There had been 
something oddly noble in his perverse bloody-mindedness. Or maybe, she realised, 
she liked to think that such perverse bloody-mindedness was noble because it 
reminded her of herself trying to order pizza to be delivered in an alien, 
hostile and non-pizza-delivering world. Nobleness was one word for making a fuss 
about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others. 

She felt a sudden surge of fear and loneliness, but it quickly ebbed away and 
left her feeling much more composed, relaxed, and wanting to go to the lavatory. 

According to her watch it was shortly after three o’clock, and according to 
everything else it was night-time. She should probably call a nurse and let the 
world know she had come round. There was a window in the side wall of the room 
through which she could see a dim corridor in which stood a stretcher trolley 
and a tall black oxygen bottle, but which was otherwise empty. Things were very 
quiet out there. 

Peering around her in the small room she saw a white-painted plywood cupboard, a 
couple of tubular steel and vinyl chairs lurking quietly in the shadows, and a 
white-painted plywood bedside cabinet which supported a small bowl with a single 
banana in it. On the other side of the bed stood her drip stand. Set into the 
wall on that side of the bed was a metal plate with a couple of black knobs and 
a set of old bakelite headphones hanging from it, and wound around the tubular 
side pillar of the bedhead was a cable with a bell push attached to it, which 
she fingered, and then decided not to push. 

She was fine. She could find her own way about. 

Slowly, a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her elbows, and slid her 
legs out from under the sheets and on to the floor, which was cold to her feet. 
She could tell almost immediately that she shouldn’t be doing this because every 
part of her feet was sending back streams of messages telling her exactly what 
every tiniest bit of the floor that they touched felt like, as if it was a 
strange and worrying thing the like of which they had never encountered before. 
Nevertheless she sat on the edge of the bed and made her feet accept the floor 
as something they were just going to have to get used to. 

The hospital had put her into a large, baggy, striped thing. It wasn’t merely 
baggy, she decided on examining it more closely, it actually was a bag. A bag of 
loose blue and white striped cotton. It opened up the back and let in chilly 
night draughts. Perfunctory sleeves flopped half-way down her arms. She moved 
her arms around in the light, examining the skin, rubbing it and pinching it, 
especially around the bandage which held her drip needle in place. Normally her 
arms were lithe and the skin was firm and supple. Tonight, however, they looked 
like bits of chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm with her other hand, 
and then looked up again, purposefully. 

She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it wobbled slightly less 
than she did, she was able to use it to pull herself slowly to her feet. She 
stood there, her tall slim figure trembling, and after a few seconds she held 
the drip stand away at a bent arm’s length, like a shepherd holding a crook. 

She had not made it to Norway, but she was at least standing up. 

The drip stand rolled on four small and independently perverse wheels which 
behaved like four screaming children in a supermarket, but nevertheless Kate was 
able to propel it to the door ahead of her. Walking increased her sense of 
wooziness, but also increased her resolve not to give in to it. She reached the 
door, opened it, and pushing the drip stand out ahead of her, looked out into 
the corridor.

To her left the corridor ended in a couple of swing-doors with circular porthole 
windows, which seemed to lead into a larger area, an open ward perhaps. To her 
right a number of smaller doors opened off the corridor as it continued on for a 
short distance before turning a sharp corner. One of those doors would probably 
be the lavatory. The others? Well, she would find out as she looked for the 
lavatory. 

The first two were cupboards. The third was slightly bigger and had a chair in 
it and therefore probably counted as a room since most people don’t like to sit 
in cupboards, even nurses, who have to do a lot of things that most people 
wouldn’t like to. It also had a stack of styro beakers, a lot of semi-congealed 
coffee creamer and an elderly coffee maker, all sitting on top of a small table 
together and seeping grimly over a copy of the Evening Standard. 

Kate picked up the dark, damp paper and tried to reconstruct some of her missing 
days from it. However, what with her own wobbly condition making it difficult to 
read, and the droopily stuck-together condition of the newspaper, she was able 
to glean little more than the fact that no one could really say for certain what 
had happened. It seemed that no one had been seriously hurt, but that an 
employee of one of the airlines was still unaccounted for. The incident had now 
been officially classified as an ‘Act of God’. 

‘Nice one, God,’ thought Kate. She put down the remains of the paper and closed 
the door behind her. 

The next door she tried was another small side ward like her own. There was a 
bedside table and a single banana in the fruit bowl. 

The bed was clearly occupied. She pulled the door to quickly, but she did not 
pull it quickly enough. Unfortunately something odd had caught her attention, 
but although she had noticed it, she could not immediately say what it was. She 
stood there with the door half closed, staring at the door, knowing that she 
should not look again, and knowing that she would. 

Carefully she eased the door back open again. 

The room was darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness did not give her a good 
feeling about the occupant of the bed. She listened. The silence didn’t sound 
too good either. It wasn’t the silence of healthy deep sleep, it was the silence 
of nothing but a little distant traffic noise. 

She hesitated for a long while, silhouetted in the doorway, looking and 
listening. She wondered about the sheer bulk of the occupant of the bed and how 
cold he was with just a thin blanket pulled over him. Next to the bed was a 
small tubular-legged vinyl bucket chair which was rather overwhelmed by the huge 
and heavy fur coat draped over it, and Kate thought that the coat should more 
properly be draped over the bed and its cold occupant. 

At last, walking as softly and cautiously as she could, she moved into the room 
and over to the bed. She stood looking down at the face of the big, Nordic man. 
Though cold, and though his eyes were shut, his face was frowning slightly as if 
he was still rather worried about something. This struck Kate as being almost 
infinitely sad. In life the man had had the air of someone who was beset by 
huge, if somewhat puzzling, difficulties, and the appearance that he had almost 
immediately found things beyond this life that were a bother to him as well was 
miserable to contemplate. 

She was astonished that he appeared to be so unscathed. His skin was totally 
unmarked. It was rugged and healthy -- or rather had been healthy until very 
recently. Closer inspection showed a network of fine lines which suggested that 
he was older than the mid-thirties she had originally assumed. He could even 
have been a very fit and healthy man in his late forties. 

Standing against the wall, by the door, was something unexpected. It was a large 
Coca-Cola vending machine. It didn’t look as if it had been installed there: it 
wasn’t plugged in and it had a small neat sticker on it explaining that it was 
temporarily out of order. It looked as if it had simply been left there 
inadvertently by someone who was probably even now walking around wondering 
which room he had left it in. Its large red and white wavy panel stared glassily 
into the room and did not explain itself. The only thing the machine 
communicated to the outside world was that there was a slot into which coins of 
a variety of denominations might be inserted, and an aperture to which a variety 
of different cans would be delivered if the machine was working, which it was 
not. There was also an old sledge-hammer leaning against it which was, in its 
own way, odd. 

Faintness began to creep over Kate, the room began to develop a slight spin, and 
there was some restless rustling in the cabin trunks of her mind. 

Then she realised that the rustling wasn’t simply her imagination. There was a 
distinct noise in the room -- a heavy, beating, scratching noise, a muffled 
fluttering. The noise rose and fell like the wind, but in her dazed and woozy 
state, Kate could not at first tell where the noise was coming from. At last her 
gaze fell on the curtains. She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk 
trying to work out why the door is dancing. The sound was coming from the 
curtains. She walked uncertainly towards them and pulled them apart. A huge 
eagle with circles tattooed on its wings was clattering and beating against the 
window, staring in with great yellow eyes and pecking wildly at the glass. 

Kate staggered back, turned and tried to heave herself out of the room. At the 
end of the corridor the porthole doors swung open and two figures came through 
them. Hands rushed towards her as she became hopelessly entangled in the drip 
stand and began slowly to spin towards the floor. 

She was unconscious as they carefully laid her back in her bed. She was 
unconscious half an hour later when a disturbingly short figure in a worryingly 
long white doctor’s coat arrived, wheeled the big man away on a stretcher 
trolley and then returned after a few minutes for the Coca-Cola machine. 

She woke a few hours later with a wintry sun seeping through the window. The day 
looked very quiet and ordinary, but Kate was still shaking. 


CHAPTER 3

The same sun later broke in through the upper windows of a house in North London 
and struck the peacefully sleeping figure of a man. 

The room in which he slept was large and bedraggled and did not much benefit 
from the sudden intrusion of light. The sun crept slowly across the bedclothes, 
as if nervous of what it might find amongst them, slunk down the side of the 
bed, moved in a rather startled way across some objects it encountered on the 
floor, toyed nervously with a couple of motes of dust, lit briefly on a stuffed 
fruitbat hanging in the corner, and fled. 

This was about as big an appearance as the sun ever put in here, and it lasted 
for about an hour or so, during which time the sleeping figure scarcely stirred. 

At eleven o’clock the phone rang, and still the figure did not respond, any more 
than it had responded when the phone had rung at twenty-five to seven in the 
morning, again at twenty to seven, again at ten to seven, and again for ten 
minutes continuously starting at five to seven, after which it has settled into 
a long and significant silence, disturbed only by the braying of police sirens 
in a nearby street at around nine o’clock, the delivery of a large eighteenth-
century dual manual harpsichord at around nine-fifteen, and the collection of 
same by bailiffs at a little after ten. This was a not uncommon sort of 
occurrence -- the people concerned were accustomed to finding the key under the 
doormat, and the man in the bed was accustomed to sleeping through it. You would 
probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant 
the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling 
about when he climbed into bed of a night and turned off the light. 

The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at 
random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and 
insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the 
socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would 
have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by 
any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room 
were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, 
most of which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were 
painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio would 
have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, 
on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a 
navigable river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as 
long as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or ‘Dirk’, Gently, né Cjelli. 

At last Gently stirred. 

The sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his head, but from 
somewhere half way down the length of the bed a hand slowly emerged from under 
the bedclothes and its fingers felt their way in little tapping movements along 
the floor. Working from experience, they neatly circumvented a bowl of something 
very nasty that had been sitting there since Michaelmas, and eventually happened 
upon a half- empty pack of untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The fingers 
shook a crumpled white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of matches, 
and then started to poke a way through the sheets tangled together at the top of 
the bed, like a magician prodding at a handkerchief from which he intends to 
release a flock of doves. 

The cigarette was at last inserted into the hole. The cigarette was lit. For a 
while the bed itself appeared to be smoking the cigarette in great heaving 
drags. It coughed long, loud and shudderingly and then began at last to breathe 
in a more measured rhythm. In this way, Dirk Gently achieved consciousness. 

He lay there for a while feeling a terrible sense of worry and guilt about 
something weighing on his shoulders. He wished he could forget about it, and 
promptly did. He levered himself out of bed and a few minutes later padded 
downstairs. 

The mail on the doormat consisted of the usual things: a rude letter threatening 
to take away his American Express card, an invitation to apply for an American 
Express card, and a few bills of the more hysterical and unrealistic type. He 
couldn’t understand why they kept sending them. The cost of the postage seemed 
merely to be good money thrown after bad. He shook his head in wonderment at the 
malevolent incompetence of the world, threw the mail away, entered the kitchen 
and approached the fridge with caution. 

It stood in the corner. 

The kitchen was large and shrouded in a deep gloom that was not relieved, only 
turned yellow, by the action of switching on the light. Dirk squatted down in 
front of the fridge and carefully examined the edge of the door. He found what 
he was looking for. In fact he found more than he was looking for. 

Near the bottom of the door, across the narrow gap which separated the door from 
the main body of the fridge, which held the strip of grey insulating rubber, lay 
a single human hair. It was stuck there with dried saliva. That he had expected. 
He had stuck it there himself three days earlier and had checked it on several 
occasions since then. What he had not expected to find was a second hair. 

He frowned at it in alarm. A second hair? 

It was stuck across the gap in the same way as the first one, only this hair was 
near the top of the fridge door, and he had not put it there. He peered at it 
closely, and even went so far as to go and open the old shutters on the kitchen 
windows to let some extra light in upon the scene. 

The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen, and did a lot of 
what’s-all-thising around the room which, like the bedroom, would have presented 
anyone of an aesthetic disposition with difficulties. Like most of the rooms in 
Dirk’s house it was large, looming and utterly dishevelled. It simply sneered at 
anyone’s attempts to tidy it, sneered at them and brushed them aside like one of 
the small pile of dead and disheartened flies that lay beneath the window, on 
top of a pile of old pizza boxes. 

The light revealed the second hair for what it was -- a grey hair at root, dyed 
a vivid metallic orange. Dirk pursed his lips and thought very deeply. He didn’t 
need to think hard in order to realise who the hair belonged to -- there was 
only one person who regularly entered the kitchen looking as if her head had 
been used for extracting metal oxides from industrial waste -- but he did have 
seriously to consider the implications of the discovery that she had been 
plastering her hair across the door of his fridge. 

It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his cleaning lady 
had escalated to a new and more frightening level. It was now, Dirk reckoned, 
fully three months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them was 
grimly determined not to be the one to open it first. The fridge no longer 
merely stood there in the corner of the kitchen, it actually lurked. Dirk could 
quite clearly remember the day on which the thing had started lurking. It was 
about a week ago, when Dirk had tried a simple subterfuge to trick Elena -- the 
old bat’s name was Elena, pronounced to rhyme with cleaner, which was an irony 
that Dirk now no longer relished -- into opening the fridge door. The subterfuge 
had been deftly deflected and had nearly rebounded horribly on Dirk. 

He had resorted to the strategy of going to the local mini-market to buy a few 
simple groceries. Nothing contentious -- a little milk, some eggs, some bacon, a 
carton or two of chocolate custard and a simple half-pound of butter. He had 
left them, innocently, on top of the fridge as if to say, ‘Oh, when you have a 
moment, perhaps you could pop these inside...’ 

When he had returned that evening his heart bounded to see that they were no 
longer on top of the fridge. They were gone! They had not been merely moved 
aside or put on a shelf, they were nowhere to be seen. She must finally have 
capitulated and put them away. In the fridge. And she would surely have cleaned 
it out once it was actually open. For the first and only time his heart swelled 
with warmth and gratitude towards her, and he was about to fling open the door 
of the thing in relief and triumph when an eighth sense (at the last count, Dirk 
reckoned he had eleven) warned him to be very, very careful, and to consider 
first where Elena might have put the cleared out contents of the fridge. 

A nameless doubt gnawed at his mind as he moved noiselessly towards the garbage 
bin beneath the sink. Holding his breath, he opened the lid and looked. 

There, nestling in the folds of the fresh black bin liner, were his eggs, his 
bacon, his chocolate custard and his simple half-pound of butter. Two milk 
bottles stood rinsed and neatly lined up by the sink into which their contents 
had presumably been poured. 

She had thrown it away. 

Rather than open the fridge door, she had thrown his food away. He looked round 
slowly at the grimy, squat, white monolith, and that was the exact moment at 
which he realised without a shadow of a doubt that his fridge had now begun 
seriously to lurk. 

He made himself a stiff black coffee and sat, slightly trembling. He had not 
even looked directly at the sink, but he knew that he must unconsciously have 
noticed the two clean milk bottles there, and some busy part of his mind had 
been alarmed by them. 

The next day he had explained all this away to himself. He was becoming 
needlessly paranoiac. It had surely been an innocent or careless mistake on 
Elena’s part. She had probably been brooding distractedly on her son’s attack of 
bronchitis, peevishness or homosexuality or whatever it was that regularly 
prevented her from either turning up, or from having noticeable effect when she 
did. She was Italian and probably had absent-mindedly mistaken his food for 
garbage. 

But the business with the hair changed all that. It established beyond all 
possible doubt that she knew exactly what she was doing. She was under no 
circumstances going to open the fridge door until he had opened it first, and he 
was under no circumstances going to open the fridge until she had. 

Obviously she had not noticed his hair, otherwise it would have been her most 
effective course simply to pull it off, thus tricking him into thinking she had 
opened the fridge. He should presumably now remove her hair in the hope of 
pulling that same trick on her, but even as he sat there he knew that somehow 
that wouldn’t work, and that they were locked into a tightening spiral of non-
fridge-opening that would lead them both to madness or perdition. 

He wondered if he could hire someone to come and open the fridge. 

No. He was not in a position to hire anybody to do anything. He was not even in 
a position to pay Elena for the last three weeks. The only reason he didn’t ask 
her to leave was that sacking somebody inevitably involved paying them off, and 
this he was in no position to do. His secretary had finally left him on her own 
initiative and gone off to do something reprehensible in the travel business. 
Dirk had attempted to cast scorn on her preferring monotony of pay over -- 

‘Regularity of pay,’ she had calmly corrected him. 

-- over job satisfaction. 

She had nearly said, ‘Over what?’, but at that moment she realised that if she 
said that she would have to listen to his reply, which would be bound to 
infuriate her into arguing back. It occurred to her for the first time that the 
only way of escaping was just not to get drawn into these arguments. If she 
simply did not respond this time, then she was free to leave. She tried it. She 
felt a sudden freedom. She left. A week later, in much the same mood, she 
married an airline cabin steward called Smith. 

Dirk had kicked her desk over, and then had to pick it up himself later when she 
didn’t come back. 

The detective business was currently as brisk as the tomb. Nobody, it seemed, 
wished to have anything detected. He had recently, to make ends meet, taken up 
doing palmistry in drag on Thursday evenings, but he wasn’t comfortable with it. 
He could have withstood it -- the hateful, abject humiliation of it all was 
something to which he had, in different ways, now become accustomed, and he was 
quite anonymous in his little tent in the back garden of the pub -- he could 
have withstood it all if he hadn’t been so horribly, excruciatingly good at it. 
It made him break out in a sweat of self-loathing. He tried by every means to 
cheat, to fake, to be deliberately and cynically bad, but whatever fakery he 
tried to introduce always failed and he invariably ended up being right. 

His worst moment had come about as a result of the poor woman from Oxfordshire 
who had come in to see him one evening. Being in something of a waggish mood, he 
had suggested that she should keep an eye on her husband, who, judging by her 
marriage line, looked to be a bit of a flighty type. It transpired that her 
husband was in fact a fighter pilot, and that his plane had been lost in an 
exercise over the North Sea only a fortnight earlier. 

Dirk had been flustered by this and had soothed meaninglessly at her. He was 
certain, he said, that her husband would be restored to her in the fullness of 
time, that all would be well, and that all manner of things would be well and so 
on. The woman said that she thought this was not very likely seeing as the world 
record for staying alive in the North Sea was rather less than an hour, and 
since no trace of her husband had been found in two weeks it seemed fanciful to 
imagine that he was anything other than stone dead, and she was trying to get 
used to the idea, thank you very much. She said it rather tartly. 

Dirk had lost all control at this point and started to babble. 

He said that it was very clear from reading her hands that the great sum of 
money she had coming to her would be no consolation to her for the loss of her 
dear, dear husband, but that at least it might comfort her to know that he had 
gone on to that great something or other in the sky, that he was floating on the 
fleeciest of white clouds, looking very handsome in his new set of wings, and 
that he was terribly sorry to be talking such appalling drivel but she had 
caught him rather by surprise. Would she care for some tea, or some vodka, or 
some soup? 

The woman demurred. She said she had only wandered into the tent by accident, 
she had been looking for the lavatories, and what was that about the money? 

‘Complete gibberish,’ Dirk had explained. He was in great difficulties, what 
with having the falsetto to keep up. ‘I was making it up as I went along,’ he 
said. ‘Please allow me to tender my most profound apologies for intruding so 
clumsily on your private grief, and to escort you to, er, or rather, direct you 
to the, well, what I can only in the circumstances call the lavatory, which is 
out of the tent and on the left.’ 

Dirk had been cast down by this encounter, but was then utterly horrified a few 
days later when he discovered that the very following morning the unfortunate 
woman had learnt that she had won £250,000 on the Premium Bonds. He spent 
several hours that night standing on the roof of his house, shaking his fist at 
the dark sky and shouting, ‘Stop it!’ until a neighbour complained to the police 
that he couldn’t sleep. The police had come round in a screaming squad car and 
woken up the rest of the neighbourhood as well. 

Today, this morning, Dirk sat in his kitchen and stared dejectedly at his 
fridge. The bloody-minded ebullience which he usually relied on to carry him 
through the day had been knocked out of him in its very opening moments by the 
business with the fridge. His will sat imprisoned in it, locked up by a single 
hair. 

What he needed, he thought, was a client. Please, God, he thought, if there is a 
god, any god, bring me a client. Just a simple client, the simpler the better. 
Credulous and rich. Someone like that chap yesterday. He tapped his fingers on 
the table. 

The problem was that the more credulous the client, the more Dirk fell foul at 
the end of his own better nature, which was constantly rearing up and 
embarrassing him at the most inopportune moments. Dirk frequently threatened to 
hurl his better nature to the ground and kneel on its windpipe, but it usually 
managed to get the better of him by dressing itself up as guilt and self-
loathing, in which guise it could throw him right out of the ring. 

Credulous and rich. Just so that he could pay off some, perhaps even just one, 
of the more prominent and sensational bills. He lit a cigarette. The smoke 
curled upwards in the morning light and attached itself to the ceiling. 

Like that chap yesterday... 

He paused. 

The chap yesterday... 

The world held its breath. 

Quietly and gently there settled on him the knowledge that something, somewhere, 
was ghastly. Something was terribly wrong. 

There was a disaster hanging silently in the air around him waiting for him to 
notice it. His knees tingled. 

What he needed, he had been thinking, was a client. He had been thinking that as 
a matter of habit. It was what he always thought at this time of the morning. 
What he had forgotten was that he had one. 

He stared wildly at his watch. Nearly eleven-thirty. He shook his head to try 
and clear the silent ringing between his ears, then made a hysterical lunge for 
his hat and his great leather coat that hung behind the door.

Fifteen seconds later he left the house, five hours late but moving fast. 


CHAPTER 4

A minute or two later Dirk paused to consider his best strategy. Rather than 
arrive five hours late and flustered it would be better all round if he were to 
arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command. 

‘Pray God I am not too soon!’ would be a good opening line as he swept in, but 
it needed a good follow-through as well, and he wasn’t sure what it should be. 

Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but then again it was 
only a short distance, and he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when 
driving. This was largely because of his method of ‘Zen’ navigation, which was 
simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow 
it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was 
worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both. 

Furthermore he was not at all certain that his car was working. 

It was an elderly Jaguar, built at that very special time in the company’s 
history when they were making cars which had to stop for repairs more often than 
they needed to stop for petrol, and frequently needed to rest for months between 
outings. He was, however, certain, now that he came to think about it, that the 
car didn’t have any petrol and furthermore he did not have any cash or valid 
plastic to enable him to fill it up. 

He abandoned that line of thought as wholly fruitless. 

He stopped to buy a newspaper while he thought things over. The clock in the 
newsagent’s said eleven thirty-five. Damn, damn, damn. He toyed with the idea of 
simply dropping the case. Just walking away and forgetting about it. Having some 
lunch. The whole thing was fraught with difficulties in any event. Or rather it 
was fraught with one particular difficulty which was that of keeping a straight 
face. The whole thing was complete and utter nonsense. The client was clearly 
loopy and Dirk would not have considered taking the case except for one very 
important thing. 

Three hundred pounds a day plus expenses. 

The client had agreed to it just like that. And when Dirk had started his usual 
speech to the effect that his methods, involving as they did the fundamental 
interconnectedness of all things, often led to expenses that might appear to the 
untutored eye to be somewhat tangential to the matter in hand, the client had 
simply waved the matter aside as trifling. Dirk liked that in a client. 

The only thing the client had insisted upon in the midst of this almost 
superhuman fit of reasonableness was that Dirk had to be there, absolutely had, 
had, had to be there ready, functioning and alert, without fail, without even 
the merest smidgen of an inkling of failure, at six-thirty in the morning. 
Absolute. 

Well, he was just going to have to see reason about that as well. Six-thirty was 
clearly a preposterous time and he, the client, obviously hadn’t meant it 
seriously. A civilised six-thirty for twelve noon was almost certainly what he 
had in mind, and if he wanted to cut up rough about it, Dirk would have no 
option but to start handing out some serious statistics. Nobody got murdered 
before lunch. But nobody. People weren’t up to it. You needed a good lunch to 
get both the blood- sugar and blood-lust levels up. Dirk had the figures to 
prove it. 

Did he, Anstey (the client’s name was Anstey, an odd, intense man in his mid-
thirties with staring eyes, a narrow yellow tie and one of the big houses in 
Lupton Road; Dirk hadn’t actually liked him very much and thought he looked as 
if he was trying to swallow a fish), did he know that 67 per cent of all known 
murderers, who expressed a preference, had had liver and bacon for lunch? And 
that another 22 per cent had been torn between either a prawn biryani or an 
omelette? That dispensed with 89 per cent of the threat at a stroke, and by the 
time you had further discounted the salad eaters and the turkey and ham sandwich 
munchers and started to look at the number of people who would contemplate such 
a course of action without any lunch at all, then you were well into the realms 
of negligibility and bordering on fantasy. 

After two-thirty, but nearer to three o’clock, was when you had to start being 
on your guard. Seriously. Even on good days. Even when you weren’t receiving 
death threats from strange gigantic men with green eyes, you had to watch people 
like a hawk after the lunching hour. The really dangerous time was after four 
o’clockish, when the streets began to fill up with marauding packs of publishers 
and agents, maddened with fettucine and kir and baying for cabs. Those were the 
times that tested men’s souls. Six-thirty in the morning? Forget it. Dirk had. 

With his resolve well stiffened Dirk stepped back out of the newsagent’s into 
the nippy air of the street and strode off. 

‘Ah, I expect you’ll be wanting to pay for that paper, then, won’t you, Mr Dirk, 
sir?’ said the newsagent, trotting gently after him. 

‘Ah, Bates,’ said Dirk loftily, ‘you and your expectations. Always expecting 
this and expecting that. May I recommend serenity to you? A life that is 
burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and 
disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.’

‘I think it’s twenty pence that one, sir,’ said Bates, tranquilly. 

‘Tell you what I’ll do, Bates, seeing as it’s you. Do you have a pen on you at 
all? A simple ball-point will suffice.’ 

Bates produced one from an inner pocket and handed it to Dirk, who then tore off 
the corner of the paper on which the price was printed and scribbled ‘IOU’ above 
it. He handed the scrap of paper to the newsagent. 

‘Shall I put this with the others, then, sir?’ 

‘Put it wherever it will give you the greatest joy, dear Bates, I would want you 
to put it nowhere less. For now, dear man, farewell.’ 

‘I expect you’ll be wanting to give me back my pen as well, Mr Dirk.’ 

‘When the times are propitious for such a transaction, my dear Bates,’ said 
Dirk, ‘you may depend upon it. For the moment, higher purposes call it. Joy, 
Bates, great joy. Bates, please let go of it.’ 

After one last listless tug, the little man shrugged and padded back towards his 
shop. 

‘I expect I’ll be seeing you later, then, Mr Dirk,’ he called out over his 
shoulder, without enthusiasm. 

Dirk gave a gracious bow of his head to the man’s retreating back, and then 
hurried on, opening the newspaper at the horoscope page as he did so. 

‘Virtually everything you decide today will be wrong,’ it said bluntly. 

Dirk slapped the paper shut with a grunt. He did not for a second hold with the 
notion that great whirling lumps of rock light years away knew something about 
your day that you didn’t. It just so happened that ‘The Great Zaganza’ was an 
old friend of his who knew when Dirk’s birthday was, and always wrote his column 
deliberately to wind him up. The paper’s circulation had dropped by nearly a 
twelfth since he had taken over doing the horoscope, and only Dirk and The Great 
Zaganza knew why. 

He hurried on, flapping his way quickly through the rest of the paper. As usual, 
there was nothing interesting. A lot of stuff about the search for Janice Smith, 
the missing airline girl from Heathrow, and how she could possibly have 
disappeared just like that. They printed the latest picture of her, which was on 
a swing with pigtails, aged six. Her father, a Mr Jim Pearce, was quoted as 
saying it was quite a good likeness, but she had grown up a lot now and was 
usually in better focus. Impatiently, Dirk tucked the paper under his arm and 
strode onwards, his thoughts on a much more interesting topic. 

Three hundred pounds a day. Plus expenses. 

He wondered how long he could reasonably expect to sustain in Mr Anstey his 
strange delusions that he was about to be murdered by a seven foot tall, shaggy-
haired creature with huge green eyes and horns, who habitually waved things at 
him: a contract written in some incomprehensible language and signed with a 
splash of blood, and also a kind of scythe. The other notable feature of this 
creature was that no one other than his client had been able to see it, which Mr 
Anstey dismissed as a trick of the light. 

Three days? Four? Dirk didn’t think he’d be able to manage a whole week with a 
straight face, but he was already looking at something like a grand for his 
trouble. And he would stick a new fridge down on the list of tangential but non-
negotiable expenses. That would be a good one. Getting the old fridge thrown out 
was definitely part of the interconnectedness of all things. 

He began to whistle at the thought of simply getting someone to come round and 
cart the thing away, turned into Lupton Road and was surprised at all the police 
cars there. And the ambulance. He didn’t like them being there. It didn’t feel 
right. It didn’t sit comfortably in his mind alongside his visions of a new 
fridge. 


CHAPTER 5

Dirk knew Lupton Road. It was a wide tree-lined affair, with large late-
Victorian terraces which stood tall and sturdily and resented police cars. 
Resented them if they turned up in numbers, that is, and if their lights were 
flashing. The inhabitants of Lupton Road liked to see a nice, well-turned-out 
single police car patrolling up and down the street in a cheerful and robust 
manner -- it kept property values cheerful and robust too. But the moment the 
lights started flashing in that knuckle-whitening blue, they cast their pallor 
not only on the neatly pointed bricks that they flashed across, but also on the 
very values those bricks represented. 

Anxious faces peered from behind the glass of neighbouring windows, and were 
irradiated by the blue strobes. 

There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way 
that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying 
that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had 
normal, good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just fuck 
off. 

Dirk hurried up the road, sweat pricking at him beneath his heavy leather coat. 
A police constable loomed up ahead of him with his arms spread out, playing at 
being a stop barrier, but Dirk swept him aside in a torrent of words to which 
the constable was unable to come up with a good response off the top of his 
head. Dirk sped on to the house. 

At the door another policeman stopped him, and Dirk was about to wave an expired 
Marks and Spencer charge card at him with a deft little flick of the wrist that 
he had practised for hours in front of a mirror on those long evenings when 
nothing much else was on, when the officer suddenly said, ‘Hey, is your name 
Gently?’ 

Dirk blinked at him warily. He made a slight grunting noise that could be either 
‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on the circumstances. 

‘Because the Chief has been looking for you.’ 

‘Has he?’ said Dirk. 

‘I recognised you from his description,’ said the officer looking him up and 
down with a slight smirk. 

‘In fact,’ continued the officer, ‘he’s been using your name in a manner that 
some might find highly offensive. He even sent Big Bob the Finder off in a car 
to find you. I can tell that he didn’t find you from the fact that you’re 
looking reasonably well. Lot of people get found by Big Bob the Finder, they 
come in a bit wobbly. Just about able to help us with our enquiries but that’s 
about all. You’d better go in. Rather you than me,’ he added quietly. 

Dirk glanced at the house. The stripped-pine shutters were closed across all the 
windows. Though in all other respects the house seemed well cared for, groomed 
into a state of clean, well-pointed affluence, the closed shutters seemed to 
convey an air of sudden devastation. 

Oddly, there seemed to be music coming from the basement, or rather, just a 
single disjointed phrase of thumping music being repeated over and over again. 
It sounded as if the stylus had got stuck in the groove of a record, and Dirk 
wondered why no one had turned it off, or at least nudged the stylus along so 
that the record could continue. The song seemed very vaguely familiar and Dirk 
guessed that he had probably heard it on the radio recently, though he couldn’t 
place it. The fragment of lyric seemed to be something like: 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i -- 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ and so on. 

‘You’ll be wanting to go down to the basement,’ said the officer impassively, as 
if that was the last thing that anyone in their right mind would be wanting to 
do. 

Dirk nodded to him curtly and hurried up the steps to the front door, which was 
standing slightly ajar. He shook his head and clenched his shoulders to try and 
stop his brain fluttering. 

He went in. 

The hallway spoke of prosperity imposed on a taste that had originally been 
formed by student living. The floors were stripped boards heavily polyurethaned, 
the walls white with Greek rugs hung on them, but expensive Greek rugs. Dirk 
would be prepared to bet (though probably not to pay up) that a thorough search 
of the house would reveal, amongst who knew what other dark secrets, five 
hundred British Telecom shares and a set of Dylan albums that was complete up to 
Blood on the Tracks. 

Another policeman was standing in the hall. He looked terribly young, and he was 
leaning very slightly back against the wall, staring at the floor and holding 
his helmet against his stomach. His face was pale and shiny. He looked at Dirk 
blankly, and nodded faintly in the direction of the stairs leading down. 

Up the stairs came the repeated sound: 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i -- 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ 

Dirk was trembling with a rage that was barging around inside him looking for 
something to hit or throttle. He wished that he could hotly deny that any of 
this was his fault, but until anybody tried to assert that it was, he couldn’t. 

‘How long have you been here?’ he said curtly. 

The young policeman had to gather himself together to answer. 

‘We arrived about half-hour ago,’ he replied in a thick voice. ‘Hell of a 
morning. Rushing around.’ 

‘Don’t tell me about rushing around,’ said Dirk, completely meaninglessly. He 
launched himself down the stairs. 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i -- 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ 

At the bottom there was a narrow corridor. The main door off it was heavily 
cracked and hanging off its hinges. It opened into a large double room. Dirk was 
about to enter when a figure emerged from it and stood barring his way. 

‘I hate the fact that this case has got you mixed up in it,’ said the figure, ‘I 
hate it very much. Tell me what you’ve got to do with it so I know exactly what 
it is I’m hating.’ 

Dirk stared at the neat, thin face in astonishment. 

‘Gilks?’ he said. 

‘Don’t stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what are those things 
what aren’t seals? Much worse than seals. Big blubbery things. Dugongs. Don’t 
stand there looking like a startled dugong. Why has that...’ Gilks pointed into 
the room behind him, ‘why has that...man in there got your name and telephone 
number on an envelope full of money?’ 

‘How m...’ started Dirk. ‘How, may I ask, do you come to be here, Gilks? What 
are you doing so far from the Fens? Surprised you find it dank enough for you 
here.’ 

‘Three hundred pounds,’ said Gilks. ‘Why?’ 

‘Perhaps you would allow me to speak to my client,’ said Dirk. 

‘Your client, eh?’ said Gilks grimly. ‘Yes. All right. Why don’t you speak to 
him? I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.’ He stood back stiffly, and 
waved Dirk into the room. 

Dirk gathered his thoughts and entered the room in a state of controlled 
composure which lasted for just over a second. 

Most of his client was sitting quietly in a comfortable chair in front of the 
hi-fi. The chair was placed in the optimal listening position -- about twice as 
far back from the speakers as the distance between them, which is generally 
considered to be ideal for stereo imaging. 

He seemed generally to be casual and relaxed with his legs crossed and a half-
finished cup of coffee on the small table beside him. Distressingly, though, his 
head was sitting neatly on the middle of the record which was revolving on the 
hi-fi turntable, with the tone arm snuggling up against the neck and constantly 
being deflected back into the same groove. As the head revolved it seemed once 
every 1.8 seconds or so to shoot Dirk a reproachful glance, as if to say, ‘See 
what happens when you don’t turn up on time like I asked you to,’ then it would 
sweep on round to the wall, round, round, and back to the front again with more 
reproach. 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ 

The room swayed a little around Dirk, and he put his hand out against the wall 
to steady it. 

‘Was there any particular service you were engaged to provide for your client?’ 
said Gilks behind him, very quietly. 

‘Oh, er, just a small matter,’ said Dirk weakly. ‘Nothing connected with all 
this. No, he, er, didn’t mention any of this kind of thing at all. Well, look, I 
can see you’re busy, I think I’d better just collect my fee and leave. You say 
he left it out for me?’ 

Having said this, Dirk sat heavily on a small bentwood chair standing behind 
him, and broke it. 

Gilks hauled him back to his feet again, and propped him against the wall. 
Briefly he left the room, then came back with a small jug of water and a glass 
on a tray. He poured some water into the glass, took it to Dirk and threw it at 
him. 

‘Better?’ 

‘No,’ spluttered Dirk, ‘can’t you at least turn the record off?’ 

‘That’s forensic’s job. Can’t touch anything till the clever dicks have been. 
Maybe that’s them now. Go out on to the patio and get some air. Chain yourself 
to the railing and beat yourself up a little, I’m pushed for time myself. And 
try to look less green, will you? It’s not your colour.’ 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i -- 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ 

Gilks turned round, looking tired and cross, and was about to go out and up the 
stairs to meet the newcomers whose voices could be heard up on the ground floor, 
when he paused and watched the head revolving patiently on its heavy platter for 
a few seconds. 

‘You know,’ he said at last, ‘these smart-alec show-off suicides really make me 
tired. They only do it to annoy.’ 

‘Suicide?’ said Dirk. 

Gilks glanced round at him. 

‘Windows secured with iron bars half an inch thick,’ he said. ‘Door locked from 
the inside with the key still in the lock. Furniture piled against the inside of 
the door. French windows to the patio locked with mortice door bolts. No signs 
of a tunnel. If it was murder then the murderer must have stopped to do a damn 
fine job of glazing on the way out. Except that all the putty’s old and painted 
over. 

‘No. Nobody’s left this room, and nobody’s broken into it except for us, and I’m 
pretty sure we didn’t do it. 

‘I haven’t time to fiddle around on this one. Obviously suicide, and just done 
to be difficult. I’ve half a mind to do the deceased for wasting police time. 
Tell you what,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘you’ve got ten minutes. If you 
come up with a plausible explanation of how he did it that I can put in my 
report, I’ll let you keep the evidence in the envelope minus 20 per cent 
compensation to me for the emotional wear and tear involved in not punching you 
in the mouth.’ 

Dirk wondered for a moment whether or not to mention the visits his client 
claimed to have received from a strange and violent green-eyed, fur-clad giant 
who regularly emerged out of nowhere bellowing about contracts and obligations 
and waving a three foot glittering-edged scythe, but decided, on balance, no. 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i -- 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ 

He was seething at himself at last. He had not been able to seethe at himself 
properly over the death of his client because it was too huge and horrific a 
burden to bear. But now he had been humiliated by Gilks, and found himself in 
too wobbly and disturbed a state to fight back, so he was able to seethe at 
himself about that. 

He turned sharply away from his tormentor and let himself out into the patio 
garden to be alone with his seethings. 

The patio was a small, paved, west-facing area at the rear which was largely 
deprived of light, cut off as it was by the high back wall of the house and by 
the high wall of some industrial building that backed on to the rear. In the 
middle of it stood, for who knew what possible reason, a stone sundial. If any 
light at all fell on the sundial you would know that it was pretty close to 
noon, GMT. Other than that, birds perched on it. A few plants sulked in pots. 

Dirk jabbed a cigarette in his mouth and burnt a lot of the end of it fiercely. 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i -- 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --’ still nagged from inside the house. 

Neat garden walls separated the patio on either side from the gardens of 
neighbouring houses. The one to the left was the same size as this one, the one 
to the right extended a little further, benefiting from the fact that the 
industrial building finished flush with the intervening garden wall. There was 
an air of well-kemptness. Nothing grand, nothing flashy, just a sense that all 
was well and that upkeep on the houses was no problem. The house to the right, 
in particular, looked as if it had had its brickwork repointed quite recently, 
and its windows reglossed. 

Dirk took a large gulp of air and stood for a second staring up into what could 
be seen of the sky, which was grey and hazy. A single dark speck was wheeling 
against the underside of the clouds. Dirk watched this for a while, glad of any 
focus for his thoughts other than the horrors of the room he had just left. He 
was vaguely aware of comings and goings within the room, of a certain amount of 
tape-measuring happening, of a feeling that photographs were being taken, and 
that severed-head-removal activities were taking place. 

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --

‘Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i --

‘Don’t pi --’ 

Somebody at last picked it up, the nagging repetition was at last hushed, and 
now the gentle sound of a distant television floated peacefully on the noontime 
air. 

Dirk, however, was having a great deal of difficulty in taking it all in. He was 
much more aware of taking a succession of huge swimmy whacks to the head, which 
were the assaults of guilt. It was not the normal background-noise type of guilt 
that comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century, and which 
Dirk was usually fairly adept at dealing with. It was an actual stunning sense 
of, ‘this specific terrible thing is specifically and terribly my fault’. All 
the normal mental moves wouldn’t let him get out of the path of the huge 
pendulum. Wham it came again, whizz, wham, again and again, wham, wham, wham. 

He tried to remember any of the details of what his late client (wham, wham) had 
said (wham) to him (wham), but it was (wham) virtually impossible (wham) with 
all this whamming taking place (wham). The man had said (wham) that (Dirk took a 
deep breath) (wham) he was being pursued (wham) by (wham) a large, hairy, green-
eyed monster armed with a scythe. 

Wham! 

Dirk had secretly smiled to himself about this. 

Whim, wham, whim, wham, whim, wham! 

And had thought, ‘What a silly man.’ 

Whim, whim, whim, whim, wham! 

A scythe (wham), and a contract (wham). 

He hadn’t known, or even had the faintest idea as to what the contract was for. 

‘Of course,’ Dirk had thought (wham). 

But he had a vague feeling that it might have something to do with a potato. 
There was a bit of a complicated story attached to that (whim, whim, whim). 

Dirk had nodded seriously at this point (wham), and made a reassuring tick 
(wham) on a pad which he kept on his desk (wham) for the express purpose of 
making reassuring ticks on (wham, wham, wham). He had prided himself at that 
moment on having managed to convey the impression that he had made a tick in a 
small box marked ‘Potatoes’. 

Wham, wham, wham, wham!

Mr Anstey had said he would explain further about the potatoes when Dirk arrived 
to carry out his task. 

And Dirk had promised (wham), easily (wham), casually (wham), with an airy wave 
of his hand (wham, wham, wham), to be there at six- thirty in the morning 
(wham), because the contract (wham) fell due at seven o’clock. 

Dirk remembered having made another tick in a notional ‘Potato contract falls 
due at 7.00 a.m.’ box. (Wh...) 

He couldn’t handle all this whamming any more. He couldn’t blame himself for 
what had happened. Well, he could. Of course he could. He did. It was, in fact, 
his fault (wham). The point was that he couldn’t continue to blame himself for 
what had happened and think clearly about it, which he was going to have to do. 
He would have to dig this horrible thing (wham) up by the roots, and if he was 
going to be fit to do that he had somehow to divest himself (wham) of this 
whamming. 

A huge wave of anger surged over him as he contemplated his predicament and the 
tangled distress of his life. He hated this neat patio. He hated all this 
sundial stuff, and all these neatly painted windows, all these hideously trim 
roofs. He wanted to blame it all on the paintwork rather than on himself, on the 
revoltingly tidy patio paving-stones, on the sheer disgusting abomination of the 
neatly repointed brickwork. 

‘Excuse me...’ 

‘What?’ He whirled round, caught unawares by this intrusion into his private 
raging of a quiet polite voice. 

‘Are you connected with...?’ The woman indicated all the unpleasantness and the 
lower-ground-floorness and the horrible sort of policeness of things next door 
to her with a little floating movement of her wrist. Her wrist wore a red 
bracelet which matched the frames of her glasses. She was looking over the 
garden wall from the house on the right, with an air of slightly anxious 
distaste. 

Dirk glared at her speechlessly. She looked about forty-somethingish and neat, 
with an instant and unmistakable quality of advertising about her. 

She gave a troubled sigh. 

‘I know it’s probably all very terrible and everything,’ she said, ‘but do you 
think it will take long? We only called in the police because the noise of that 
ghastly record was driving us up the wall. It’s all a bit...’ 

She gave him a look of silent appeal, and Dirk decided that it could all be her 
fault. She could, as far as he was concerned, take the blame for everything 
while he sorted it out. She deserved it, if only for wearing a bracelet like 
that. 

Without a word, he turned his back on her, and took his fury back inside the 
house where it began rapidly to freeze into something hard and efficient. 

‘Gilks!’ he said. ‘Your smart-alec suicide theory. I like it. It works for me. 
And I think I see how the clever bastard pulled it off. Bring me pen. Bring me 
paper.’ 

He sat down with a flourish at the cherrywood farmhouse table which occupied the 
centre of the rear portion of the room and deftly sketched out a scheme of 
events which involved a number of household or kitchen implements, a swinging, 
weighted light fitting, some very precise timing, and hinged on the vital fact 
that the record turntable was Japanese. 

‘That should keep your forensic chaps happy,’ said Dirk briskly to Gilks. The 
forensic chaps glanced at it, took in its salient points and liked them. They 
were simple, implausible, and of exactly that nature which a coroner who liked 
the same sort of holidays in Marbella which they did would be sure to relish. 

‘Unless,’ said Dirk casually, ‘you are interested in the notion that the 
deceased had entered into some kind of diabolical contract with a supernatural 
agency for which payment was now being exacted?’ 

The forensic chaps glanced at each other and shook their heads. There was a 
strong sense from them that the morning was wearing on and that this kind of 
talk was only introducing unnecessary complications into a case which otherwise 
could be well behind them before lunch. 

Dirk made a satisfied shrug, peeled off his share of the evidence and, with a 
final nod to the constabulary, made his way back upstairs.

As he reached the hallway, it suddenly became apparent to him that the gentle 
sounds of day-time television which he had heard from out in the garden had 
previously been masked from inside by the insistent sound of the record stuck in 
its groove. 

He was surprised now to realise that they were in fact coming from somewhere 
upstairs in this house. With a quick look round to see that he was not observed 
he stood on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the upstairs floors of 
the house and glanced up them in surprise. 


CHAPTER 6

The stairs were carpeted with a tastefully austere matting type of substance. 
Dirk quietly made his way up them, past some tastefully dried large things in a 
pot that stood on the first landing, and looked into the rooms on the first 
floor. They, too, were tasteful and dried.

The larger of the two bedrooms was the only one that showed any signs of current 
use. It had clearly been designed to allow the morning light to play on 
delicately arranged flowers and duvets stuffed with something like hay, but 
there was a feeling that socks and used shaving heads were instead beginning to 
gather the room into their grip. There was a distinct absence of anything female 
in the room -- the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it 
on a wall. There was an air of tension and of sadness and of things needing to 
be cleaned out from under the bed. 

The bathroom, which opened out from it, had a gold disc hung on the wall in 
front of the lavatory, for sales of five hundred thousand copies of a record 
called Hot Potato by a band called Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo. Dirk 
had a vague recollection of having read part of an interview with the leader of 
the band (there were only two of them, and one of them was the leader) in a 
Sunday paper. He had been asked about their name, and he had said that there was 
an interesting story about it, though it turned out not to be. ‘It can mean 
whatever people want it to mean,’ he had added with a shrug from the sofa of his 
manager’s office somewhere off Oxford Street. 

Dirk remembered visualising the journalist nodding politely and writing this 
down. A vile knot had formed in Dirk’s stomach which he had eventually softened 
with gin. 

‘Hot Potato...’ thought Dirk. It suddenly occurred to him looking at the gold 
disc hanging in its red frame, that the record on which the late Mr Anstey’s 
head had been perched was obviously this one. Hot Potato. Don’t pick it up. 

What could that mean? 

Whatever people wanted it to mean, Dirk thought with bad grace. 

The other thing that he remembered now about the interview was that Pain (the 
leader of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo was called Pain) claimed to 
have written the lyrics down more or less verbatim from a conversation which he 
or somebody had overheard in a café or a sauna or an aeroplane or something like 
that. Dirk wondered how the originators of the conversation would feel to hear 
their words being repeated in the circumstances in which he had just heard them. 

He peered more closely at the label in the centre of the gold record. At the top 
of the label it said simply, ‘ARRGH!’, while underneath the actual title were 
the writers’ credits -- ‘Paignton, Mulville, Anstey’. 

Mulville was presumably the member of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo who 
wasn’t the leader. And Geoff Anstey’s inclusion on the writing credits of a 
major-selling single was probably what had paid for this house. When Anstey had 
talked about the contract having something to do with Potato he had assumed that 
Dirk knew what he meant. And he, Dirk, had as easily assumed that Anstey was 
blithering. It was very easy to assume that someone who was talking about green-
eyed monsters with scythes was also blithering when he talked about potatoes. 

Dirk sighed to himself with deep uneasiness. He took a dislike to the neat way 
the trophy was hanging on the wall and adjusted it a little so that it hung at a 
more humane and untidy angle. Doing this caused an envelope to fall out from 
behind the frame and flutter towards the floor. Dirk tried unsuccessfully to 
catch it. With an unfit grunt he bent over and picked the thing up. 

It was a largish, cream envelope of rich, heavy paper, roughly slit open at one 
end, and resealed with Sellotape. In fact it looked as if it had been opened and 
resealed with fresh layers of tape many times, an impression which was borne out 
by the number of names to which the envelope had in its time been addressed --
each successively crossed out and replaced by another. 

The last name on it was that of Geoff Anstey. At least Dirk assumed it was the 
last name because it was the only one that had not been crossed out, and crossed 
out heavily. Dirk peered at some of the other names, trying to make them out. 

Some memory was stirred by a couple of the names which he could just about 
discern, but he needed to examine the envelope much more closely. He had been 
meaning to buy himself a magnifying glass ever since he had become a detective, 
but had never got around to it. He also did not possess a penknife, so 
reluctantly he decided that the most prudent course was to tuck the envelope 
away for the moment in one of the deeper recesses of his coat and examine it 
later in privacy. 

He glanced quickly behind the frame of the gold disc to see if any other goodies 
might emerge but was disappointed, and so he quit the bathroom and resumed his 
exploration of the house. 

The other bedroom was neat and soulless. Unused. A pine bed, a duvet and an old 
battered chest of drawers that had been revived by being plunged into a vat of 
acid were its main features. Dirk pulled the door of it closed behind him, and 
started to ascend the small, wobbly, white-painted stairway that led up to an 
attic from which the sounds of Bugs Bunny could be heard. 

At the top of the stairs was a minute landing which opened on one side into a 
bathroom so small that it would best be used by standing outside and sticking 
into it whichever limb you wanted to wash. The door to it was kept ajar by a 
length of green hosepipe which trailed from the cold tap of the wash-basin, out 
of the bathroom, across the landing and into the only other room here at the top 
of the house. 

It was an attic room with a severely pitched roof which offered only a few spots 
where a person of anything approaching average height could stand up. 

Dirk stood hunched in the doorway and surveyed its contents, nervous of what he 
might find amongst them. There was a general grunginess about the place. The 
curtains were closed and little light made it past them into the room, which was 
otherwise illuminated only by the flickering glow of an animated rabbit. An 
unmade bed with dank, screwed-up sheets was pushed under a particularly low 
angle of the ceiling. Part of the walls and the more nearly vertical surfaces of 
the ceiling were covered with pictures crudely cut out of magazines. 

There didn’t seem to be any common theme or purpose behind the cuttings. As well 
as a couple of pictures of flashy German cars and the odd bra advertisement, 
there were also a badly torn picture of a fruit flan, part of an advertisement 
for life insurance and other random fragments which suggested they had been 
selected and arranged with a dull, bovine indifference to any meaning that any 
of them might have or effect they might achieve. 

The hosepipe curled across the floor and led around the side of an elderly 
armchair pulled up in front of the television set. 

The rabbit rampaged. The glow of his rampagings played on the frayed edges of 
the armchair. Bugs was wrestling with the controls of an aeroplane which was 
plunging to the ground. Suddenly he saw a button marked ‘Autopilot’ and pressed 
it. A cupboard opened and a robot pilot clambered out, took one look at the 
situation and baled out. The plane hurtled on towards the ground but, luckily, 
ran out of fuel just before reaching it and so the rabbit was saved. 

Dirk could also see the top of a head. 

The hair of this head was dark, matted and greasy. Dirk watched it for a long, 
uneasy moment before advancing slowly into the room to see what, if anything, it 
was attached to. His relief at discovering, as he rounded the armchair, that the 
head was, after all, attached to a living body was a little marred by the sight 
of the living body to which it was attached. 

Slumped in the armchair was a boy. 

He was probably about thirteen or fourteen, and although he didn’t look ill in 
any specific physical way, he was definitely not a well person. His hair sagged 
on his head, his head sagged on his shoulders, and he lay in the armchair in a 
sort of limp, crumpled way, as if he’d been hurled there from a passing train. 
He was dressed merely in a cheap leather jacket and sleeping-bag. 

Dirk stared at him. 

Who was he? What was a boy doing here watching television in a house where 
someone had just been decapitated? Did he know what had happened? Did Gilks know 
about him? Had Gilks even bothered to come up here? It was, after all, several 
flights of stairs for a busy policeman with a tricky suicide on his hands. 

After Dirk had been standing there for twenty seconds or so, the boy’s eyes 
climbed up towards him, failed utterly to acknowledge him in any way at all, and 
then dropped again and locked back on to the rabbit. 

Dirk was unused to making quite such a minuscule impact on anybody. He checked 
to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and 
that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway. 

He felt momentarily deflated and said, ‘Er...’ by way of self introduction, but 
it didn’t get the boy’s attention. He didn’t like this. The kid was deliberately 
and maliciously watching television at him. He frowned. There was a kind of 
steamy tension building in the room it seemed to Dirk, a kind of difficult, 
hissing quality to the whole air of the place which he did not know how to 
respond to. It rose in intensity and then suddenly ended with an abrupt click 
which made Dirk start. 

The boy unwound himself like a slow, fat snake, leaned sideways over the far 
side of the armchair and made some elaborate unseen preparations which clearly 
involved, as Dirk now realised, an electric kettle. When he resumed his earlier 
splayed posture it was with the addition of a plastic pot clutched in his right 
hand, from which he forked rubbery strands of steaming gunk into his mouth. 

The rabbit brought his affairs to a conclusion and gave way to a jeering 
comedian who wished the viewers to buy a certain brand of lager on the basis of 
nothing better than his own hardly disinterested say- so. 

Dirk felt that it was time to make a slightly greater impression on the 
proceedings than he had so far managed to do. He stepped forward directly into 
the boy’s line of sight. 

‘Kid,’ Dirk said in a tone that he hoped would sound firm but gentle and not in 
any way at all patronising or affected or gauche, ‘I need to know who --’

He was distracted at that moment by the sight which met him from the new 
position in which he was standing. On the other side of the armchair there was a 
large, half full catering-size box of Pot Noodles, a large, half full catering-
size box of Mars Bars, a half demolished pyramid of cans of soft drink, and the 
end of the hosepipe. The hosepipe ended in a plastic tap nozzle, and was 
obviously used for refilling the kettle. 

Dirk had simply been going to ask the boy who he was, but seen from this angle 
the family resemblance was unmistakable. He was clearly the son of the lately 
decapitated Geoffrey Anstey. Perhaps this behaviour was just his way of dealing 
with shock. Or perhaps he really didn’t know what had happened. Or perhaps he... 

Dirk hardly liked to think. 

In fact he was finding it hard to think clearly while the television beside him 
was, on behalf of a toothpaste manufacturing company, trying to worry him deeply 
about some of the things which might be going on in his mouth. 

‘OK,’ he said, ‘I don’t like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult 
and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually 
realise that this is a difficult and distressing time for you.’ 

Nothing. 

All right, thought Dirk, time for a little judicious toughness. He leant back 
against the wall, stuck his hands in his pockets in an OK- if-that’s-the-way-
you-want-to-play-it manner, stared moodily at the floor for a few seconds, then 
swung his head up and let the boy have a hard look right between the eyes. 

‘I have to tell you, kid,’ he said tersely, ‘your father’s dead.’ 

This might have worked if it hadn’t been for a very popular and long-running 
commercial which started at that moment. It seemed to Dirk to be a particularly 
astounding example of the genre. 

The opening sequence showed the angel Lucifer being hurled from heaven into the 
pit of hell where he then lay on a burning lake until a passing demon arrived 
and gave him a can of a fizzy soft drink called sHades. Lucifer took it and 
tried it. He greedily guzzled the whole contents of the can and then turned to 
camera, slipped on some Porsche design sunglasses, said, ‘Now we’re really 
cookin’!’ and lay back basking in the glow of the burning coals being heaped 
around him. 

At that point an impossibly deep and growly American voice, which sounded as if 
it had itself crawled from the pit of hell, or at least from a Soho basement 
drinking club to which it was keen to return as soon as possible to marinade 
itself into shape for the next voice-over, said, ‘sHades. The Drink from 
Hell...’ and the can revolved a little to obscure the initial ‘s’, and thus 
spell ‘Hades’. 

The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk, but what was one 
tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a raging torrent? 

Lucifer then mugged at the camera again and said, ‘I could really fall for this 
stuff...’ and just in case the viewer had been rendered completely insensate by 
all these goings-on, the opening shot of Lucifer being hurled from heaven was 
briefly replayed in order to emphasise the word ‘fall’. 

The boy’s attention was entirely captivated by this. 

Dirk squatted down in between the boy and the screen. 

‘Listen to me,’ he began. 

The boy craned his neck round to look past Dirk at the screen. He had to 
redistribute his limbs in the chair in order to be able to do this and continue 
to fork Pot Noodle into himself. 

‘Listen,’ insisted Dirk again. 

Dirk felt he was beginning to be in serious danger of losing the upper hand in 
the situation. It wasn’t merely that the boy’s attention was on the television, 
it was that nothing else seemed to have any meaning or independent existence for 
him at all. Dirk was merely a featureless object in the way of the television. 
The boy seemed to bear him no malice, he merely wished to see past him. 

‘Look, can we turn this off for a moment?’ Dirk said, and he tried not to make 
it sound testy. 

The boy did not respond. Maybe there was a slight stiffening of the shoulders, 
maybe it was a shrug. Dirk turned around and was at a loss to find which button 
to push to turn the television off. The whole control panel seemed to be 
dedicated to the single purpose of keeping itself turned on -- there was no 
single button marked ‘on’ or ‘off’. Eventually Dirk simply disconnected the set 
from the power socket on the wall and turned back to the boy, who broke his 
nose. 

Dirk felt his septum crunching from the terrific impact of the boy’s forehead as 
they both toppled heavily backwards against the set, but the noise of the bone 
breaking, and the noise of his own cry of pain as it broke was completely 
obliterated by the howling screams of rage that erupted from the boy’s throat. 
Dirk flailed helplessly to try and protect himself from the fury of the 
onslaught, but the boy was on top with his elbow in Dirk’s eye, his knees 
pounding first on Dirk’s ribcage, then his jaw and then on Dirk’s already 
traumatised nose, as he scrambled over him to reconnect the power to the 
television. He then settled back comfortably into the armchair and watched with 
a moody and unsettled eye as the picture reassembled itself. 

‘You could at least have waited for the news,’ he said in a dull voice. 

Dirk gaped at him. He sat huddled on the floor, coddling his bleeding nose in 
his hands, and gaped at the monstrously disinterested creature. 

‘Whhfff...fffmmm...nnggh!’ he protested, and then gave up for the time being, 
while he probed his nose for the damage. 

There was definitely a wobbly bit that clicked nastily between his fingers, and 
the whole thing seemed suddenly to be a horribly unfamiliar shape. He fished a 
handkerchief out of his pocket and held it up to his face. Blood spread easily 
through it. He staggered to his feet, brushed aside non-existent offers of help, 
stomped out of the room and into the tiny bathroom. There, he yanked the 
hosepipe angrily off the tap, found a towel, soaked it in cold water and held it 
to his face for a minute or two until the flow of blood gradually slowed to a 
trickle and stopped. He stared at himself in the mirror. His nose was quite 
definitely leaning at a slightly rakish angle. He tried bravely to shift it, but 
not bravely enough. It hurt abominably, so he contented himself with dabbing at 
it a little more with the wet towel and swearing quietly. 

Then he stood there for a second or two longer, leaning against the basin, 
breathing heavily, and practising saying ‘All right!’ fiercely into the mirror. 
It came out as ‘Aww-bwigh!’ and lacked any real authority. When he felt 
sufficiently braced, or at least as braced as he was likely to feel in the 
immediate future, he turned and stalked grimly back into the den of the beast. 

The beast was sitting quietly absorbing news of some of the exciting and 
stimulating game shows that the evening held in store for the determined viewer, 
and did not look up as Dirk re-entered. 

Dirk walked briskly over to the window and drew the curtains sharply back, half 
hoping that the beast might shrivel up shrieking if exposed to daylight, but 
other than wrinkling up its nose, it did not react. A dark shadow flapped 
briefly across the window, but the angle was such that Dirk could not see what 
caused it. 

He turned and faced the boy-beast. The midday news bulletin was starting on 
television, and the boy seemed somehow a little more open, a little more 
receptive to the world outside the flickering coloured rectangle. He glanced up 
at Dirk with a sour, tired look. 

‘Whaddayawananyway?’ he said. 

‘I ted you whad I wad,’ said Dirk, fiercely but hopelessly, ‘I wad...hag od a 
bobed...I gnow thad faith!’ 

Dirk’s attention had switched suddenly to the television screen, where a rather 
more up-to-date photograph of the missing airline check- in girl was being 
shown. 

‘Whadayadoingere?’ said the boy. 

‘Jjchhhhh!’ said Dirk, and perched himself down on the arm of the chair, peering 
intently at the face on the screen. It had been taken about a year ago, before 
the girl had learnt about corporate lipgloss. She had frizzy hair and a frumpy, 
put-upon look. 

‘Whoareyou? Wassgoinon?’ insisted the boy. 

‘Loog, chuddub,’ snapped Dirk, ‘I’b tryid to wodge dthith!’ 

The newscaster said that the police professed themselves to be mystified by the 
fact that there was no trace of Janice Smith at the scene of the incident. They 
explained that there was a limit to the number of times they could search the 
same buildings, and appealed for anyone who might have a clue as to her 
whereabouts to come forward. 

‘Thadth by segradry! Thadth Mith Pearth!’ exclaimed Dirk in astonishment. 

The boy was not interested in Dirk’s ex-secretary, and gave up trying to attract 
Dirk’s attention. He wriggled out of the sleeping-bag and sloped off to the 
bathroom. 

Dirk sat staring at the television, bewildered that he hadn’t realised before 
who the missing girl was. Still, there was no reason why he should have done, he 
realised. Marriage had changed her name, and this was the first time they had 
shown a photograph that actually identified her. So far he had taken no real 
interest in the strange incident at the airport, but now it demanded his 
attention. 

The explosion was now officially designated an ‘Act of God’. 

But, thought Dirk, what god? And why? 

What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to 
catch the 15.37 flight to Oslo? 

After the miserable lassitude of the last few weeks, he suddenly had a great 
deal that required his immediate attention. He frowned in deep thought for a few 
moments, and hardly noticed when the beast-boy snuck back in and snuggled back 
into his sleeping-bag just in time for the advertisements to start. The first 
one showed how a perfectly ordinary stock cube could form the natural focus of a 
normal, happy family life.

Dirk leapt to his feet, but even as he was about to start questioning the boy 
again his heart sank as he looked at him. The beast was far away, sunk back in 
his dark, flickering lair, and Dirk did not feel inclined to disturb him again 
at the moment. 

He contented himself with barking at the unresponding child that he would be 
back, and bustled heavily down the stairs, his big leather coat flapping madly 
behind him. 

In the hallway he encountered the loathed Gilks once more. 

‘What happened to you?’ said the policeman sharply, catching sight of Dirk’s 
bruised and bulging nose. 

‘Ondly whad you dold me,’ said Dirk, innocently. ‘I bead bythelf ub.’ 

Gilks demanded to know what he had been doing, and Dirk generously explained 
that there was a witness upstairs with some interesting information to impart. 
He suggested that Gilks go and have a word with him, but that it would be best 
if he turned off the television first. 

Gilks nodded curtly. He started to go up the stairs, but Dirk stopped him. 

‘Doedth eddydthig dthrike you adth dthraydge aboud dthidth houdth?’ he said. 

‘What did you say?’ said Gilks in irritation. 

‘Subbthig dthraydge,’ said Dirk. 

‘Something what?’ 

‘Dthraydge!’ insisted Dirk. 

‘Strange?’ 

‘Dthadth right, dthraydge.’ 

Gilks shrugged. ‘Like what?’ he said. 

‘Id dtheemdth to be cobbleedly dthouledth.’ 

‘Completely what?’ 

‘Dthouledth!’ he tried again. ‘Thoul-leth! I dthigg dthadth dverry 
idderedthigg!’ 

With that he doffed his hat politely, and swept on out of the house and up the 
street, where an eagle swooped out of the sky at him and came within a whisker 
of causing him to fall under a 73 bus on its way south. For the next twenty 
minutes, hideous yells and screams emanated from the top floor of the house in 
Lupton Road, and caused much tension among the neighbours. The ambulance took 
away the upper and lower remains of Mr Anstey and also a policeman with a 
bleeding face. For a short while after this, there was quietness. 

Then another police car drew up outside the house. A lot of ‘Bob’s here’ type of 
remarks floated from the house, as an extremely large and burly policeman heaved 
himself out of the car and bustled up the steps. A few minutes and a great deal 
of screaming and yelling later he re- emerged also clutching his face, and drove 
off in deep dudgeon, squealing his tyres in a violent and unnecessary manner. 

Twenty minutes later a van arrived from which emerged another policeman carrying 
a tiny pocket television set. He entered the house, and re-emerged a short while 
later leading a docile thirteen-year-old boy, who was content with his new toy. 

Once all policemen had departed, save for the single squad car which remained 
parked outside to keep watch on the house, a large, hairy, green-eyed figure 
emerged from its hiding place behind one of the molecules in the large basement 
room. 

It propped its scythe against one of the hi-fi speakers, dipped a long, gnarled 
finger in the almost congealed pool of blood that had collected on the deck of 
the turntable, smeared the finger across the bottom of a sheet of thick, 
yellowing paper, and then disappeared off into a dark and hidden otherworld 
whistling a strange and vicious tune and returning only briefly to collect its 
scythe. 


CHAPTER 7

A little earlier in the morning, at a comfortable distance from all these 
events, set at a comfortable distance from a well-proportioned window through 
which cool mid-morning light was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a 
white bed. A newspaper sat like a half- collapsed tent on the floor, where it 
had been hurled two minutes before, at shortly after ten o’clock by the clock on 
the bedside table.

The room was not large, but was furnished in excessively bland good taste, as if 
it were a room in an expensive private hospital or clinic, which is exactly what 
it was -- the Woodshead Hospital, set in its own small but well-kempt grounds on 
the outskirts of a small but well-kempt village in the Cotswolds. 

The man was awake but not glad to be. 

His skin was very delicately old, like finely stretched, translucent parchment, 
delicately freckled. His exquisitely frail hands lay slightly curled on the pure 
white linen sheets and quivered very faintly. 

His name was variously given as Mr Odwin, or Wodin, or Odin. He was -- is -- a 
god, and furthermore he was that least good of all gods to be alongside, a cross 
god. His one eye glinted. 

He was cross because of what he had been reading in the newspapers, which was 
that another god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance of himself. It 
didn’t say that in the papers, of course. It didn’t say, ‘God cuts loose, makes 
nuisance of himself in airport,’ it merely described the resulting devastation 
and was at a loss to draw any meaningful conclusions from it. 

The story had been deeply unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, on account of its 
perplexing inconclusiveness, its going-nowhereness and the irritating (from the 
newspapers’ point of view) lack of any good solid carnage. There was of course a 
mystery attached to the lack of carnage, but a newspaper preferred a good whack 
of carnage to a mere mystery any day of the week. 

Odin, however, had no such difficulty in knowing what was going on. The accounts 
had ‘Thor’ written all over them in letters much too big for anyone other than 
another god to see. He had thrown this morning’s paper aside in irritation, and 
was now trying to concentrate on his relaxation exercises in order to avoid 
getting too disturbed about all this. These involved breathing in in a certain 
way and breathing out in a certain other way and were good for his blood 
pressure and so on. It was not as if he was about to die or anything -- ha! --
but there was no doubt that at his time of life -- ha! -- he preferred to take 
things easy and look after himself. 

Best of all he liked to sleep. 

Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish 
periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the 
business seriously. He enjoyed a good night’s sleep and wouldn’t miss one for 
the world, but he didn’t regard it as anything even half approaching enough. He 
liked to be asleep by half past eleven in the morning if possible, and if that 
could come directly after a nice leisurely lie-in then so much the better. A 
little light breakfast and a quick trip to the bathroom while fresh linen was 
applied to his bed is really all the activity he liked to undertake, and he took 
care that it didn’t jangle the sleepiness out of him and thus disturb his 
afternoon of napping. Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep, and 
this he regarded as a good snooze. He had also slept through the whole of 1986 
and hadn’t missed it. 

But he knew to his deep disgruntlement that he would shortly have to arise and 
undertake a sacred and irritating trust. Sacred, because it was godlike, or at 
least involved gods, and irritating because of the particular god that it 
involved. 

Sneakily, he twitched the curtains at a distance, using nothing but his divine 
will. He sighed heavily. He needed to think and, what was more, it was time for 
his morning visit to the bathroom. 

He rang for the orderly. 

The orderly arrived promptly in his well-pressed loose green tunic, good-
morninged cheerfully, and bustled around locating bedroom slippers and dressing-
gown. He helped Odin out of bed, which was a little like rolling a stuffed crow 
out of a box, and escorted him slowly to the bathroom. Odin walked stiffly, like 
a head hung between two heavy stilts draped in striped Viyella and white 
towelling. The orderly knew Odin as Mr Odwin, and didn’t realise that he was a 
god, which was something that Odin tended to keep quiet about, and wished that 
Thor would too. 

Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it. It was inappropriate. 
He seemed unwilling, or unable, or maybe just too stupid to understand or 
accept...Odin stopped himself. He sensed that he was beginning mentally to rant. 
He would have to consider calmly what next to do about Thor, and he was on his 
way to the right place for a good think. 

As soon as Odin had completed his stately hobble to the bathroom door, two 
nurses hurried in and stripped and remade the bed with immense precision, 
patting down the fresh linen, pulling it taut, turning it and tucking it. One of 
the nurses, clearly the senior, was plump and matronly, the other younger, 
darker and more generally bird- like. The newspaper was whisked off the floor 
and neatly refolded, the floor was briskly Hoovered, the curtains hooked back, 
the flowers and the untouched fruit replaced with fresh flowers and fresh fruit 
that would, like every piece of fruit before them, remain untouched. 

When after a little while the old god’s morning ablutions had been completed and 
the bathroom door reopened, the room had been transformed. The actual 
differences were tiny, of course, but the effect was of a subtle but magical 
transformation into something cool and fresh. Odin nodded in quiet satisfaction 
to see it. He made a little show of inspecting the bed, like a monarch 
inspecting a line of soldiers. 

‘Is it well tucked?’ he asked in his old and whispery voice. 

‘It is very well tucked, Mr Odwin,’ said the senior nurse with an obsequious 
beam. 

‘Is it neatly turned?’ It clearly was. This was merely a ritual. 

‘Turned very neatly indeed, Mr Odwin,’ said the nurse, ‘I supervised the turning 
down of the sheets myself.’ 

‘I’m glad of that, Sister Bailey, very glad,’ said Odin. ‘You have a fine eye 
for a trimly turned fold. It alarms me to know what I shall do without you.’ 

‘Well, I’m not about to go anywhere, Mr Odwin,’ said Sister Bailey, oozing happy 
reassurance. 

‘But you won’t last for ever, Sister Bailey,’ said Odin. It was a remark that 
puzzled Sister Bailey on the times she had heard it, because of its apparent 
extreme callousness. 

‘Sure, and none of us lasts for over, Mr Odwin,’ she said gently as she and the 
other nurse between them managed the difficult task of lifting Odin back into 
bed while keeping his dignity intact. 

‘You’re Irish aren’t you, Sister Bailey?’ he asked, once he was properly 
settled. 

‘I am indeed so, Mr Odwin.’ 

‘Knew an Irishman once. Finn something. Told me a lot of stuff I didn’t need to 
know. Never told me about the linen. Still know now.’ 

He nodded curtly at this memory and lowered his head stiffly back on to the 
firmly plumped up pillows and ran the back of his finely freckled hand over the 
folded-back linen sheet. Quite simply he was in love with linen. Clean, lightly 
starched, white Irish linen, pressed, folded, tucked -- the words themselves 
were almost a litany of desire for him. In centuries nothing had obsessed him or 
moved him so much as linen now did. He could not for the life of him understand 
how he could ever have cared for anything else. 

Linen. 

And sleep. Sleep and linen. Sleep in linen. Sleep. 

Sister Bailey regarded him with a sort of proprietary fondness. She did not know 
that he was a god as such, in fact she thought he was probably an old film 
producer or Nazi war criminal. Certainly he had an accent she couldn’t quite 
place and his careless civility, his natural selfishness and his obsession with 
personal hygiene spoke of a past that was rich with horrors. 

If she could have been transported to where she might see her secretive patient 
enthroned, warrior father of the warrior Gods of Asgard, she would not have been 
surprised. That is not quite true, in fact. She would have been startled quite 
out of her wits. But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent 
with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered from the shock 
of discovering that virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to 
believe in was true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race 
particularly needed it to be true any more. 

Odin dismissed his medical attendants with a gesture, having first asked for his 
personal assistant to be found and sent to him once more.

This caused Sister Bailey to tighten her lips just a very little. She did not 
like Mr Odwin’s personal assistant, general factotum, manservant, call him what 
you will. His eyes were malevolent, he made her jump, and she strongly suspected 
him of making unspeakable suggestions to her nurses during their tea breaks. 

He had what Sister Bailey supposed was what people meant by an olive complexion, 
in that it was extraordinarily close to being green. Sister Bailey was convinced 
that it was not right at all. 

She was of course the last person to judge somebody by the colour of their skin 
-- or if not absolutely the last, she had at least done it as recently as 
yesterday afternoon when an African diplomat had been brought in to have some 
gallstones removed and she had conceived an instant resentment of him. She 
didn’t like him. She couldn’t say exactly what it was she didn’t like about him, 
because she was a nurse, not a taxi-driver, and she wouldn’t let her personal 
feelings show for an instant. She was much too professional, much too good at 
her job, and treated everyone with a more or less equal efficient and cheerful 
courtesy, even, she thought -- and a profound iciness settled on her at this 
point -- even Mr Rag. 

‘Mr Rag’ was the name of Mr Odwin’s personal assistant. There was nothing she 
could do about it. It was not her place to criticise Mr Odwin’s personal 
arrangements. But if it had been her business, which it wasn’t, then she would 
greatly have preferred it, and not just for herself, but for Mr Odwin’s own 
well-being as well, which was the important thing, if he could have employed 
someone who didn’t give her the absolute heebie-jeebies, that was all. 

She thought no more about it, merely went to look for him. She had been relieved 
to discover when she came on duty this morning that Mr Rag had left the premises 
the previous night, but had then, with a keen sense of disappointment, spotted 
him returning about an hour or so ago.

She found him exactly where he was not supposed to be. He was squatting on one 
of the seats in the visitors’ waiting-room wearing what looked horribly like a 
soiled and discarded doctor’s gown that was much too big for him. Not only that, 
but he was playing a thinly unmusical tune on a sort of pipe that he had 
obviously carved out of a large disposable hypodermic syringe which he 
absolutely should not have had. 

He glanced up at her with his quick, dancing eyes, grinned and continued to 
tootle and squeak, only significantly louder. 

Sister Bailey ran through in her mind all the things that it was completely 
pointless to say about either the coat or the syringe, or about him being in the 
visitors’ room frightening, or preparing to frighten, the visitors. She knew she 
wouldn’t be able to stand the air of injured innocence with which he would 
reply, or the preposterous absurdity of his answers. Her only course was simply 
to let it pass and just get him away from the room and out of the way as quickly 
as possible. 

‘Mr Odwin would like to see you,’ she said. She tried to jam some of her normal 
lilting quality into her voice, but it just wouldn’t go. She wished his eyes 
would stop dancing like that. Apart from finding it highly disturbing from both 
a medical and aesthetic point of view she also could not help but be piqued by 
the impression it conveyed that there were at least thirty-seven things in the 
room more interesting than her. 

He gazed at her in this disconcerting manner for a few seconds then, muttering 
that there was no peace for the wicked, not even the extremely wicked, he pushed 
past Sister Bailey and skedaddled up the corridor to receive instructions from 
his lord and master, quickly, before his lord and master fell asleep. 


CHAPTER 8

By the end of the morning Kate had discharged herself from hospital. There were 
some initial difficulties involved in this because first the ward sister and 
then the doctor in charge of Kate’s case were adamant that she was in no fit 
state to leave. She had only just emerged from a minor coma and she needed care, 
she needed -- 

‘Pizza --’ insisted Kate.

-- rest, she needed -- 

‘-- my own home, and fresh air. The air in here is horrible. It smells like a 
vacuum cleaner’s armpit.’ 

-- further medication, and should definitely remain under observation for anoth
her day or so until they were satisfied that she had made a full recovery. 

At least, they were fairly adamant. During the course of the morning Kate 
demanded and got a telephone and started trying to order pizza to be delivered 
to her ward. She phoned around all of the least co- operative pizza restaurants 
she knew in London, harangued them, then made some noisily unsuccessful attempts 
to muster a motorbike to roam around the West End and try and pick up for her an 
American Hot with a list of additional peppers and mushrooms and cheeses which 
the controller of the courier service refused even to attempt to remember, and 
after an hour or so of this sort of behaviour the objections to Kate discharging 
herself from the hospital gradually fell away like petals from an autumn rose. 

And so, a little after lunchtime, she was standing on a bleak West London street 
feeling weak and shaky but in charge of herself. She had with her the empty, 
tattered remains of the garment bag which she had refused to relinquish, and 
also a small scrap of paper in her purse, which had a single name scribbled on 
it. 

She hailed a taxi and sat in the back with her eyes closed most of the way back 
to her home in Primrose Hill. She climbed up the stairs and let herself into her 
top-floor flat. There were ten messages on her answering machine, which she 
simply erased without listening to. 

She threw open the window in her bedroom and for a moment or two leaned out of 
it at the rather dangerous and awkward angle which allowed her to see a patch of 
the park. It was a small corner patch, with just a couple of plane trees 
standing in it. The backs of some of the intervening houses framed it, or 
rather, just failed totally to obscure it, and made it very personal and private 
to Kate in a way which a vast, sweeping vista would not have been. 

On one occasion she had gone to this corner of the park and walked around the 
invisible perimeter that marked out the limits of what she could see, and had 
come very close to feeling that this was her own domain. She had even patted the 
plane trees in a proprietorial sort of way, and had then sat beneath them 
watching the sun going down over London -- over its badly spoiled skyline and 
its non-delivering pizza restaurants -- and had come away with a profound sense 
of something or other, though she wasn’t quite certain what. Still, she had told 
herself, these days she should feel grateful for a profound sense of anything at 
all, however unspecific. 

She hauled herself in from the window, left it wide open in spite of the chill 
of the outside air, padded through into the small bathroom and ran the bath. It 
was a bath of the sprawling Edwardian type which took up a wonderfully 
disproportionate amount of the space available, and encompassed most of the rest 
of the room with cream-painted pipes. The taps seethed. As soon as the room was 
sufficiently full of steam to be warm, Kate undressed and then went and opened 
the large bathroom cupboard. 

She felt faintly embarrassed by the sheer profusion of things she had for 
putting in baths, but she was for some reason incapable of passing any chemist 
or herb shop without going in to be seduced by some glass-stoppered bottle of 
something blue or green or orange and oily that was supposed to restore the 
natural balance of some vague substance she didn’t even know she was supposed to 
have in her pores. 

She paused, trying to choose. 

Something pink? Something with extra Vitamin B? Vitamin B12? B13? Just the 
number of things with different types of Vitamin B in them was an embarrassment 
of choice in itself. There were powders as well as oils, tubes of gel, even 
packets of some kind of pungent smelling seed that was meant to be good for some 
obscure part of you in some arcane way. 

How about some of the green crystals? One day, she had told herself in the past, 
she would not even bother trying to choose, but would simply put a bit of 
everything in. When she really felt in need of it. She rather thought that today 
was the day, and with a sudden reviving rush of pleasure she set about putting a 
drop or two of everything in the cupboard into the seething bath until it was 
confused with mingling, muddying colours and verging on the glutinous to touch. 

She turned off the taps, went to her handbag for a moment, then returned and 
lowered herself into the bath, where she lay with her eyes closed, breathing 
slowly for fully three minutes before at last turning her attention to the scrap 
of paper she had brought with her from the hospital. 

It had one word on it, and it was a word she had dragged out of an oddly 
reluctant young nurse who had taken her temperature that morning.

Kate had questioned her about the big man. The big man whom she had encountered 
at the airport, whose body she had seen in a nearby side ward in the early hours 
of the night. 

‘Oh no,’ the nurse had said, ‘he wasn’t dead. He was just in some sort of coma.’ 

Could she see him? Kate had asked. What was his name? 

She had tried to ask idly, in passing as it were, which was a difficult trick to 
pull off with a thermometer in her mouth, and she wasn’t at all certain she had 
succeeded. The nurse had said that she couldn’t really say, she wasn’t really 
meant to talk about other patients. And anyway, the man wasn’t there any more, 
he had been taken somewhere else. They had sent an ambulance to collect him and 
take him somewhere else. 

This had taken Kate considerably by surprise. 

Where had they taken him? What was this special place? But the nurse had been 
unwilling to say anything much more, and a second or two later had been summoned 
away by the Sister. The only word the nurse had said was the one that Kate had 
then scribbled down on the piece of paper she was now looking at. 

The word was ‘Woodshead’. 

Now that she was more relaxed she had a feeling that the name was familiar to 
her in some way, though she could not remember where she had heard it. 

The instant she remembered, she could not stay in the bath any longer, but got 
out and made straight for the telephone, pausing only briefly to shower all the 
gunk off her. 


CHAPTER 9

The big man awoke and tried to look up, but could hardly raise his head. He 
tried to sit up but couldn’t do that either. He felt as if he’d been stuck to 
the floor with superglue and after a few seconds he discovered the most 
astounding reason for this. 

He jerked his head up violently, yanking out great tufts of yellow hair which 
stayed painfully stuck to the floor, and looked around him. He was in what 
appeared to be a derelict warehouse, probably an upper floor judging by the 
wintry sky he could see creeping past the grimy, shattered windows. 

The ceilings were high and hung with cobwebs built by spiders who did not seem 
to mind that most of what they caught was crumbling plaster and dust. They were 
supported by pillars made from upright steel joists on which the dirty old cream 
paint was bubbled and flaking, and these in turn stood on a floor of battered 
old oak on to which he had clearly been glued. Extending out for a foot or two 
in a rough oval all around his naked body the floor glistened darkly and dully. 
Thin, nostril-cleaning fumes rose from it. He could not believe it. He roared 
with rage, tried to wriggle and shake himself but succeeded only in tugging 
painfully at his skin where it was stuck fast to the oak planks. 

This had to be the old man’s doing. 

He threw his head back hard against the floor in a blow that cracked the boards 
and made his ears sing. He roared again and took some furious satisfaction in 
making as much hopeless, stupid noise as he could. He roared until the steel 
pillars rang and the cracked remains of the windows shattered into finer shards. 
Then, as he threw his head angrily from one side to the other he caught sight of 
his sledge-hammer leaning against the wall a few feet from him, heaved it up 
into the air with a word, and sent it hurtling round the great space, beating 
and clanging on every pillar until the whole building reverberated like a mad 
gong. 

Another word and the hammer flew back at him, missed his head by a hand’s-width 
and punched straight down through the floor, shattering the wood and the plaster 
below. 

In the darker space beneath him the hammer spun, and swung round in a slow heavy 
parabola as bits of plaster fell about it and rattled on the concrete floor 
below. Then it gathered a violent momentum and hurtled back up through the 
ceiling, smacking up a stack of startled splinters as it punched through another 
oak floorboard a hand’s-width from the soles of the big man’s feet. 

It soared up into the air, hung there for a moment as if its weight had suddenly 
vanished, then, deftly flicking its short handle up above its head, it drove 
hard back down through the floor again -- then up again, then down again, 
punching holes in a splintered ring around its master until, with a long heavy 
groan, the whole oval section of punctured floor gave way and plunged, twisting, 
through the air. It shattered itself against the floor below amidst a rain of 
plaster debris, from which the figure of the big man then emerged, staggering, 
flapping at the dusty air and coughing. His back, his arms and his legs were 
still covered with great splintered hunks of oak flooring, but at least he was 
able to move. He leant the flat of his hands against the wall and violently 
coughed some of the dust from his lungs. 

As he turned back, his hammer danced out of the air towards him, then suddenly 
evaded his grasp and skidded joyfully off across the floor striking sparks from 
the concrete with its great head, flipped up and parked itself against a nearby 
pillar at a jaunty angle. 

In front of him the shape of a large Coca-Cola vending machine loomed through 
the settling cloud of dust. He regarded it with the gravest suspicion and worry. 
It stood there with a sort of glazed, blank look to it, and had a note from his 
father stuck on the front panel saying whatever he was doing, stop it. It was 
signed ‘You-know- who’, but this had been crossed out and first the word ‘Odin’ 
and then in larger letters ‘Your Father’ had been substituted. Odin never ceased 
to make absolutely clear his view of his son’s intellectual accomplishments. The 
big man tore the note off and stared at it in anger. A postscript added darkly 
‘Remember Wales. You don’t want to go through all that again.’ He screwed the 
note up and hurled it out of the nearest window, where the wind whipped it up 
and away. For a moment he thought he heard an odd squeaking noise, but it was 
probably just the blustering of the wind as it whistled between the nearby 
derelict buildings. 

He turned and walked to the window and stared out of it in a belligerent sulk. 
Glued to the floor. At his age. What the devil was that supposed to mean? ‘Keep 
your head down,’ was what he guessed. ‘If you don’t keep it down, I’ll have to 
keep it down for you.’ That was what it meant. ‘Stick to the ground.’ 

He remembered now the old man saying exactly that to him at the time of all the 
unpleasantness with the Phantom fighter jet. ‘Why can’t you just stick to the 
ground?’ he had said. He could imagine the old man in his soft-headed benign 
malice thinking it very funny to make the lesson so literal. 

Rage began to rumble menacingly inside him but he pushed it down hard. Very 
worrying things had recently begun happening when he got angry and he had a bad 
feeling, looking back at the Coca-Cola vending machine, that another of those 
very worrying things must have just happened. He stared at it and fretted. 

He felt ill. 

He had felt ill a lot of late, and he found it impossible to discharge what were 
left of his godly duties when he felt he was suffering from a sort of continual 
low-grade flu. He experienced headaches, dizzy spells, guilt and all the sorts 
of ailments that were featured so often in television advertisements. He even 
suffered terrifying blackouts whenever the great rage gripped him. 

He always used to have such a wonderful time getting angry. Great gusts of 
marvellous anger would hurl him through life. He felt huge. He felt flooded with 
power and light and energy. He had always been provided with such wonderful 
things to get angry about -- immense acts of provocation or betrayal, people 
hiding the Atlantic ocean in his helmet, dropping continents on him or getting 
drunk and pretending to be trees. Stuff you could really work up a rage about 
and hit things. In short he had felt good about being a Thunder God. Now 
suddenly it was headaches, nervous tension, nameless anxieties and guilt. These 
were new experiences for a god, and not pleasant ones. 

‘You look ridiculous!’ 

The voice screeched out and affected Thor like fingernails scratched across a 
blackboard lodged in the back of his brain. It was a mean voice, a spiteful, 
jeering voice, a cheap white nylon shirt of a voice, a shiny-trousered pencil 
moustache of a voice, a voice, in short, which Thor did not like. He reacted 
very badly to