The Apprentice

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Noise filled the canteen. Knives, forks, spoons, cups and plates were being thrown into dishwashing machines or taken out of them, chinking against each other and being wheeled around the kitchen on trolleys. The loud sizzle of frying breakfasts and the shouts of the arriving day shift ordering food added appetising smells to the noise.

Ellis, Professor Ellis, looked as though he was in his mid fifties, and was dressed from head to foot in black overalls emblazoned Sunlight. Escorted by the standard issue personnel officer and carrying a plate of hot breakfast, the twenty year old trainee arrived, looking out of place in a charcoal grey suit, Bengal striped shirt and Miró tie. He sat opposite Ellis. The personnel officer said, ‘Morning, Professor Ellis. This is Theodore Williams,’ and disappeared.

The canteen supervisor had kindly scrawled ‘Reserved’ on the formica™ table-top with a marker pen. Ellis was close to finishing his bacon and eggs. The new arrival put his plate onto the table and began eating.

‘Welcome to The Works,’ Ellis began. ‘I suppose I should begin by apologising for the noise in here, but firstly it’s the only place for several miles in any direction where you can get breakfast without cooking it yourself, and secondly, the noise is so loud that we’re unlikely to be overheard.’
‘It’s a very good breakfast, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir,’ said Ellis, ‘I insist. It’s Professor Ellis. Most important things first: have they offered you a decent salary?’
‘More than decent, Professor. I was surprised…’
‘Then you’ll pay for your own breakfast tomorrow. Bring a credit card or something because they don’t understand about money.’ The Professor paused for a second and sighed. ‘How simple life used to be when you carried money around with you and you bought things with it. So, I’m Professor Ellis and you’re Williams, have I got the right name there?’
‘Yes, Professor. Theodore Williams. Theodore Williams BSc, I suppose.’
‘And you’re the new hire.’
‘Yes, Professor.’
‘What in God’s name made you want to work for Sunlight? Most of the guys you’ll meet today are probably trying to get paroled out of Sunlight.’
‘Someone at Sunlight wrote to the head of the maths department and he recommended me. Jobs are hard to come by— I mean, I want to work for a socially conscientious small business with potential for growth that offers a realistic prospect of promotion and at the same time respects my interests and abilities and puts them to good use. And of course Rosentyre

Maps of Rosentyre

is one of the most remote, unspoiled and beautiful places in the whole of Scotland.’
‘Spoken like a true Dalek. You’ve spent hours rehearsing that speech, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, Professor. I mean, no, Professor. I mean—’
‘Don’t be too modest. You showed imagination, persistence and fortitude, you anticipated a hard question and you prepared for it, and you didn’t even have the job when you wrote your answer. Why do you think Sunlight chose you?’
‘I’d like to pretend that I had no idea to what I owe the honour of being offered the chance to work here, but someone probably noticed that I got a first class degree in maths, my father went to Chamberlain School and both my parents voted Conservative.’
‘You’re completely right. I wrote to him. Your former Headmaster and I were at St Hubert’s University together.’ Professor Ellis paused and looked serious. ‘Well, here’s your first lesson. Your name is Horatio, your name is not Williams. As long as you are on Sunlight premises, talking to anyone about Sunlight or speaking to customers on Sunlight business, your name is Horatio. Horatio because it begins with H and the last person we hired got the G. You never use your real name even if your mother phones you at work. What do you think…’
‘May I change the name, Professor? It’s a bit nineteenth-century Admiral of the Fleet, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Have they given you your identity card yet?’
‘Yes, Professor. Here, I’m wearing it already.’
‘Oh, so you are. Then you can change your name when your card expires, not before.’

Ellis looked up at the clock. Eight twenty-five.

‘You’d best finish your breakfast because we have to go and watch an important event at eight thirty-eight and it’s downstairs at the other end of the corridor. While you eat, I’ll get the formalities out of the way. You are now a member of staff at Sunlight. This place is governed by the State Secrets Act. You never talk about your work except to people — like him, over there — wearing Sunlight overalls and with a Sunlight identity card.’
‘Who is that over there? Anyone I should try to curry favour with?’
‘He’s Dr Paul Eaks, brilliant genetic engineer. Developed the Eaks Test for… some disease or other. But as there are only eight scientific practitioners in the entire company, including you, you’re bound to meet him sooner or later.’
‘Panic instability,’ said Horatio.
‘What?’
‘Panic instability. The disease that the Eaks Test detects. Runs in families. Mental illness, rare but crippling. Sandeep Tolhurst suffered from it and ended up in—’
‘Well, you can talk about that to Eaks, but if anyone else asks, Sunlight is a nineteenth century Quaker business that makes horse shoes, harrows and ploughs. Your job is to put our products into cardboard cartons, carry them to the Post Office and send them to all those steaming jungles and frozen wastes where the British Empire used to be. What you see and hear and smell and read while you’re here stays with you and you alone. No photography, no drawings, no maps, no phones except the one that we issue to you, no using the public internet, any notes you take stay in this building, and

This building does not exist

this building does not exist.’
‘What? How can our colleagues send us postcards while they’re on holiday in Spain in the summer?’
‘That’s no great problem,’ said Ellis, ‘They address them to the Sunlight Traditional Farm Implement Company on Oxygen Street, Edinburgh, it’s a trap street. Now, back to what matters. Have you had enough to eat?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ Horatio wiped the grease off his lips with the paper napkin, dropped it onto the table and stood up, ready to go.
‘Come with me, then. Have you been given an idea of what Sunlight does?’
‘No, sir.’ Ellis glared at him. ‘I mean, no, Professor. Sorry. Only that they do advanced—’
‘You are forgiven this time. I worked damned hard for my title and you will use it. Now, come along, our demonstration will not wait. We’re going downstairs, on the double.’

 

Ellis and Horatio left the canteen, walked along the corridor of grey walls, rooflights and anonymous brushed steel doors, until they reached an electric gate. Specific authorisation required for entry. The gate opened ahead of them and closed after them. Down one floor in a lift, then along another corridor was another gate, and this time it didn’t open.

‘Who’s there?’ asked a loudspeaker at head height.
‘Is that you, Gresham?’
‘Yes, it’s me, Professor. I see you’ve got someone with you.’
‘Horatio, he’s the new hire. I’ve got his authorisation—’

The gate opened.

‘Thanks.’

Ellis and Horatio walked into a large, low ceilinged room with powerful forced air ventilation making a continuous hiss and half the room freezing cold. There were six chairs in a half circle, each placed behind a desk and a screen. Five of the chairs were occupied by men in black Sunlight overalls, which made them look like identical quintuplets. The computer displays were more varied than the people. In front of the half circle of desks, two straight yellow lines were painted on the floor about three feet apart. The yellow lines led from a roll-up door on the left to another roll-up door on the right. Both doors were rolled down, closed. No Exit.

‘Are these people clones?’ Horatio whispered to Ellis.

‘No, of course not.’ Ellis spoke normally, as though the question was nothing out of the ordinary and everybody asked it sooner or later. He gestured toward the empty chair. ‘You can have my seat, Horatio. You’ll probably need it and I need the exercise.’

One of the overalls spoke with neither emotion nor interest. Horatio thought it was the one on the right, but he wasn’t sure. They all looked the same.

‘Eight thirty-four and… three seconds, and all’s well.’

A second overall added, in the same flat tone of voice, ‘Vital signs, heart, respiration, blood pressure all on target.’
The first overall spoke to the microphone on his desk. ‘Send the patient in. Stand away from the yellow lines.’
Someone said, ‘Why do you always say that?’
‘Because it’s in the script. Gas masks on.’
Horatio turned anxiously to the Professor. ‘Where’s my gas mask?’
‘There aren’t any. He’s having a joke.’

The left hand roll-up door lifted and, almost silently, a lidless plywood coffin rolled in, apparently under its own power, between the yellow lines. Inside the coffin lay a man, wearing a hospital gown, skeletally thin, several teeth missing, covered in bruises and bleeding heavily. There was a large and spreading blood stain on the gown. There was blood oozing from his mouth and nose, and some stinking mess on the floor of the coffin.

‘What the devil happened to him, Professor?’ Horatio asked Ellis.
‘Virus infection.’
‘Are we all going to catch it?’
‘No, Horatio, don’t worry, you can’t catch it and neither can anybody else.’

The tortured soul in the coffin moaned weakly.

‘Are we going to cure him?’ Horatio asked.
Professor Ellis thought about that, and eventually he said ‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’

First Overall spoke to the computer again, ‘Patient number one-two-two, Avner Gilbert, 48 year old male.’

On First Overall’s desk, the computer started beeping out the heart rate of the patient. First Overall spoke to nobody in particular, ‘When was this guy infected?’
‘Midnight yesterday, Gresham.’
‘Isn’t that a bit late to wake the medics up?’
‘Yes. But it means we don’t have to do take-away sums to work out the time elapsed to—’

‘Does anyone want a chip? Are you a bit peckish, Gresham?’ One of the overalls was unwrapping the newspaper from a pile of chips.
‘No thanks, Falstaff. I have to concentrate for the next couple of minutes.’
‘I missed breakfast, Falstaff,’ said another. ‘I’ll take one.’
‘Here you are, Digger. Catch!’ Falstaff took a chip out of the newspaper and threw it to his hungry colleague.
‘Thanks… Oh, God, it’s got brown sauce on it.’
‘Then you’ll have to get WFK in to clean the keyboard, Digger, like I do. They’re good at it, and it’s what we pay them for. Trust you to—’
‘Who’s WFK?’ asked Horatio.
‘We Fix Keyboards. Little Polish techno shop in the town,’ Ellis told him.
Falstaff announced expressionlessly, ‘Sorry to interrupt, boys, but it’s eight thirty-five and five seconds, and the BP is dropping.’

The pulse beeps stopped for a couple of seconds and resumed.

‘Heart is slowing,’ said Falstaff.
Digger read out, ‘Heart 49, pulse intermittent, respiration shallow, BP sixty on forty one.’

A moan came from the plywood coffin. Blood was welling up in the patient’s eyes and under his finger nails.

‘Give us another chip,’ said Digger.
‘Sure. Shall I lick the brown sauce off first?’
‘No, thanks. I can cope with it.’
‘Catch!’ The chip flew across the room. Digger reached up for it, but missed. The chip ricocheted off his fingers and landed in the coffin. The patient did not notice it.

‘Wide! No ball!’ cried Ellis, holding his arms out sideways.
‘Do you want a chip?’
‘No, thanks. I just had breakfast.’

Horatio told Professor Ellis that he was feeling a bit queasy, and the Professor replied that everybody did, the first couple of times they watched it happen, without mentioning what it was.

‘Are you sure I’m not about to catch whatever he’s suffering from?’ asked Horatio.
‘I thought that might be on your mind,’ said Ellis. ‘Yes, I am sure. No, you can’t catch it. It won’t affect you or anyone else.’
Falstaff spoke. ‘Sorry, guys, I forgot to watch the clock. It is now eight thirty-seven and forty-five seconds. Quiet, please.’
The room fell silent apart from the newspaper rustling and Horatio retching and the ventilator hissing and the patient moaning and making a last feeble effort to lie in a comfortable position.
‘Have this newspaper,’ said Falstaff, holding it out to Horatio. ‘Sorry, I’ve eaten all the chips.’
Falstaff led the chant, and apart from Horatio, the rest joined in, in unison. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five…’
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Ellis asked Horatio.
‘Four, three, two…’
‘No, I feel sick.’
‘One.’

The irregular pulse beep stopped and a high pitched, continuous note replaced it.

‘Zero.’
Meeeeeep!

The patient spluttered and fell into an awkward position, his head twisted at an impossible angle, eyes open, tongue lolling out. Apart from Horatio, who was now sitting bent forwards, vomiting into the newspaper in his lap, everyone clapped, cheered and congratulated each other.

‘Flat-line,’ said Gresham, raising his voice to be heard over the hubbub.‘The patient has flat-lined.’
‘Flat-line at eight thirty-eight and zero seconds,’ said Falstaff.
‘Another triumph for British engineering,’ cried Digger.
‘Welcome to Sunlight, Horatio,’ said Falstaff, as the roll-up door on the right side opened and the coffin rolled through it out of the room. ‘Have a nice career.’

 

 

Theo had been working at Sunlight for a bit over three weeks. They gave him something harmless to do, he did it, and everyone told him — correctly — that he was doing it well. He took the Scottish Public Holiday long week-end off, mainly to reassure his mother Margaret that the job he had accepted really existed, he was not sleeping freezing cold under a bridge in constant terror of the bailiffs and without enough money for the train fare home, and nor had he starved to death due to living by himself and not knowing how or where to buy food.

 

Slipping away early and unremarked from The Works on the Friday, he managed to arrive at his family’s large and nearly empty house in Craigkeld a few minutes before midnight. His mum had plainly already gone to bed. She was barefoot and wearing her dressing gown when she opened the front door.

‘Theo!’ she beamed at him. ‘At last. I thought you’d missed the train. Come in, come in.’ She thought for a second and added, ‘I’m overjoyed to see you.’
‘Why’s that? Has everything been all right?’
‘Oh, yes, absolutely. It was just so late that I thought you might have decided to travel tomorrow, or maybe you missed the train somewhere along the way.’

When Theo had been given the job and set off for Waverley Station a month earlier carrying a canvas sports bag of essentials, the house was exactly the same as it had been when Mum and Dad had first moved into it together in 1970 or thereabouts. Furniture, decorations, everything that they had bought for their house when they moved into it was still standing in the same place, and little had been added since. The dining room, with its carved table and matching chairs and hand painted crockery hung on the walls, far too big for one woman and her occasional visitor, looked as though for the whole month Mum had not so much as stood in it. Years ago the room had been arranged as if for an antique furniture catalogue and, apart from a couple of photographs of his father’s funeral, left undisturbed thereafter,.

‘The trains were on time, pretty much.’ Theo recounted the long journey. ‘It’s just a long way. The train that leaves Rosentyre at six doesn’t get to Edinburgh until eleven, and then…’
‘You must be very tired. I cooked sausage and mash earlier but it was so late that I ate my share and then I left the rest to cool. It’s still on the stove if you want some.’
‘Yes, please. I haven’t eaten since lunch time.’
‘Well, I can heat it up, I suppose.’
‘Don’t bother. I can eat it cold.’

Margaret brought a plate laden with cold dinner out of the kitchen, set it in front of her son with a knife and fork, and watched him start to eat.

‘It’s not much,’ Margaret said, apologetically, ‘but as it’s so late…’
‘It’s my favourite, and they almost never cook it in the canteen.’
‘What’s the food like?’ Margaret asked.
‘Not bad, considering.’ Theo thought about the canteen food. ‘They make us a cheap cooked breakfast, lunch and a hot dinner in the evening. If you live alone it’s a lot less trouble than cooking for yourself.’
‘You haven’t found a girlfriend yet?’ Margaret drew the obvious conclusion.
‘ ’Fraid not, mum. I’m signed up to this internet thing. Medjool Dates. You never know.’
‘How much did that cost you?’
‘Thirty quid a month.’
‘And how many women have you…’
‘I’ve had three phone calls.’
‘I know a waste of time and money when I hear about one.’ Margaret dismissed Medjool Dates with blistering scepticism. ‘Go to Church and look. All the lonely women go to Church. They think God can’t be bothered sending them a husband and if they don’t suck up to Him, they’ll wake up one morning and realise they’ve turned into creaking elderly spinsters with grey hair and walking sticks. You don’t want to be all alone for the rest of your life, now.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. I did think of launderettes and art galleries, but there aren’t any.’
‘How do you manage without a launderette?’
‘I got a second-hand washing machine. It works most of the time, I’ve only had the repair-man in twice. Anyway, I can hardly tell my date that the reason I’m trying to find a girlfriend is because I haven’t got a washing machine, can I?’
‘No,’ said Margaret after careful consideration. ‘You’ll need to get your story straight. “I need an angel to brighten up my dull and aimless existence.” Girls love that sort of nonsense.’

Theo had eaten everything on his plate.

‘Your room’s just how you left it,’ said Margaret. ‘By the way, how’s the job?’
‘It’s all right. I’ve not got any life altering decisions to take, or anything. I’m not supposed to talk about what I do…’
‘That’s the management fad of the week, is it? Make them keep everything a secret and they’ll work more for less wages, is that it?’
‘Well, Mum, it breaks no secrets to tell you that they knew I was a mathematician so they put me onto estimating demand. For the last three weeks I’ve been trying to work out how to predict the number of customers who’ll come knocking on the door, if they can find it, and how much money they’ll spend when they do. I told them to buy me a crystal ball and ask that, but they said no, we want to get accurate predictions without crossing any palms with any more silver than we already do. So after a Fourier analysis that fills more paper than the Scottish Daily does in a week, I’ve got half a dozen relevant correlations and some seasonal cycles—’
‘That’s further above my head than a flight to Bermuda,’ said Margaret, ‘and I need my sleep, I’m afraid. I’m really pleased that you’ve found a niche for yourself. Good-night, see you tomorrow.’

 

Theo awoke while it was still dark. The room was silent, for the clanks and hoots of Rosentyre Harbour were many miles away. He thought for a few seconds that he heard voices, but then realised that his mother was lying in bed listening to her radio, or more likely she had fallen asleep without first turning the radio off. He lay still for a while and then realised that as long as the radio was playing, he wouldn’t get another wink of sleep. Late night radio presenters were expert at keeping their listeners awake. The jingles, the shouts of feigned surprise and well rehearsed delight, the hoots of laughter, the forty year old pop records, the sound effects, the scripted phone calls, were all added to the waffle in carefully measured numbers like currants to a fruit cake, one every eight minutes, just enough to keep sleepy listeners awake.

‘Mum?’ he whispered as he tip-toed into her bedroom, not wanting to wake her if she was asleep.
‘It’s all right, I’m awake.’
‘Can you not sleep?’
‘Something’s keeping me awake,’ she said. ‘You’re troubled. I can tell. There’s something not quite right about the job, isn’t there.’
‘Mum, I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.’
‘Ah, you’re a good man but you’re no Tom Cruise. So there is something. Do you want to throw the job in and come home? Everybody makes false starts sometimes — look at me, for instance. You’d be welcome to come and live here, you know.’

Theo found the prospect of living at home with someone he had known and loved all his life in the town he had known and loved all his life more attractive than it had appeared when he was actually living there.

‘What would we live on?’ he asked.
‘I’ve still got my lifelong annuity, my works pension, the state pension if I’m desperate, and you’ll get some Nash, I expect.’
‘We can live on that if we both stop eating.’
‘Don’t sneer too loudly. Your grandfather was a good and generous man. So why do you stay at… wherever you are? Sunlight?’
‘Mum, I don’t want to sound more exasperated than I really am, but you do realise my job, and everything connected with it, is top secret?’
‘Guessing how many customers will come into a farrier’s shop is top secret? Pull the other one.’
‘It’s the truth. I really have been asked to estimate future sales. But what worries me…’

Theo tailed off.

‘Yes? You don’t think I sat up until this hour for to listen to Moss and Myra’s Late Night Lorry Driver Sing-Along, did you? Can a horse-shoe factory afford a sales estimate from a St Hubert’s graduate mathematician, even if it needed one? Come on, I’ve let this banal drivel keep me awake all night in order to hear this.’

‘I’ve seen them removing dead bodies from the stock yard.’
‘Well, there’s a thing. Thanks for telling me. Shall I go to sleep now or will you—’
‘That’s all I know. There isn’t much more I could tell you. I don’t know what they’re doing and I don’t know how deep in the mire I already am.’

 

 

On the other side of the street from the railway station, in the middle of Rosentyre stood the village’s finest pub, The King’s Unicorn. The building dated back to some year in the nineteenth century, at which time it was called The King’s Field and it served cheap beer, blended whisky, smoked fish and hot beef stew with dumplings to a small clientele of porters, shunters, engine drivers, ticket collectors and train passengers. The pub had now, as they say, been re-imagined, refurbished, given a new name, roof, central heating system and sign on the street outside.

Theodore alighted from the last train of the day, dragging his suitcase packed with things he needed, like socks and a bottle opener, and things his Mum wanted him to have just in case, like window cleaning fluid. Eternally a train-spotter, he stood mesmerised on the platform and watched the signal turn green, the carriage doors hiss shut and the red tail lights of the train shrink into the distance and disappear around a curve. Theo left the station as someone was switching off the lights.

Many years of watching television programmes had convinced Theo that in a small town the only way to become accepted, to hear people say Good Morning to him as they passed him in the street, or to lend him a couple of teaspoons of Nescafé if he ran out of it, was to drink in the same public house as everyone else, and that was the King’s Unicorn, opposite the station entrance.

Standing on the street in the evening chill, Theodore steeled himself to deal with the hostile reception which he thought probably awaited every newcomer. This was the only way to become a full member of the village in good standing, rather than a foreigner and an intruder. He took a deep breath, opened the heavy hardwood door, hoped that the first time would be the worst and walked gingerly into the bar.

The room was large, warm, light, and full of people without being crowded.

The people did not look in his direction, hold its collective breath and fall silent. No fights broke out. Nobody yelled abuse at him. The conversations continued, in the corner two old men carried on playing draughts, and the barman pulled pints.

‘What may I get you, sir?’
‘Brown ale, please.’

The barman put a bottle and a glass in front of Theo and nipped the cap off the bottle.

‘Two pounds ninety.’

Theodore poured the beer into the glass and carried it over to a bookcase at the side of the room, where a handwritten notice read, ‘Please take a book.’

As he looked along the shelves, ‘The Ebony Mirror,’ ‘His and Her Rules,’ ‘The Mathematics of Guesswork,’ ‘Leviathan Among the Seërs,’ ‘Grasses and Crustaceans,’ he heard a Tyneside accent that he recognised saying, ‘Take the black one on the right.’
‘Gresham! What are you doing here?’
‘What am I doing here?’ Gresham was a short man, slender, darker skinned than many, the progeny of seven generations of coal miners and locomotive engineers. ‘I am steeling mysel’ for another week of stoking the refrigerators, shoein’ weasels, ploughin’ the marshmallow fields and gettin’ covered from head to foot in pig-swill. Such is the fate of yer lowly employee at the Sunlight Historic Agricultural Implement Company.’
Theo pointed to a well worn and scruffy black paperback that looked as though it had passed through many hands. ‘Did you mean this book?’
‘Aye. That’n ’ll fascinate ye. I guarantee it.’
Theo pulled the book off the shelf. It did not look like a riveting read. ‘Why? It doesn’t look so interesting that I need to read it before anything else.’
‘Bring it ower here an’ come and sit wi’ me, Horatio. I hate drinkin’ alone, but if I stop, I won’t consume my recommended daily alcohol intake and then I’ll die of beer deficiency by about Wednesday. What are you doin’ here?’
‘Just back from spending the holiday week-end at my mum’s, and I’ve been on the train since lunch time.’
‘Well, now you’re back, and after you’ve taken a long swig of the brown ale, you ought to start reading that book, because the author was the drivin’ force behind—’
‘Hush! Don’t spoil the surprise, Gresham.’ Theodore settled down, opened the book and began to read.

Small scale warfare, the lessons of David and Goliath
By Prof Daniel Newman

‘What’s this have to do with me?’ Theo asked.
‘Quite a lot. You’ll see.’

Chapter One: Strength is Weakness

It is said that someone once asked the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein what weapons would be used to fight the Third World War. According to legend, he replied, ‘I know not with what weapons the Third World War will be fought, but the Fourth World War will be fought with sticks and stones.’ Einstein’s opinion was widely shared, although later commentators have cast doubt on the authenticity of the quotation.

‘I think, on the whole,’ Theo ruminated, ‘I’d prefer to take home “Leviathan Among the Seërs.” ’
‘If you work here for long enough, you’ll read it sooner or later. There’s little enough else to do here. An’ Leviathan Among the Seërs is tosh. By the same author that wrote The Prey with Two Faces.’
‘Gruesome. Thanks for warning me,’ Theo said, mentally adding that there was indeed nothing else to do if you didn’t count going to the pub and drinking.
‘Except go to the pub and drink,’ Gresham said out loud, ‘and you’re already doing that.’
Theo opened the paperback and read.

Before two atomic bombs were dropped, one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki, the extent of the destruction which the bombs would wreak was universally under-estimated. In 1945, for instance, George Orwell, writing in an essay entitled You and the Atom Bomb, imagined an atomic bomb dropping on the Stock Exchange in London and life in the capital continuing as normal afterwards. Once two atomic bombs had been dropped, it became clear that the truth was much closer to that later envisaged by Douglas Adams. There was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequence of setting it off. In other words, the atomic bomb was a useless weapon. Despite the huge amounts spent on designing, developing and testing bigger and better atomic bombs, none has been dropped in anger since 1945. Two atomic explosions were sufficient to show that the bomb could never be used again.

As soon as the military realised that atomic bombs powerful enough to devastate an entire city were useless in war, they asked the physicists to build a small atomic bomb. Their answer was not that for which they were hoping. It was No. You cannot build a small atomic bomb. You can only build a big one. The bomb must weigh at least the critical mass, or it will not explode.

The immediate consequence of this realisation…

‘It’s my turn to buy the beers,’ said Gresham. ‘Another glass?’
‘I think I ought to be going home,’ Theo said after a little consideration. ‘I haven’t slept much.’
‘That’s a very sensible idea.’ Gresham upended his glass and drained it. ‘I’ll help with the suitcase. I can see it’s too heavy for you.’
‘Yes, please do, but I live on Nicholson Close, right across town.’
‘7 Nicholson Close, perhaps?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘I stayed there too, when I first arrived. Mrs MacKechnie’s still going, then. Of course I’ll carry the suitcase. You carry the book and try not to get it wet.’

 

A quarter of an hour later, they arrived at 7 Nicholson Close.

‘Looks like she’s out.’ Theo made the observation first.
‘We can do as we like, then.’ Gresham followed Theo upstairs and lay the heavy suitcase down on the floor.
‘Mrs MacKechnie has a boyfriend, I think,’ said Theo, ‘She’s sometimes out until the small hours and I don’t think they have overnight lock-ins at the bingo hall.’
‘There isn’t a bingo hall,’ Gresham shook his right arm to get rid of the cramps. ‘And there isn’t a night shift at the fish factory, so it’s got to be the boyfriend.’
‘Lucky woman.’
There was a pause. ‘Mm.’ Gresham looked as though he might have been wrestling with a difficult decision.
‘Go ahead,’ said Theo. ‘Say it.’
‘All right, then. Have you ever had a boyfriend?’
‘Yes.

St Hubert’s University

I went to St Hubert’s University. We all had one, the girls too. I thought you knew.’
‘I did. That’s why I asked. I think I remembered there being a raid or something at St Hubert’s, years ago?’
‘2 am on Wednesday, 20 September 2013. I was lucky. I heard the noise and I hid. There were doors banging, dogs barking, shouts. They took a moment—’
‘Dogs barking?’ Gresham seemed surprised to hear about them. ‘Looking for drugs, were they?’
‘Yes, but none of us had any, but only because we didn’t know how to get them. Anyway, the Proctors took a little while to reach the room I was in. I clambered onto the top of the wardrobe and knelt there trying to be invisible. The man looked in the wardrobe but he didn’t look up.’
‘You’re joking. You got away with it, as easy as that?’
‘No, it works. Psychology 101. People don’t look up when they’re searching for something, that’s why you can hide up trees. The room was dark. The guy got the door open, turned the light on, glanced around, opened the wardrobe and shut it again, looked under the bed, said sorry and shut the door behind him. I climbed back down and turned the light off. Mr Beattie was embarrassed but apart from that, he had a lucky escape. They didn’t have anything to arrest him for. He went back to sleep. I went back to halls after the noise died down. By the time I woke up, I’d missed a lecture and the newspapers were having a field day.’
Gresham drew breath. ‘Do you want to sleep together?’
‘I think that’s a marvellous idea. Yes, when I’ve had a bath and relaxed.’
‘Bring on the bubble bath!’
‘It’s in the blue bottle. I need lashings of it. All that talk about the raid made me nervous.’
‘Don’t worry. They don’t go out on midnight raids here.’
‘That’s a great relief,’ said Theo. ‘The funny thing is, the man stank of aftershave and cigarette smoke. I swear I could see a faint trace of lipstick as well. He must have been as gay as a midsummer may-pole.’

 

 

Horatio stood nervously at the table in the small meeting room upstairs in The Works, in front of Ellis, whom he knew, Gresham, whom he had fallen three quarters of the way in love with, and two men whom Horatio did not recognise. The one looked around mid-career age and his name badge read Earle (Medicine,) and the other was around the same age as Horatio and his name was Dustan (Admin.)

‘Th- Thanks for coming,’ he began. ‘After a c- couple of weeks of number crunching, I’m in a position—’
‘I don’t know everyone here,’ said Ellis, who knew everyone. ‘Could we perhaps introduce ourselves? It won’t take a minute.’ Horatio was grateful to the Professor for easing the tension in the room. He realised that he had a small pile of name cards that he hadn’t given out and also that he hadn’t tested the projector. ‘I’m Professor Ellis. I’m an expert on viruses. Product development. Horatio, why don’t you go next?’
‘I’m Horatio, I’m the new boy. First in mathematics from St Hubert’s.’ He was still shaking slightly with stage fright. ‘I’ve spent my first month working on sales estimates. I had a crystal ball imported specially from ancient Rome and installed in my office. Drop by if you need a weather forecast.’ He turned to his friend. ‘Gresham, it’s your turn. You’re good at introducing yourself.’

A round of introductions was enough to relax Horatio a little, ‘I should have said thank you for coming. I appreciate being trusted to produce useful results. Given a choice between being useful and being interesting, most mathematicians prefer to be interesting.’

The attempt at witticism warmed the audience to him.

‘I’ll start with the important results and then I’ll tell you how I got them,’ Horatio continued. Dates and numbers appeared on the screen behind him. ‘It might take half an hour.’ Professor Ellis wrote the numbers down as Horatio continued, ‘These are the estimated sales volumes for the next six months.’
‘How accurate are these numbers?’ asked Falstaff.
‘Ten thousand dollars either way, I guess. Paradoxically, the smaller numbers have higher probability of errors than the big numbers. So you can see from the big numbers that our salaries are well provided for…’

The gentle laughter relaxed the meeting further.

‘…the company stays out of overdraft and we’re all on course for a massive Christmas bonus—’ and then there was a knock on the door. ‘Come in.’

The policewoman who walked in was young and obviously bewildered by the endless steel doors and warning notices. ‘Police.’

Nobody answered but, imbued with the secretiveness which is the fellow traveller of security, Horatio turned the projector off.

The policewoman looked around and asked, ‘Is there a Theodore Williams here?’
Horatio turned to the officer and said, ‘That’s me, Officer.’
‘You’re Theodore Williams?’
‘I am. But only in real life. Not in here. Inside this building, I’m Horatio.’
She held up her identity card. ‘I’m W P C Rayner Shaw,’ she said, ‘from Dunnabeg police station. I need a word with you. Can we go and talk somewhere quiet?’
‘There’s a little store room next door,’ said Horatio. ‘I think my key opens it.’

Gresham asked, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘It probably is,’ Horatio answered, ‘but if I end up in prison, come and visit me.’

The store room door clunked open when it saw Horatio’s name badge. The room had obviously not been used for a while but, among the junk, Horatio found a brush and cleaned the dust off the two wooden chairs. Horatio and W P C Shaw sat down and he asked her the obvious question. ‘Pardon my asking, Officer, but what’s this about?’
‘I can’t find the stockyard,’ she said in a whisper, as though she were embarrassed about not being able to find it. ‘Where’s the stockyard?’

It was Horatio’s turn to be bewildered. ‘There isn’t a stockyard. Deliveries come to the front door. There’s nothing stored outside this building. At the front it faces the road and at the back there’s a little flower garden.’
‘We’ve had a report of a dead body in the stockyard here. Do you know anything about it?’
‘It wasn’t me!’ Without thinking, and without any idea what Ms Shaw was talking about, Horatio added in rapid succession, ‘I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything.’
Ms Shaw pretended not to be amused. ‘Mr Williams, you’re no Bart Simpson.’
‘Sorry. But if I’d known you were coming I’d have put the kettle on.’
Sigh. ‘Let’s for a moment pretend that we occupy the same universe.’ W P C Shaw had dealt with tiresome comedians before. ‘What did you mean when you told your mother that a dead body had been taken out of the stockyard? You did say that to her?’

Like a wicker basket of homing pigeons, the late night conversation with his Mum came back to him. ‘Oh,’ he said as realisation dawned. Horatio checked that the door was shut. ‘I didn’t think she’d tell anybody. Let me rattle you a yarn.’

They sat and stared at each other while Horatio wondered where to start his story. Ms Shaw broke the ice.

‘I’ve never seen so many security precautions in one place,’ said Ms Shaw, ‘and I’ve been on duty in Bute House. What on earth do you do here?’
‘I’m not allowed to talk about it. Besides, to tell the truth, I don’t know. I’ve been here a month and the only thing I’ve been allowed to do is slave over a hot calculator, a 2B pencil and two books about cyclic and progressive time sequences, with occasional breaks to go to the toilet, get a cup of tea and use the pencil sharpener.’
‘But you did tell your mother that there was something suspicious going on and it had to do with the stockyard?’
‘I did tell her that. She’d sensed that I was worried about something, and it was something to do with work. I said someone’d found a dead body in the stockyard. Truth is, I was worried about a mathematical problem that I didn’t have a solution for.’
‘Why didn’t you just say, “I’m stressed ’cause I can’t find a solution to a maths problem” ?’
‘Because then I would’ve had to explain the problem to her, and poor soul, she thinks mathematics is borrowing and paying back when you do a take-away sum.’
‘And the problem was what, exactly?’ W P C Shaw produced her notebook as if to write down Horatio’s answer.
‘Fourier analysis of approximate data. It doesn’t breach any secrets to say that I’m trying to predict future sales volumes from past data. Until I found a solution, the standard error of the predictions was too high by an order of magnitude. But Cooley and Tukey’s method runs into trouble, it gives wrong answers, when some of the data points—’
‘Okay. I get the idea,’ said Ms Shaw, although she didn’t. She put the pencil back into the clip on the notebook without writing anything. ‘I’ll tell the sergeant that there’s nothing to worry about and your Mum’s an old lady, easily confused and she might have dreamed the whole story. Don’t worry about it. I doubt you’ll hear any more of this.’
‘Pleased to hear it.’

Ms Shaw thought for a moment and added, ‘Just one other thing. Do all mathematicians talk like you?’
‘No. Most of us are like the famous piece of cod that passes all understanding. Thanks for helping to ease my mum’s worries. Can I do anything else to help?’
W P C Shaw looked at her wristwatch and answered, ‘Yes. I’ve got five minutes if you have.’
‘I think the crowd has picked its things up and gone home by now. I certainly have five minutes.’
‘I’ve never understood…’ Ms Shaw was trying to find the words for her question, ‘Can you show me how borrowing and paying back works when you do a take-away sum?’

 

An hour later, Horatio arranged a new time and place to announce the expected sales volumes, and he took Small Scale Warfare from his desk and opened it somewhere near the page where he left off.

Chapter Two: The Past is the Future

As Goliath learned to his cost, a stone, perhaps weighing one pound and neither explosive nor particularly dangerous, is a death dealing weapon in the right hands. Goliath’s adversary was David, armed with five stones, a sling and a sharp stick. David had spent the last several years as a shepherd and was used to killing wolves by flinging stones at them from the sling. Doubtless he had also honed his skill by taking pot shots at trees, rocks, tin cans, lemonade bottles, camels, greenhouses and policemen. Doubtless his skill was such that he could hit the head of a pin from a hundred yards away. David’s first slingshot knocked Goliath to the ground, and there David cut Goliath’s head off with the stick.

The development of more and more powerful explosives ended with the invention of the atomic bomb. The search turned instead to firing the old explosives, but more precisely.

It is now possible to guide a missile to Nº 5 Charlotte Square so accurately that the gunner can choose whether the missile should fly into the building through a window, fall down the chimney or knock on the door and ask whether the First Minister is at home—

Professor Ellis flung the office door open without knocking. He looked a little panicky and he appeared to have been running. ‘Horatio! Stop what you’re doing and come with me. We need you.’
‘First time for everything,’ said Horatio. Ellis glared at him. Horatio put the book down and stood up to leave. ‘What happened?’
They were rushing along the back corridor. ‘One of them survived.’
‘One of what?’ Horatio didn’t grasp the issue.
‘We’ve had a failure. You’re conducting the investigation.’
‘I’ll do my best, of course,’ Horatio said, with unusual diffidence.
‘Of course you will,’ said Ellis. ‘What do you think you’ll need?’
‘Well… a team of people who understand what the product does, how the product works, would be a good start. Medicine, virology…’
‘Who do you want on the team?’
‘I don’t really know anyone in the scientific team yet. I’d like to have Gresham with me. He keeps me grounded. Apart from him, well…’
‘Gresham. Good. Ask around the labs and put a team together as a matter of the utmost urgency,’ said Professor Ellis. ‘You’ll have all the budget you need.’
‘The first thing the team will need,’ Horatio scrabbled for ideas, ‘is all the test results of any kind relating to that patient and results of the same tests on a collection of patients on which the product, err—’
‘Data on a random selection of successes. Tell I T to give you database privileges and if they piss you about, ask them to talk to me about it. How many cases do you think you’ll need?’
‘To find outliers with a Z test, if there are any outliers? More the merrier but twenty ought to be enough.’

The electric gate at the end of the corridor opened, and Ellis ushered Horatio into the auditorium in which he had spent most of his first day at The Works.

‘Are you carrying your company ID?’
‘Yes, Professor, it’s in my shirt pocket.’
‘Good, you’ll need it because if you don’t have it, the doors won’t open and Security will appear from under a rock, like a shoal of piranhas. Now, watch this. This is live video.’ Ellis sat down at the nearest desk and the computer lit up. He typed something, and a video opened. They saw a man wearing an overcoat, carrying a bag of groceries and ambling down a shopping street. ‘See? That’s him, there, Patient one five five, Jory Hodgson, age forty-three.’
‘Looks like he’s out shopping,’ Horatio observed.
‘Crew member on the ferry. Lives on Sandpiper Terrace…’
‘I’d love to know where he found the money for a house there.’
Professor Ellis continued, ‘The house has four bedrooms and a garden the size of Hampden Park. He bought it with half a million pounds that he inherited from his grandparents, so choose your grandparents with care. Married to Bonny-Lee, two children, middle income, studied performing arts at Montrose, pollen allergy…’
Horatio stared at the video. ‘That’s the main street in Lochkeld, isn’t it, Professor. I recognise it. So what’s wrong with Mr Hodgson?’
‘Yes, it’s Lochkeld. The cameras identify themselves over here,’ he pointed, ‘Farmer’s Way, Lochkeld Nº 3. And what’s wrong with Jory Hodgson is, he’s alive. He should have been far too weak to stand up by now. Nothing’s happening to him. I need to know what we did wrong.’
‘So when do I start investigating?’
‘You’ve already started. Get everyone and everything together tomorrow morning. Make sure you check your e-mail because you’re running the show.’
‘Well, Professor, I’m touched by the faith you have in me, but—’
‘This is an emergency, Horatio. You are quite likely the best mathematician in Scotland. Find the problem, fix it, stop it happening again and you can bath in modesty later on.’
‘I fully intend to,’ said Horatio. ‘I shall be more modest than you or anyone else can imagine.’
‘One other thing,’ the Professor thought for a moment, ‘This is absolutely secret, at least until you’ve fixed the problem. Understand?’
‘Yes, Professor.’
‘Nobody’s going to buy a product that doesn’t work.’

 

 

If you believed the street sign, the name of the street that ran beside Rosentyre harbour was Sràid a’Chladaich. The original name plate, Shore Street, had been painted over and later removed altogether by the fervent nationalists of the late nineteen-fifties. The County Council, probably wisely, had not replaced it, arguing that had the English language name plate been removed during the War, and the Gaelic one left in place, it would have been easy to catch German spies because they would have to ask which street they were on, or how to pronounce it, or pronounced it comically wrongly.

Actually, during the war the English language name plate had indeed been removed, and not a single German spy had been detained as a result. Somewhere there is the gun barrel of a Centurion tank or the fuselage of a Spitfire made in part from the melted down name plate that once gazed down upon Shore Street, Rosentyre.

Theodore was walking home. As he often did, he chose to go along Shore Street, beside the harbour, where he could look out to sea, watch the seagulls eating spilt curry and chips off the street, see the small boats in the harbour riding the waves, hear the bells of the boats, the waves breaking on the rocks, the honks of the birds and the rumble of occasional aeroplanes departing Inverness Airport on the opposite side of the firth. He watched for the small passenger ferry that sailed every couple of hours from Rosentyre to Nairn, storms permitting. He thought of this way home as going the pretty way, walking for a quarter of an hour longer than necessary in exchange for the calm that the view of the harbour conferred upon his soul after a day of difficult work.

Rosentyre was far too far north to benefit much from tourist traffic, but the shopkeepers on Shore Street (or Sràid a’Chladaich if you know how to say it) did their utmost to provide everything the tourists would have demanded, if there were any. There was an ice cream café, a fish and chip shop, a post office, a grocer, a herbalist who told fortunes as a side hustle, an expensive whisky off-licence, an Indian take-away and a sign pointing to the railway station.

Theodore was passing the post office when he heard the kerfuffle inside. He heard one voice, a male voice, cursing and hollering threats and another voice repeating ‘Don’t hurt us, don’t hurt us.’ The door flew open and a young man ran out. He was unshaven, untidy, wearing a black bomber jacket and leather jeans, and carrying a butcher’s knife in one hand and a pile of notes and coins in both.

Instinctively, Theodore stuck one foot out. The young man tripped over it and fell hard. Reaching out to try to stop himself falling, he cut his hand deeply and let go the knife. With the other hand he released a cloud of banknotes and a shower of coins to the four winds. He landed face down on the pavement shouting, ‘You’re dead, you bastard!’

The force of the collision knocked Theodore off balance. He stumbled and landed heavily on top of the thief just as he was trying to stand up and grab hold of the fluttering cloud of banknotes. Theodore managed to kneel on the small of the thief’s back and hold his wrists.

He heard applause from the Post Office clerks, a man and a woman, both in their fifties, who had spilled out onto the street, and cheers — ‘Well done, sir, well held’ — from a tourist in a Burberry overcoat and a sou’wester who had been standing looking out at the harbour and taking photographs with an impressive big, black and silver Leica.

‘Do you have your phone?’ said Male Post Office Clerk.
‘It’s in the shop,’ said Female Post Office Clerk. ‘I’ll dial nine-nine-nine.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said W P C Rayner Shaw. ‘I’m here already. Theodore! It’s all right, I’ll take over from here—’
‘Pig! Bloody pig!’ came a shout from the felled man.
‘Hamish Todd,’ said Ms Shaw as she grabbed the thief’s arms and wrestled them into handcuffs. ‘I’d know that incoherent swearing anywhere. Now, you just lie still for a few minutes, and I’ll call for a van.’

As she found the mobile phone in a jacket pocket, she double checked, ‘That is you, Theodore, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Well spotted. How did you get here so quickly?’
‘I’ve been here for an hour or so. Coastguard reported two men acting suspiciously on the ferry pier, so I hitched a ride on a prison bus going to Inverness Airport. Turned out, the two men were civil engineers checking the stonework.’

The Post Office clerks said their thanks to W P C Shaw. They assured her that they would make witness statements in the next day or two and they didn’t need an ambulance, and they traipsed back into the Post Office and put the ‘Closed’ sign on the door. The photographer was nowhere to be seen.

‘You rode here in an empty seat on a bus-load of deportees?’ Theo asked. ‘That must’ve been more fun than calling a taxi.’
‘No,’ Ms Shaw shook her head, ‘it was half a dozen long sentences on an educational visit to Spain. Language, Landscape and Liquor,’ sort of thing, but not necessarily in that order. It keeps them out of trouble.’

‘Lucky sods!’ Hamish railed loudly, still face down on the pavement. ‘When’s this sodding van going to arrive? I’m getting goddamned mud up my nose.’
‘I quite forgot.’ Ms Shaw turned her attention to the matter in hand. ‘Mr Todd, do you want to be cautioned in English or Gaelic?’
‘You can pissin’ say it in Siamese, for all I bloody care,’ grunted Mr Todd.
Ms Shaw took a deep breath and recited in Siamese for half a minute or so.
‘That was an impressive performance,’ said Theo, open mouthed in astonishment. ‘I’m really grateful to you for turning up so promptly. I don’t think I could have held the man down for much longer.’
‘I’m impressed too.’ Ms Shaw admitted. ‘I’d never have guessed that I’d find you moonlighting as a super-hero. Where are the bright red cape, the blue shirt and the red underpants?’
‘They don’t fit me any more.’ Theo explained. ‘I’ve lost weight.’

Blue lights flashing, a police car arrived and its driver helped Ms Shaw to stand Mr Todd on his feet — ‘Well. Hamish Todd. What a surprise.’ — and load him into the back seat of the car hollering ‘Pigs! Leave me alone, pigs!’ at the top of his voice. The car drove off, leaving Ms Shaw and Theo standing, laughing, on the pavement outside the Post Office.

‘On days like today,’ Theo surmised, ‘you must really enjoy your job.’
‘I’m not allowed to do this in uniform,’ Ms Shaw giggled. She took her peaked cap off and kissed Theo. ‘We both need to cool down. Fancy a cup of coffee and an ice cream? I’m buying.’
‘That’s a very kind invitation, Ms Shaw,’ said Theo, ‘and I’d love to.’
‘Rayner. You can call me Rayner, even if I put my cap back on.’

 

‘Where did you learn Siamese, Rayner?’ Theo asked as they waited for their order in the ice cream café.
‘I didn’t. I’m not entirely sure that Siamese is a language at all. I was just wiggling my tongue and singing “Roll Out the Barrel.” ’

The waitress, who was also the chef, the dish washer and the proprietor, brought two Viennese coffees on a tray along with two large glass dishes each holding a pint or so of ice cream covered with diced fruit.

‘I‘m glad it sounded convincing.’
‘Very convincing for a minute and a half of unrehearsed soliloquy, I’d say.’
‘Well, not quite unrehearsed,’ Rayner admitted, ‘I go to a Pentecostal church occasionally.’
‘Let me ask your opinion about something.’ Theo weighed his words and spoke with care. ‘You say that you occasionally go to Church. My Mum says I should go to Church to look for a girlfriend, because I haven’t got one. Do you think it’s a good idea?’
‘You never know who might come and sit beside you,’ said Rayner. ‘Come to think of it, I’ll be escorting the Revolt Party march tomorrow. If you want to talk to me about the Pentecostals, why don’t you join them? There won’t be any trouble, and you never know who you might meet.’
‘I’ve never really paid much attention to the Revolt Party. As they’re competing for my vote, I really ought to find out what they’ll do if they’re elected.’
‘The first thing they’ll need to do is to set light to the Lake of Fire again,’ Rayner predicted, ‘because Hell will have frozen over from bank to bank. Did you like the ice cream?’
‘Very good indeed.’
‘Well,’ said Rayner, ‘I have to pay the bill, put my cap back on and start wandering around the town again, telling people the time and the way to the Town Hall. I swear that half the people in this town have left their wristwatch at home. Tomorrow at six in the evening, come wind, rain, shine or earthquake, I have to be standing in the car park of the King’s Unicorn watching half a dozen wannabe kingpins mooch quietly around the town.’
‘Six o’clock at the King’s Unicorn,’ Theo repeated. ‘Don’t let them start the revolution without me. May I bring Lois Lane with me?’
‘No,’ said Rayner. ‘She might inhibit you.’

 

 

By the next morning, the only thing about the incident outside the Post Office that Horatio hadn’t forgotten about was that W P C Shaw had let him call her Rayner, bought him an ice cream and kissed him. It came, therefore, as a surprise when he saw The Scottish Daily which some helpful soul had put on his office desk. He was the lead story on the front page. ‘Have-a-go Hero foils knife raid,’ it read.

Yesterday must have been a slow news day. He imagined the editorial conference held just before midnight, choosing tomorrow’s front page lead from a small pile of stories off the wires.

Faced with the choice of (a) King stays in bed, (b) Delia Smith eats deep fried jam sandwich in Norwich, (c) All quiet on the eastern front and (d) Passer-by trips up robber in Scottish town that reader couldn’t find on a map at gunpoint, the trip hazard story would have been their automatic choice.

Horatio guessed with reasonable certainty who the tourist with the big camera worked for and what his job was.

He wondered whether it was worth trying to smuggle the paper out of the office and decided that the risk of being banged up for a breach of the State Secrets Act justified the small cost and big inconvenience of putting it in the waste paper basket, buying another copy in town and carrying it straight to a joiner who would frame it.

‘Sorry,’ ran the message that arrived in Horatio’s mail, ‘I haven’t found anyone else to help you investigate yesterday’s failure. You can work with Gresham for the moment so you’re not struggling on your own. Ellis.

‘I’m not much surprised,’ Horatio said out loud, ‘because that’s my job.’

‘P. S. Well done, O righter of wrongs and virtuous defender of the law-abiding citizen.’

Horatio realised that he had forgotten to ask Gresham his official issue phone number. There was no piece of paper bearing a list of names and numbers. Using the secure internal telephone directory was legendarily time consuming, especially considering that he could just go into the corridor and shout ‘Gresham!’ as loudly as he could, but sooner or later he would have to use the telephone and it would be as well not to put off finding out how it worked until he needed to fetch the Fire Brigade.

Horatio picked up the phone and an irritating synthesised female voice said ‘Name badge.’
‘What?’
‘Name badge.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Horatio asked, knowing full well that the irritating voice would not tell him.
‘Name badge.’
‘This is getting me nowhere.’ You could only get away with speaking in such an excruciating voice, Horatio thought, if you were saying something that people wanted to hear, like ‘You are due a refund of income tax’ or ‘I have found your cat’ or ‘Nigel Farage has fallen down a hole.’ If you were saying something annoying—
The irritating voice said, ‘Time limit exceeded. Goodbye!’ and the phone stopped talking.
‘Hello? HELLO!’

The phone did not answer. Horatio hung up and glowered at it. ‘Bloody computers. They can’t do anything right.’

Gresham knocked on the door and walked in.

‘Hey, sweety pie, have you seen the papers?’
‘Yes. I’ve been elevated to the rank of Hero.’
‘In fact, I know you’ve seen the papers, because I bought two and I put one on your desk.’
‘It’s going to take me a lifetime to live this down. All I did was stand there while everything happened around me. Anyway, I’m glad you came along, because the phone didn’t let me ring you up. All the phone did was say “Name badge,” and then it cut me off.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Gresham explained, ‘you’ve got ten seconds to hold your name badge near the phone or it switches itself off. I had to work that out all by myself, you know.’
‘Your ability to talk to computers duly dazzles me. When you’ve done that, can you make a phone call?’
‘Yes. One phone call, then you have to start again.’
‘How I long for an ordinary phone so I can dial the number I want and, Bob’s your uncle, the person I want answers. Anyway, you and I’ve got some serious investigating to do. Where do you want to start?’
‘I’d say we should see what records and test results we have of this patient,’ said Gresham.
‘Jory Hodgson,’ Horatio put in, ‘His name’s Jory Hodgson.’
‘And we also need to gather some data on successes,’ said Gresham. ‘There are about a hundred, I think.’
‘I reckoned that twenty’d be enough to cast around for possible causes.’
‘Which means,’ Gresham said, ‘that we need to get some help out of I T. Not to mention some sense.’
‘This should be good,’ said Horatio. ‘I think I know where their office is. Come on.’

In the canteen at lunch time, Horatio chose chicken and Gresham chose fish. Tavin from I T had been more helpful than either had expected.

Gresham looked up and asked, ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘We sit and bash the data until we find some characteristic of Jory Hodgson that nobody else shares.’
‘Nobody else so far,’ said Gresham.
‘Well, yes, there’s always…’ He pointed to the sign. Do not discuss work. We aren’t allowed to talk about work in here.’
‘All right, then: Is the chicken nice?’
‘Not bad. This chicken must’ve been starving. Beats a Foodmaster Meal in a Box, all the same. What sort of fish is that?’
‘Fried fish,’ said Gresham. ‘Batter on the outside, fish on the inside, handful of chips.’

There was a pause.

‘You know,’ said Horatio, ‘the other thing I think we should get is a blood sample.’
‘What? Do you think this fish had some sort of disease?’
‘No.’ Horatio laughed. ‘I’m sure the fish is perfectly healthy, apart from being dead. I mean Jory Hodgson’s blood. We need a sample of Jory Hodgson’s blood for analysis, to see if there’s any sort of immune reaction or anything.’
‘Shall we sneak up on him with a cut-throat razor and a milk bottle? Like this.’ Gresham mimed sneaking up on what remained of his battered cod to the tune of the shark in Jaws and then stabbing it repeatedly with the point of his fish knife while mouthing the staccato violin shrieks from the stabbing scene in Psycho. ‘Der-dup, der-dup, der-der-der-dup, Eek, eek, eek, eek…’
‘That’s a brilliant idea but I think it needs a bit more tomato ketchup on it,’ said Horatio.

Back in his office, Horatio found himself devoid of ideas for drawing blood from Jory Hodgson without him noticing. Maybe Gresham would think of something. In the meanwhile, he picked up Small Scale Warfare once more, and carried on reading from where he left off.

 

Chapter Three: The Arrow is the Target

The use of infectious diseases as weapons of war suffers similar limitations to the use of nuclear explosives. Its effects are too widespread and it kills the wrong people. In the Middle Ages, armies laying siege to a town fouled the drinking water by throwing animal carcasses into the wells. All the people of the town became too ill to fight, even though to force a surrender it was sufficient to force a handful of decision takers to surrender.

Is there an infectious disease which could stop an army? The British spread anthrax over Gruin-Árd island off the west coast of Scotland, killing every sheep there. The island was still uninhabitable fifty years after the event, and the British never used anthrax spores as a weapon.

Other diseases also became candidates for biological warfare. Yet the problem was not the lack of sufficiently lethal infectious diseases, but the same problem that had beset nuclear explosives. The diseases were so highly infectious and so lethal that they were useless as weapons of war. Killing one person whose death might improve the outcome of the war would likely entail killing hundreds of others whose deaths would serve no tactical purpose.

The hope for changing the nature of warfare comes from an obscure branch of genetic science. It is the simple observation that two patients may be exposed to the identical bacterium, or to the identical virus, or the identical prion, and one patient will have no symptoms while the other is severely affected, perhaps even killed by it. The difference between different patients’ vulnerability to an infection arises out of differences between the patients’ immune systems specified in the patients’ DNA.

 

Suddenly it was ten minutes past five, and the King’s Unicorn was half an hour distant.

 

 

Theodore couldn’t see Rayner. He looked around the car park and saw a young man standing on a box behind a Revolt Party poster. Vote Rose X, the poster read. Mr Rose was warming to his subject.

‘When you find rabbits in your cabbage patch, what do you do about them?’

Eight people stood in the car park, listening disconsolately to Turner Rose, the man who was to be the Revolt Party candidate in the next election. They wore brown and black badges and they buttoned their coats and pulled their collars up to keep out the evening chill. It would have been hard, Theodore mused, to imagine a less revolutionary crowd, or a smaller one.

‘Do you welcome them, let them eat as much as they want, and build a luxury hutch with air conditioning and maid service to make sure that they enjoy their stay?’

The crowd shook their heads. They didn’t and they wouldn’t. A man in a grey overcoat ventured, ‘Shoot them,’ and a middle aged lady with ginger hair added, ‘Make them into a casserole with onions and carrots.’
‘Well, that’s a bit of an extreme remedy,’ said Mr Rose. ‘Perhaps—’
‘And a couple of tablespoons of peas,’ said a younger lady with a black and brown scarf.
‘No,’ said the overcoat. ‘Peas don’t go with rabbit. You could try tomato.’
‘A dash of worcester sauce might give it a bit more taste,’ said a young man whose black hair looked as though a bird had made his nest in it.
Realising too late that his chosen metaphor wasn’t evoking the imagery that he expected from his audience, Mr Rose tried to continue. ‘I mean, you don’t want to kill them, just to keep them out—’
‘No, you don’t,’ said the overcoat. ‘You’ve never so much as seen a rabbit, have you? You’ve got to shoot ’em. You can’t run after them with a catapult, grab ’em by the back legs and ping them away over the hills and into the Cromarty Firth. If you don’t shoot ’em, they’ll eat everythin’ in the entire allotment an’ then they’ll start on the plot next door to yours.’
‘I still say you should put peas in it,’ said the scarf. ‘Listen to authority. “No casserole can be considered complete unless it’s got peas in it.” It was Egon Ronay what said that, I think.’
‘Gordon Ramsay,’ said a man who looked about forty and wore a cricket club blazer. ‘I saw him sayin’ it on TV.’ He nodded sagely and went on, ‘Egon Ronay died in 2010.’
‘Well, he said it before he died,’ said the scarf.
‘Let me take a different example,’ Mr Rose began, but a cry of ‘Don’t change the subject’ from the overcoat un-nerved him.

‘This is as lively as I’ve ever seen them,’ said Rayner.

Theo jumped. He hadn’t noticed her in the crowd. ‘Hello! I wondered where you were.’
‘I was keeping an eye on things,’ she said, ‘and this is as lively as they’ve ever been, so I don’t think they’ll be marching around the town with blazing torches, smashing windows, setting fire to buildings and impaling one another on pitchforks.’

‘Let us march around the town,’ called Mr Rose, evidently having abandoned his speech for the evening, ‘chanting as always, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” ’
‘I’m as mad as a hatter, he means,’ Rayner muttered. ‘One seat on South Lanarkshire Council and he thinks he holds the world in thrall.’
‘I’m sure I’ve heard that mantra before somewhere,’ said Theo.
‘It’s not original,’ said Rayner, ‘but it’s rhythmic and it’s what they want people to hear.’
‘Forward together! Follow me!’ cried Mr Rose, leading the chant. ‘I’m as mad as hell…” ’

A light drizzle began. The small crowd took up the chant and began to amble gently down the road, looking mostly at their shoes and muttering, ’I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!’ as if they didn’t want anyone to notice.

‘You and I,’ Rayner explained to Theo, ‘walk around after them, just in case all hell breaks loose.’
‘I don’t think it will.’
‘Neither do I, but it beats standing in the rain outside Bute House.’
‘You mean, you actually turned down the chance to stand in the rain outside Bute House in order to come here?’
‘Only because you were going to be here.’
‘That’s very kind. Did they give you a scarlet tunic and a bearskin hat?’
‘They’re safe in my locker in Dunnabeg,’ said Rayner, ‘beside the bagpipes.’
‘Do they suit you?’
‘Yes. Well, if they really existed, they would make me look like the

Guardian of the Underworld

Guardian of the Underworld, shouting “Halt! Who goes there? Friend or foe?” at the milkman.’

 

Theodore walked back from the bar. He put the glass of amber wine onto the table in front of Rayner, stood the brown ale in front of his chair, and sat down.

‘Thanks,’ Rayner said. As she relaxed, a smile lit up her face.

They touched their glasses. ‘Cheers!’
‘So, Theo, now that you’ve trudged around town for half an hour in the company of the Revolt Party, what do you think of them?’
Walking around town in the drizzle, Theodore had been thinking more about whether the rain was going to become colder or heavier, and about whether Rayner would make time to have a drink together afterwards, and he hadn’t really thought about the Revolt Party. ‘They know how to make casseroles, they don’t know how to keep rabbits out of their cabbage patches, they think Egon Ronay was a controversial orator unless it was Gordon Ramsay, and… I guess… they’re as mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more, but I don’t really know what “it” is, and I’m not sure I’d have noticed how angry they were about it if they hadn’t told me.’
Rayner sipped the wine. ‘Delicious. Now that really is something special.’
‘Malmsey. It’s a specialty here. Noah’s wife got herself so tanked up on it that Noah, Shem and Japheth had to carry her onto the Ark.’
‘Why didn’t they just put her onto a taxi?’
‘Because there weren’t any taxis back in those days,’ Theo explained, ‘only Arks. It tootled around the floodwater for forty days and eventually landed beside the kerb at Number Three Uruk Gardens, Gilgamesh, where the driver charged her fifteen bob for the ride and ten shillings extra for taking all her pets with her.‘
‘Plus the traditional fifteen per cent tip,’ Rayner added.
‘Making a total of £1 8s 9d,’ said Theodore before he could stop himself, still the mathematics graduate hours after the end of his shift.
’God’s truth!‘ Rayner was astonished. ’How did you do that?‘
‘I didn’t,’ said Theo. ‘I mean, I didn’t really do anything. I can see the numbers. They’re still there, in digits like the neon signs you see in hairdressers’ shop windows, except instead of “No appointment necessary,” it says “£1 8s 9d.” ’ He pointed at the invisible numerals in the empty space on the table, two feet in front of him, in between the beer mat and the bottle of brown ale. ‘Pound sign, one, eight, nine.’
‘There’s some dust floating in the air, sparkling a bit, but…’
‘It’s a gift,’ said Theo, ‘like other people see ghosts or unidentified flying objects or sure fire business opportunities. I’ve always had it.’
Rayner took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I’ve never come across anything like this. What happens if she pays the driver with a five pound note?’
‘£3 11s 3d change, and, yes, I can see it.’
‘And you could do that ever since your first day at school?’ Rayner asked.
‘I remember the boy who sat next to me asking me what the answer to some simple question was. Five plus four, that sort of thing, and I told him to read the question and write down the numbers that appeared in front of him. He had no idea what I was talking about. That was when I found out that nobody else could see them.’
‘What happened?’
‘The little bastard asked the teacher about the numbers that appeared in front of me, and they dragged me off for a drug test.’

 

 

The walkie-talkie in Rayner’s pocket began to squawk.

‘Is that you off somewhere?’ Theo asked, as she fumbled with the zippered pocket from which the squawks came.
Rayner pulled the walkie-talkie out of the pocket and held it without answering it. ‘I’m on duty until midnight,’ she told Theo. ‘Wait a second while I find out what sort of cataclysm is next in line for Superwoman and her beloved have-a-go caped crime fighter Batman.’ She pushed a button on the black box with her thumb, and the squawking stopped. ‘Shaw.’ she said, trying to sound professional.
‘Evening, Rayner. Sorry to call on you this late in the evening but I think you’re nearby. Damn it, I dropped the note…’
‘It’s probably on the floor somewhere, sir,’ she said.
‘Yes… Ah, here we are. Automatic alarm operating. Can you go and have a look? Paper Pusher, the newsagent on, er,’ he struggled with the pronunciation, ‘Sràid a’Chladaich. Is that -ch as in loch or itch?’
‘It rhymes with… Actually, I can’t think of anything. I’ll go straight away, sir.’

Rayner put the walkie-talkie down onto the table and turned to Theo. ‘Those damned alarms go off all the time. Fancy a short walk in the cold and dark? We can hold hands.’ She fumbled the radio into the zippered pocket and added, ‘If there’s anyone breaking in, no heroics. OK?’

An alarm bell was ringing loudly and a brilliant lamp was flashing above the doorway of Paper Pusher.

‘Oh, crikey, this is all I need.’ Rayner let go Theo’s hand, ‘Sorry, honey, you stay over here,’ and she walked up to the shabby youth who was standing in the shop doorway cursing and trying ineffectively to prise the lock open with a screwdriver. He might have been fourteen, she thought, or thirteen and on the tall side.

‘Why don’t you just ring the doorbell?’
‘ ’Cause there’s nobody in,’ he said, spinning around.
‘Give me the screwdriver,’ Rayner asked, calmly.
‘Eff off.’
‘Come on, have some common sense. You wouldn’t want to do six months for carrying an offensive weapon. Not in Dunnabeg Youth Correction Institute, anyway. Truly, it’s a grim place. Most of the cells are without windows, the meals are awful, half an hour of telly a week, church on Sunday, no mobile phones, and bullying is out of control — those guys would punch a kid like you in the face without a second thought, steal your food, smash your radio, raid your stash.’
Rayner’s description had worried the lad. ‘Can you not hide from them?’
‘Well, you might be able to hide from them, because you can see them coming from a distance. They’re the ones wearing Y C I uniforms.’

The youth handed over the screwdriver, holding it courteously by the blade.

‘Thanks. I can see we’re going to get along fine,’ said Rayner. ‘I’m sure I recognise you from your mugshot. What’s your name?’
‘John Smith,’ growled the youth.
‘Are you sure it’s not Ewan Turner?’
‘Completely,’ said Ewan Turner, with a snarl that would have done credit to a hungry Rottweiler.
‘And you don’t live in Flat 15, Waldegrave House, Falgour?’
‘No,’ said Ewan Turner, who lived in Flat 15, Waldegrave House, Falgour, ‘I live over there.’
‘Which one?’ Rayner asked him. ‘What’s the door number?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t see it from here.’
‘Have you tried going to Specsavers?’ Rayner suggested.
‘No, it’s pointless, ’cause they take all the cash to the bank every night.’
‘Incidentally,’ Rayner continued, ‘while I think of asking, which school do you go to?’
‘I don’t go to school.’
‘Because someone might ask me which school you go to. When you did go to school, which one was it?’
‘Carpenter’s.’
‘Carpenter’s School in Falgour. I must’ve got you confused with someone else. I’m sorry. We all make mistakes. So how about I take you to that house over the way and you let yourself in with your key, and you’ll hear no more about it. Do you think I can trust you not to do anything silly like this again?’
‘I wasn’t doing anything silly at all. I was trying to get some fags.’
‘ ’Cause you can get into an awful lot of trouble if anyone sees you and thinks that you’re trying to break in.’
‘Hey, I just remembered,’ said Ewan, ‘I left my door key at my mate’s house in Falgour.’
Rayner looked up at the clock on the harbour tower. ‘If we rush, you’ll just make the train to Falgour.’
‘I would, but I haven’t got any money.’
‘Oh, you poor soul. And it’s a long walk, too. Is that why you were trying to break the lock on the newsagent’s door?’
‘No, I wanted a packet of fags.’
‘Without money?’ Rayner looked at her watch. ‘Giving them away free now, are they? Let’s get you onto the train. We’ve got five minutes. I don’t know how you’re going to get back home after you’ve picked your keys up, though. Do you think we should knock on the door of your house and see whether there’s anyone at home? Or we could break the lock with that screwdriver of yours. You could fetch your key from your mate’s house in the morning. Your Mum will surely lend you the train fare.’
‘I need to bloody go to Falgour.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ She looked at the harbour clock in the distance. ‘We can just get you on the train, I think, but we’ll have to rush.’

Theo came out from the shadows and caught up with Rayner and Ewan. ‘Six minutes, actually,’ he said.
‘You don’t mind if my friend comes with us, I hope?’ said Rayner to both of them, and neither objected.

Rosentyre station at night

As they crossed the footbridge at the station, the last train of the day grumbled in. They were the only departures. The guard stood on the platform watching three late night travellers leave the train. Rayner beckoned him across.

‘A child’s single to Falgour, please.’
‘Don’t you need one for yourself as well?’
‘No, thank you. I’m going home. The ticket’s for my friend John here. He left his door keys and his money at his mate’s house and he needs to go back and get them.’
‘One pound fifty.’ Rayner paid for the ticket and the guard issued it, asking quietly, ‘Are you sure I won’t find him stumbling around first class, smoking dope, like he was a couple of days ago?’
‘Oh, I hope not.’ said Rayner. ‘It would upset me dreadfully if my John did anything like that. He’d be letting me down awfully.’

With a reply of, ‘I hope you’re right,’ the guard returned to the back cab and rang the bell. The engines revved and the train moved off.

 

‘Was that the last train?’ Rayner asked Theo.
‘Yes. No more trains either way until five thirty in the morning.’
‘I reckon we’ve both earned a rest.’ Rayner pushed open the door of the Ladies Only Waiting Room. It was a room with three benches covered with dull coloured vinyl, a fireplace that hadn’t been lit for years, grubby windows, unwashed peach coloured curtains along one wall and a couple of lights hanging from the ceiling. ‘Nobody ever comes in here,’ she said as they walked in.
‘You mean, like we just did?’
Rayner took off her cap and laid it on one of the benches. ‘I’m not in uniform now,’ she said, as she turned the lights off. ‘I reckon we could spend a couple of hours in here.’

Rayner unwound her tie, took off her uniform jacket and shirt, and laid them beside the cap.

Entranced by her, Theo wrapped his arms around her and was tussling with her bra clip when a train pulled into the platform. It was about two thirds full. The guard came over and opened the waiting room door.

‘You’re lucky I saw you. Sorry we’re late. Last train for— Oh!’ he called, and he looked the other way as he continued quietly, ‘I am sorry. Switch everything off when you leave.’

With that, he closed the door quietly, returned to the back cab and sent the train on its way.

 

 

The phone on Horatio’s desk trilled. ‘Horatio,’ said Horatio.
‘Who was that lady I saw ye with last neet?’ The voice was Gresham’s.
‘What?’
‘Was she yer date?’
‘I’m sorry, Gresham, I’m not really with you.’
‘Ah was in the King’s Unicorn last neet, but ye didn’t notice me. Was she yer date?’
‘Yes. Yes, she was. We had a drink, we chatted for a few minutes…’
‘It’s okay, she’s really nice, and Ah divven’t need the full after action report. The forst thing Ah need to know is, are ye still going to date me?’
‘Of course. Any time.’
‘Well, that’s all right, then. I didn’t want to think that ye’d found someone else.’
‘I’ll always have time for you, sweety,’ said Horatio. ‘So why is Jory Hodgson still alive?’
‘Ah divven’t know.’
‘I thought you said…’
‘Ah said, Ah think ah’ve gorra solution to wor problem. You got ten minutes?’
‘Um… to a problem that isn’t what went wrong?’
‘No, to yer what to tell the management problem. That would do, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well, I haven’t worked out why Jory Hodgson is still alive, so any port in a storm, really.’
Gresham thought for a moment. ‘Are ye thorsty?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘See ye in the canteen in ten minutes, then. I could morder a cup of tea.’

 

Horatio and Gresham sat opposite each other behind cups of tea and far enough from the admonition on the wall not to discuss work to forget that it existed.

‘So, ye see,’ Gresham began, ‘Ah was home about midnight, and Ah was watching Fraud Squad on telly, when I had this idea.’
‘Sounds excellent so far.’
‘Ah have my best ideas when I’m watching crime shows, and fortunately there’s not much else.’
‘So what are we going to do?’
‘We write a report saying that Hodgson was never infected.’
‘That’s taking a bit of a risk, isn’t it?’
‘Not if we have evidence,’ Gresham enthused, ‘I can get two samples of my own blood, put Hodgson’s labels on both of them, in two different handwritings, with different dates. That’ll do for evidence.’
‘Well, it’s the best idea we’ve had between us so far. What could possibly go wrong?’
‘Quite a lot, now Ah come to think of it.’
‘But it’s the only idea we have, apart from investigating exactly what went wrong and reporting on how to fix it, of course. Let’s cut your idea loose from its moorings,’ Horatio continued, ‘take it for a sail across the Cromarty Firth, and see whether it floats. The first problem I can see is, how would you get two samples of your own blood, in NHS pattern containers?’
‘Ah was wondering that as well,’ said Gresham, ‘but then I thought, there must be some old sample tubes lying around somewhere.’
‘I see.’ Horatio thought for a moment. ‘I have to admit it’s a good idea. You hand over two vials of your own blood and we pass them off as Jory Hodgson’s blood, one before he was inoculated with the product and one after we thought he had been inoculated with it but really he hadn’t. Have I got the idea?’
‘You certainly have,’ said Gresham, ‘that’s exackly reet.’
‘I’d still feel a lot happier if we had the answers to some fairly basic questions, though. So, since we’re not under any great pressure to have an answer by going home time this evening, I’d like to call the plan that we haven’t thought of yet Plan A and call the brilliant idea that you’ve just suggested Plan B.’
‘Whass the B stand for?’
‘It doesn’t stand for anything. It means the second.’
‘You mean, you divvent have a Plan A so mine has to be Plan B.’
‘Yes, that’s it. I don't have a fully formed Plan A but yours is good enough for an emergency, so I’m going to call it Plan B.’
‘Supposin’ you didn’t have a Plan A or a Plan B, then my plan would have to be Plan C, is that reet?’
‘No, your plan would still be Plan B, and the second plan that we haven’t got would be Plan C, I think. To be honest, I’m becoming a trifle confused. Before we start putting paint to paper and turning out the masterpiece that Plan A is sure to be, let’s try to draw some preliminary pencil sketches of Plan A. What questions do we need answers to?’
‘Well, for a start…,’ Gresham thought for a moment, ‘there’s “If Hodgson wasn’t injected with the stuff, who was? What happened to him?” ’
‘And then,’ Horatio took up the theme, “Who mistakenly injected it into the wrong person?” and “If nobody injected it into the wrong person, where is the dose of product now?” You can see that some people might possibly worry about that sort of thing.’
Gresham asked, ‘Do ye have a Plan A?’
‘No,’ said Horatio, ‘not yet.’
‘How about Plan C?’
‘No, I haven’t got that either.’

Gresham stared out of the window for a moment. Two huge crows were chasing each other in circles above the moorland that separated the Works from the town.

He sighed, ‘Ah, if only they could talk.’
‘Who?’ Horatio hadn’t seen the crows.
‘Them crows there. If only they could talk.’
‘But crows can talk,’ Horatio pointed out. ‘They can learn to speak, like parrots.’
‘Well,’ Gresham proposed, ‘Ah’ll open the window, an’ maybe one of them will fly in here and talk to us.’

The crows landed in a tree and looked around them. Gresham didn’t open the window.

‘Supposing it did?’ Even though it stopped at all stations and in between them as well, Horatio was, as sometimes happened, unable to guess the destination of Gresham’s train of thought.
‘Well, maybe one of ’em saw somethin’. ’
‘Supposing one of them did. Where would that get us?’
‘Well, the one that saw it would tell all the others. They’d all have heard the story by now. One or other of the crows could tell us the gossip. Why Jory Hodgson is still alive.’
Horatio thought that unlikely. ‘I think he’d just make a wild guess.’
‘Aye. He’d just say “Some interferin’ bustard must’ve done it.” ’

‘Which would have us all barking up the wrong tree.’

‘There is a proverb,’ Gresham said after a pause for thought. ‘The people singin’ the wrong words are the people what wrote the reet ones.’
‘Does that help us?’
‘It’s a Ukrainian proverb I just made up. Who started this line of research in the first place, years ago?’
‘Daniel Newman,’ said Horatio. ‘Last I heard, he was still at St. Hubert’s doing the odd spot of work whenever he felt like it.’
‘Perhaps he can spare us ten minutes,’ said Gresham.

 

Like the Victorian prisons and the Victorian schools and the Victorian lunatic asylums, the buildings that comprised St Hubert’s University were intended to uplift, soothe and delight the souls of their occupants, as well as to impress visitors and passers-by. ‘Here, in these buildings,’ you felt as you walked along the sonorously named Maxwell Highway or across the Golden Bridge, ‘men and women become great by achieving great things.’

Theodore and Gresham left the Glentinny Hotel in Balgour the next morning and struck out along the riverside path to the Life Science Palace.

Every academic building in St Hubert’s University was famously either a reconstruction of an impressive Scottish building, or an original Scottish building transported brick by brick and re-assembled on site. The design of the Glentinny Hotel was squarely based on the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, although a lot smaller, and the Life Science Palace was pretty much a replica of Brodie Castle in Morayshire, with the addition of lifts, fire escapes, whiteboards, a ground floor burger bar with vegetarian options and electricity.

Professor Newman was pleased to see them. A bearded figure, either approaching retirement or already retired but unable to stop working, he welcomed Horatio and Gresham into his office. He talked to them while staring out of the window at the Lonnen Burn. Patch, his large and somnolent golden retriever lay on the floor. Patch looked up as the two former students entered the office, then lay down again and closed his eyes.

‘I haven’t seen either of you for a while. How have you been getting along?’
‘We’re both working for Sunlight, Professor,’ said Gresham, ‘so we can’t say that much.’
‘You can tell me more or less anything,’ said Prof Newman. ‘I helped to set the place up. The research they’re doing is my idea. Did you get a chance to read my book?’
‘Small Scale Warfare, yes. I’ve read the first three chapters,’ said Theodore.
‘And Ah telled him to read it,’ said Gresham.
‘Three down, five to go, then. It’s reassuring that you understand the need for secrecy, but fortunately I still have Sunlight staff ID. I hope your jobs suit you, ’cause nothing is worse than a job that you don’t like. Go ahead, tell me what’s on your mind. And call me Daniel, for goodness’s sake. ’
‘We’re trying to find out how a patient survived—’
‘Ssh! Quiet for a moment.’ From his desk, Prof Newman picked up an old and well-worn notepad, a pencil and a small silver telescope. ‘I can hear the nine thirty from Stirling.’

Patch stood up slowly and with great effort.

‘Come on,’ The Professor urged the dog towards the window. ‘You’ll miss it.’

Patch parked his lower jaw on the window-ledge and looked out of the window while Prof Newman stared out of it through the small telescope. A train approached the station on the farther bank of the Burn, and he wrote something on the notepad.

‘What is it, Daniel?’ Horatio asked. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘It’s one oh seven, four two six. Class 107 — it ought to be in a museum by now.’ The Professor put the pad, pencil and telescope back onto the desk and turned back to his visitors. ‘Honestly, they keep these old war-horses going until they fall to pieces.’

Patch wandered back to his place on the carpet, lay down and closed his eyes.

‘You’re trying to find out how a patient survived,’ Prof Newman reminded himself.
‘Survived a weapons test,’ Horatio said, and realised immediately from the expression on Daniel’s face that he had said the wrong thing.
‘Never call it a weapons test,’ he growled, ‘even though it is one. It’s a drug trial.’
‘We’re trying to find out how a patient survived a drug trial.’
‘Well, let’s see. What do you know about the patient?’
‘Serial number one five five, male, age forty three, lives in a big house on Sandpiper Terrace in Lochkeld,’ Horatio volunteered. He paused for breath and went on, ‘Wife, two children,’
‘Is that all you know about him?’
‘Except that he’s still alive, yes, and he has a degree in performing arts.’
‘Fat lot of good that is. Ah, well, everybody has to start somewhere.’

Prof Newman asked them to ‘Hold on a moment,’ and rummaged in his desk. Eventually he took a sheet of paper from the lowest drawer. ‘Serial number one five five, you say?’

‘One five five,’ said Horatio.
‘He was on my list, see? Here.’ He pointed at the entry. ‘Is. Now, I had one of my students administer the drug. Wayne Crawford. He’ll be in tomorrow.’
‘Could we go and visit him at home? Or at work?’
‘There wouldn’t be much point,’ said Daniel, ‘because he’ll be off his face on some exotic substance. No, come in tomorrow and I’ll make sure he speaks to you. I don’t think I can do much else to help, but if I think of anything… Meantime, find something interesting to do this afternoon. This is a great university with a unique history.’

Suddenly Patch barked loudly twice.

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said to the dog, ‘I’ll take a look.’

Both he and the dog returned to the window, and Daniel scoured the landscape through his telescope. ‘Yes, Patch, you’re absolutely right as always. It’s a train of four container wagons headed by a Class Sixty-six. Six six five oh two, it looks like. Remember that for me, because I forgot my pencil. ’ He turned to Horatio and Gresham as Patch carried on gazing out of the window. ‘Patch loves these trains. I’d guess it’s another building being brought CKD from some faraway hill or valley and ready to be turned into a thriving university department. That locomotive has enough horse-power to pull St Mary’s Cathedral.’ Patch opened his eyes for a few seconds. ‘Yes, Patch, perhaps it is hauling St Mary’s Cathedral. The spirit of Victoria Vincent lives on, God rest her immortal soul, now appearing in the shape of six clones of Mr Bumble who live in a room marked Board of Trustees.’

 

 

In the burger bar on the ground floor of the Life Science Palace, Theodore and Gresham were the only customers. They sat at a table by the plate glass window looking out at the terrace of tiny shops that lined the opposite side of Argyle Furlong. News and Fags, TV Paradise, Hair Today, Everything For Dogs.

‘Sorry,’ said Gresham, ‘it was all they had left. The chef’s taken the rest of the day off to gan on TV. He’s got himself onto Sundae Superman.’
‘How do you know that?’ Theo asked.
‘Kate told me. Check-out operator. An’ before you ask me how Ah know, Ah read her name badge.’
Theodore read the scrap of paper which Kate had left on the tray. ‘Healthy cheese and nut cutlet burgers on wholemeal bread, £5·23. Each! I knew I should’ve eaten more for breakfast. Still, I don’t want to appear ungrateful. Thank you for buying it.’ More gingerly than necessary, Theodore bit off a piece of his healthy lunch. ‘Actually, it’s quite nice.’
‘Unless there’s a fire, stop talkin’, ’ said Gresham. ‘Ah’m thinkin’. ’
Theodore turned pale. ‘What thought is going through your mind? Should I hide under the table?’
‘If ye dee, I’ll steal the tomato slices out of your nut cutlet cheeseburger.’
‘Does your nut cutlet cheeseburger have tomato slices in it?’
‘Naa. It’s defective in manufacture. Thass why I want to steal yours while you’re not lookin’. ’
‘Have you thought of a Plan A?’
‘No, but Ah have a plan for gettin’ a couple of tomatoes. I can go into Everything For Dogs, over there, and say that my dog wants a tomato.’
‘What happens if your dog doesn’t eat the tomato?’
‘That’s not a problem. I’ll eat it mesel’.’
‘You’ll eat the dog?’
‘Naa, the tomato.’
‘Forgive me if my memory is at fault, but you haven’t got a dog, have you, Gresham?’
‘Naa, I haven’t. I was just thinkin’ out loud. So, where was Ah? Oh, yes. Ah thought, where can Ah get an idea for Plan A.’
‘Lots of places.’ Theo considered. ‘The library, the genetics laboratory, the archivist, the laundrette, the Poisons Bureau?’
‘Naa. Look, it’s nearly mid-day. Almost time for Crime Ship. See that phone over there?’

There was a phone on the table near the cash desk, just in case Kate ever needed to call the Police or the Fire Brigade. (‘Help, help! We ran out of steak and kidney pie, a riot broke out, and one of them’s set fire to the toaster!’)
Gresham stood up, ‘There’s nobody lookin’, ’ and he walked to the check-out and picked up the phone.
‘Whass the phone number of the TV shop?’
The number was painted in big bright green numerals on the sign above the window of TV Paradise. Theodore shouted it and Gresham dialled it. After a few seconds, he started to talk.
‘You haven’t done what I told you,’ he said with fake anger and in a fake posh accent.
‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Theodore asked.
‘Brutus from Head Office in Edinburgh,’ said Gresham, ‘that’s who the hell I am.’

There was a pause of a few seconds while the person at the farther end of the phone call said something indistinct. Then Gresham continued,

‘Well, read your messages more carefully. If I have to come to your house with your P45, I shall expect you to pay for the taxi. I told you to put your finest ninety-six inch television right at the front in the shop window and tune it to The Renfrew Channel. Think you can manage that?’

Gresham paused as the reply came from the further end.

‘I hope so, for your sake, and one other thing. Turn the sub-titles on. Customers love sub-titles. Even the ones who can’t read love sub-titles. They think any words that flash on and off are a neon sign advertising low calorie fizzy drink.’

Though the voice on the far end of the call was indistinct, Theo could tell that it had asked a question.

‘Yes, and with sales figures like yours, you’d better. Now get back to work. Good afternoon.’

‘Oi! Put my phone down!’ Wearing her burger bar brown overalls, Kate rushed across the room and hollered at Gresham, who immediately put the phone down and went back to sit with Theodore. ‘That’s there so as I can call an ambulance if anyone chokes on a fishbone.’
‘Nobody’s going to choke on a fishbone,’ Theodore called across the room, ‘because we’re the only customers, and we’re not eating fish.’
‘You’re too clever by half,’ said Kate, grudgingly.
‘See?’ said Gresham, taking a long, slow munch on his healthy cheese and nut cutlet burger as the old shopkeeper in TV Paradise fired up a jumbo size television set in the shop window, where Theodore and Gresham could see it clearly. ‘Telled you so. Crime Ship is just starting.’
‘I think I got lost somewhere,’ said Theodore. ‘Why are we watching Crime Ship? Is it a tense, authentic, vivid and imaginative drama set in a deceptive and malign world where nothing is what it appears to be?’
‘Naa,’ said Gresham, ‘it’s about a magic ship that solves mysterious crimes and then throws the bad guys in jail. Typical daytime TV. It’s tripe. But Ah telled ye, Ah get all my best ideas while watching crime shows on TV.’
As Theodore watched the opening titles, he wondered whether there wasn’t any wet paint that he could watch drying.

Kate shouted to them from the cash desk. ‘Are you two watching Crime Ship?’
‘Yes,’ Theo shouted back, ‘Is that all right?’
‘Of course. May I come over there and sit with you? It’s my favourite programme.’

Kate walked sedately over to them and pulled up a chair. ‘Let’s be friends. Where’s the telly?’
‘Over there, in the shop window. I’m Theodore and that’s Gresham. We were students here.’
‘Goodness me,’ said Kate, ‘that takes me back. Weren’t you two caught up in that raid on the dormitories back in…’
‘I can’t read the words on the screen from here,’ Theo complained in the hope of changing the subject.
‘This episode is called In the Sand Long Ago,’ said Gresham, squinting. ‘Should ye not’ve gone to Specsavers, like Ah said?’
‘I know this one.’ A smile spread across Kate’s face. ‘This is the one where they find some ancient Egyptian artefact in a passenger’s luggage and the ship takes them to an excavation in the Jamibian Desert in 1932 and they…’
‘Don’t spoil it for me.’ Theo interrupted, ‘Crime Ship is a waste of good electricity at the best of times, but watching it and knowing exactly what’s going to happen would be insufferable.’
‘How can a ship take ye to the middle of a desert?’ Gresham was mystified. ‘There isn’t any water. That’s the whole point of a desert.’
‘May I tell him?’ Kate asked Theo. ‘You may put your fingers in your ears.’
‘Suppose the fire alarm goes off?’
‘You’ll see me running hell for leather towards the fire escape,’ said Kate, reassuringly.

Theo put his fingers in his ears.

‘It takes them to a fishing port,’ she explained to Gresham sotto voce, ‘and it puts them on a camel and gives it a map of where to take them.’ Kate turned around to Theo and mimed pulling her fingers out of her ears.
Theo took his fingers out of his ears and Gresham got as far as saying, ‘It takes them to a fishin’ port on the western Mediterranean coast…’ before Theo yelled at him to shut up. ‘And camels can’t read,’ he went on.
‘Poetic licence,’ said Gresham, ‘of Category Z, for zoölogy.’

They watched the programme almost until the end. Three midshipmen trekked to the site of an excavation in the desert in 1932. An archæologist who was working on the excavation identified the antiquity in the luggage as the priceless handbag of a mummified ancient noblewoman, containing a lipstick, half a dozen papyrus handkerchiefs and a couple of those syrup-flavoured biscuits wrapped in plastic that the kahwas give you on the saucer with your cup of coffee.

Magic glasses that translate Egyptian hieratics

Thanks to a magic pair of glasses which enabled whoever wore them to read and understand Egyptian hieratics, the crew restored the bag to the present heir and successor of the noblewoman, a Ms Karen Abbas, who lived in a modest three storey residence in Alessandria and worked as a portrait photographer. So grateful was she for her heirloom that she sent its finder an International Money Order for three silver aggry beads and twelve camels with gold rings in their noses.

When the Egyptian police heard the tale, they were at last able to take an ancient file out of the cupboard, blow the dust off and tick the box marked ‘Solved.’

The episode ended, as every episode of Crime Ship did, with Captain Rochard Bligh wearing distinguished, freshly laundered and ironed uniform, sunlit, smiling, standing behind the wheel of R M S Kildale, giving the order to weigh anchor, and saluting the harbour wall while intoning his sonorous catch-phrase, ‘Nothing escapes the Crime Ship.’

The credits rolled.

Theo was complaining, ‘But there wasn’t any crime in it,’ when an old man in dusty overalls, who smelled of warm bakelite, clouds of dust and the odour of overheated and badly tuned television sets, entered the burger bar.

 

 

The old man had TV Paradise stitched onto his shirt. ‘Is Brutus here?’ Nobody answered, and he tried again. ‘Is there anyone here called Brutus?’ he demanded.
Theo spoke. ‘Him,’ he said, pointing. ‘Wake up, Brutus.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ muttered Gresham. He assumed his fake voice and turned again into his adopted alter ego Brutus, a man in his fifties who had only ever felt quite at home in the Army, sitting up straighter than Gresham did, noticing how much his Army uniform felt like being wrapped up in a coconut hair doormat, barking orders at anyone who needed to have an order barked at him, wilting in the relentless, debilitating heat on the esplanade of the विंदाललू (Vindaloo) hill fort, feeling older than Gresham, sitting in the foreground like Sir Hector Macdonald on the Camp coffee bottle, bidding a servant to make the elevenses while he planned the defeat of the enemy. Was the shopkeeper seeking revenge on the trickster?

Theo was engulfed by a vision of his boyfriend being seized on a charge of impersonation for fraudulent reasons, overpowered, dragged out of the room and hurled violently into prison by four large and heavily armed policemen.
‘You don’t look like Brutus,’ said the shopkeeper.
Gresham thought quickly. ‘I am the other Brutus,’ he said in the other Brutus’s voice, ‘there’s two of us.’
‘Could you see the screen all right from all the way over here, sir?’ the man asked.

‘Yes. Thank you. It was readily visible.’
‘Does anything need to be improved, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Gresham, still in the other Brutus’s voice, ‘the programmes, they’re dreadful.’

Theodore remarked quietly to Kate, ‘God’s truth, is he going to get away with this?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Kate, twice as quietly.

‘I’ll see what I can do about the programmes, sir,’ said the man.

Kate found that hard to swallow. ‘Can you really improve the programmes, Mr., er…’
‘Jacobs. Jonah Jacobs, Jacob’s as in “crackers,” ’ he said. ‘I can but try. I’ll have a word with God about it.’

Before she could stop herself, Kate asked, ‘Do you think God can improve the programmes?’
‘I doubt He’ll help much,’ said Mr Jacobs, ‘He used to appear as a burning bush or a still, small voice, but these days He’s like everyone else. When you need His help, he gives you a leaflet. Which among you gives your son a stone when he asks for bread, or a leaflet when he asks for help?’
‘Have you got the leaflet?’ Gresham asked him, ‘Is it any use?’
‘Not much,’ Mr Jacobs shook his head, ‘although Corinthians is all right.’
‘By the way,’ Gresham asked Mr Jacobs, ‘how did you know I’d be here?’
‘I thought you were the first Brutus and not the other Brutus,’ he explained. ‘Isn’t this where he always comes? I remember, he said they do an awesome cheese and nut cutlet burger on wholemeal bread.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Gresham, ‘I only came here because the other Brutus told me about it.’
The brief lull in the conversation gave Kate a moment to look up at Mr Jacobs and ask, ‘Would you like to try one of our speciality burgers?’
‘Oh, definitely yes.’

Kate went to the kitchen door and disappeared through it, and Mr Jacobs continued, ‘I’m surprised that the first Brutus didn’t tell you that he’d been here, ’cause it was only last week.’
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ said Gresham, still speaking as the other Brutus, ‘but I haven’t been to the office. I’ve been in China looking for a supplier of battery-powered television sets for cyclists that screw on the handlebars.’
Mr Jacobs misunderstood. ‘Eh?’
‘I mean, television sets that screw onto the handlebars. How many of those could you sell at £40 each or so?’
‘They would fly off the shelves like hot cakes,’ said Mr Jacobs, ‘if I had any shelves.’ He paused for a second and added, ‘And if cakes could fly.’

Kate returned from the kitchen with a cheese and nut cutlet burger on a blue plastic plate. ‘Here, this is what Brutus eats when he comes here.’

Mr Jacobs looked a bit shocked when Kate asked him for £5·23. He paid up, bit a chunk off and said, ‘Ish very tashty,’ through a mouthful of nut cutlet.

 

Back in the Glentinny Hotel that evening, Theodore suggested to Gresham that they spend a while in the hotel bar, The Taproom, talking about the case.

The Tap Room at the Glentinny Hotel, Balgour

‘Where did that leave us?’ Theo ordered two double Lochdarisaigs. ‘Have you thought of a Plan A?’ Theodore asked Gresham as they sat side by side on a couch in the bar. The barman brought the drinks in cut crystal glasses on a silver tray. The Taproom was the kind of bar that has a hundred single malts, but even in the middle of the day it was so dark that if you put your whisky down, you couldn’t find it again afterwards.
‘Aye,’ said Gresham in his own voice.
‘Inspired by Crime Ship?’
‘Yes, I have been and it was.’
‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’
‘Supposin’ Wayne Crawford had a handbag,’ Gresham began, ‘and he put the loaded syringe in that, and then he left it on a bus or somewhere. What do ye think?’
‘Does it come to light five thousand years later,

In the seventieth century, a traveller finds a handbag whose owner left it on a bus five thousand years previously

in the seventieth century?’
‘I don’t think so. I think someone finds it and gives it to the bus driver,’ Gresham said.
‘Well, it’s a good story, so who knows, maybe we can follow it and it’ll lead us somewhere.’
‘Probably to a lost property office in the bus garage.’
‘So you’ve almost solved the problem,’ said Theo in a tone of voice that meant “But not quite.” ‘The problem I see is that the person who was asked to carry the syringe went by the name Wayne. Wayne is a boy’s name so he probably doesn’t have a handbag.’
Gresham thought for a moment. ‘I see what ye’re getting at. But it doesn’t have to be a handbag. It could be a carrier bag, or his pocket. If your name was Wayne, and ye were told to carry a loaded syringe somewhere, what would you put it into?’
‘My coat pocket, I expect.’
‘So either the syringe is lying around at the bottom of Wayne’s wardrobe, or somewhere a dry cleaner is carefully lookin’ after a couple of tablespoonful of a genetically engineered poison which, injected into the right sort of person, is about twenty times more lethal than potassium cyanide.’
Theodore shook his head as though trying to keep the nightmare visions at bay. ‘Not looking good, is it?’
‘Yer greatest fears are like yer most fervent wishes, Theodore. Neither of ’em is ever goin’ to happen. Thass what me Auntie used to say, an’ she was right.’ Gresham looked directly into Theo’s eyes and spoke softly, ‘Aa think wor job’s finished for the day.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I just noticed that the bar is nigh-on empty and naebody’s lookin’ at us.’ He leaned closer to Theo and kissed him.

They held each other close. They heard a man and a woman walking along the corridor towards The Taproom. Gresham recognised one of the voices. ‘Thass Turner Rose’s voice,’ he said, ‘Aa’d recognise it anywhere.’

Turner Rose was saying, as only he could, ‘It’s pretty obvious that the only way to speed up traffic in towns is to abolish all the zebra crossings and all the traffic lights, and then make bicycles go on the pavements,’ and a woman’s voice replied, ‘It might work, but don’t forget who has to scrape the casualties off the tarmac.’

Theo cried out in panic, ‘Quick! Hide me!’
‘Why, what’s happened?’ said Gresham.
‘Because that’s Rayner! The woman I went on a date with!’

 

 

Turner Rose came into The Taproom with Rayner Shaw, in uniform, beside him. ‘Well, I just happened to hold the winning ticket that day,’ she was explaining. ‘You’re a prominent person in need of Police protection, and the sergeant thought that since I’d been escorting your march through the streets of Rosentyre a few days ago, I would probably know what you looked like, and so I was the ideal person to look after security at the big Revolt Party meeting here.’
‘Are you looking forward to it as much as I am?’
‘May I be honest?’ she asked. Mr Rose nodded. ‘Thanks. I’d rather be at the football match.’

Mr Rose sat down on one of the couches. ‘Caley fan, are you?’
‘No.’

‘Cold outside,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Not at all the weather you want in the week before an election.’ He waited for Rayner to take a seat beside him. When she sat on a bar stool facing him, his disappointment showed in his face. ‘They do a twelve year old Lochdarisaig here,’ he said, waving at the bottles on the shelves behind the bar. ‘Do you want to try it?’
‘Which one is it?’ Rayner asked.
‘I think it’s that one,’ said Mr Rose, pointing to a bottle so far away that he couldn’t have read it with a telescope.
‘I can’t. I’m on duty. A double fresh orange juice will have to do me. But do have one yourself.’ The waiter brought the drinks without being asked, and Mr Rose showed his key fob. Rayner looked around her. ‘How the other half lives,’ she mused, looking at the cut crystal tumblers glinting in the warm light of the ’fifties pendant electroliers.
Mr Rose hesitated for an instant and then suggested, ‘You don’t have to sit in the corridor outside my room, you know. You could come inside. I wouldn’t mind.’
Rayner looked shocked, although she had heard similar invitations many times before. ‘Are you saying what I think you might be saying?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Rose, ‘or at least I think I am.’
‘It would be best,’ she said, ‘if I phoned the station and asked whether there’s a male officer still on shift—’
A crash, the crash of a table and two heavy cut crystal tumblers landing on the floor, interrupted her. One of the two tables farther along the bar had fallen sideways, sending flying the two Lochdarisaigs that had been standing on it. Theo straightened half-way up, slipped awkwardly to the side as his muscles found themselves, and then stood up completely, while Gresham tried to avoid attention by making himself as small as possible. ‘You, sir,’ yelled Theo, pointing at Rose, ‘had best find somewhere else to stay.’
Shocked and shaking, Rose resorted to outright lying. ‘I was only concerned that Ms Shaw might be cold and uncomfortable in the night.’
‘Then book a room for her. A single room, I suggest.’

‘Yes, yes. Good idea,’ said Rose, grateful for being shown a way out of a fight. ‘I’ll go to Reception and sort it out straight away.’

While Rose was out of hearing, Rayner said to Theo, ‘You’re my knight in shining armour. How did you know I was here?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Theo. ‘I was here to see Daniel Newman about a problem at The Works. But I did notice the placard tied to the lamp post in the car park. A caricature of Rose with a toothbrush moustache. Very well drawn. Instantly recognisable. Whoever drew it must have been practising for weeks.’
‘That might mean trouble.’
‘I thought that, too. What sort of trouble? Water cannon, mounted Police, rubber bullets, machine guns?’
‘You watch too much television,’ Rayner concluded. ‘At worst it might be three second year sociology students asked politely to keep their opinions to themselves and piss off.’

Rose came back into the bar carrying a room key on a hotel fob. ‘This is for you,’ he said, giving the key to Rayner, ‘Room 277. Not too far from mine.’
‘Thanks, that’s very kind.’

For half an hour or so, Theo and Gresham sat on the couches, drank double Lochdarisaigs and talked about Jory Hodgson and what they were going to ask Professor Newman in the morning, while Turner Rose talked to Rayner Shaw about the miraculous transformation that was to befall the economy of Scotland on the day after Mr Shaw was, in the teeth of all the evidence, elected First Minister by a landslide. Theo overheard him saying, ‘People of all stripes are fed up to the back teeth with politicians,’ and he breathed to Gresham, ‘You don’t know how right you are, Jimmy.’

Theo and Gresham went to their room first, leaving Rayner to enjoy Rose’s company. She had learned as a teen-ager that the best way to deal with bores in a bar was to let them drink as much as they wanted, because then they fell asleep.

As the clock of St Bridget’s Kirk struck two, Room Service walking along the corridor with a tray of rattling cut crystal tumblers woke Theo, who noticed that Gresham was fast asleep beside him. He remembered that Rayner was booked into room 277. He slipped into the hotel fluffy dressing gown, closed the room door very carefully so as not to wake his boyfriend, padded quietly along the corridor, and lightly tapped door number 277. A very annoyed elderly male voice hollered ‘Piss off,’ in a yell that could have been heard, and probably was, a mile away. Perhaps, knowing that in Scotland the assassination of ambitious minor politicians simply isn’t done, Rayner had gone home and was at that very moment sitting in her kitchen in her pyjamas eating cornflakes out of the box.

Under his breath, without realising that he was speaking out loud, Theo sighed, ‘How I longed for you.’
‘I told you to piss off,’ said the angry male voice, ‘that’s twice you’ve woken me up.’

Going back to the room he was supposed to be sharing with Gresham, Theo discovered that he had forgotten to put the key into his fluffy dressing gown pocket before closing the door, and he had to wake Gresham in order to get back into bed with him.
‘I’ll explain in the morning,’ he said.
‘I think I worked it out already,’ Gresham replied, yawning. ‘Divvent be embarrassed. I would have done exactly the same if it’d been me.’

In the morning, there she was. Rayner was almost ready to check out, dressed in civvies, breakfasting on scrambled egg and kippers. ‘Sorry to disappoint. I would’ve enjoyed your company. I went to Reception and changed the key for another room, so that Turner wouldn’t find me in the night, but as he was still sitting in the bar, I couldn’t tell you where to look for me.’

Ten minutes later, Gresham arrived and sat beside Theo. Rayner looked at him and smiled, unable to think what to say in the circumstances.

‘I didn’t know you were such a gifted political cartoonist,’ Gresham said.
‘I try my hand occasionally. When the Devil blows his bugle, there I am, riding among the reinforcements… Just a minute. How did you know?’
‘That poster tied to the lamp post in the car park. It’s drawn with a Sharpie™ on the back of a letter from your Mum. Good likeness, that is.’

 

 

Daniel Newman was standing by the window, staring out at the street and smoking a churchwarden pipe. Sitting on the wooden chair near the desk was a smiling and happy looking student in jeans and a T shirt printed with the St Hubert’s stag Cervus. His arms were in constant motion, waving, and he shifted awkwardly in his seat, as though sitting made him uncomfortable.

Wayne introduced himself briefly. ‘Hi, I’m Wayne Crawford. I’m a second year student of genetic engineering. I’m from Zimbabwe and I’m funded by the Scottish Fund for Technology Transfer.’
‘What sort of fund is that?’ Gresham asked.
‘It’s part of the detritus of the British Empire,’ Wayne continued. ‘It pays for students in Commonwealth countries to study science and engineering in Scottish universities. I had the job—’
‘I know your name,’ said Theo, ‘You’re the student who…’
‘Yes, he is, Horatio,’ said the Professor, reminding Theo just in time to use his approved pseudonym for as long as they had company, ‘From what I remember, I had other work to do, and the last post was due, so I asked Crawford to post the dose of product to Lochkeld clinic.’
‘And I did it the next day,’ Wayne interrupted. ‘I remember clearly. You gave me a padded envelope, a plastic bottle the size of my little finger, a note addressed to the doctor and a cheque payable to the National Health Service.’ He drew breath and went on, ‘The bottle had the numbers MB2 and 155 hand-written on it. I’ve got the certificate of posting somewhere.’
‘I don’t think we’ll need that,’ the Professor smiled. ‘Not at the moment, anyway, but if you come across it again, don’t throw it away.’
‘MB2’s the batch number and 155 is the patient number,’ Horatio observed unnecessarily.
‘So, what happened?’ Gresham too was keen to hear the story from beginning to end. ‘Did you fall over and drop it in front of a rapidly oncoming steam-roller, or did the wind blow it over a cliff and send it crashing onto the rocks below, which dashed it to pieces?’
Wayne giggled. ‘No, of course not. I told you, I have a certificate of posting. I put the stuff into the envelope… Woops, that’s a sequence error. I copied the address off the letter onto the envelope, then I put the plastic bottle, the letter and the cheque into the envelope, and I stuck the flap down with parcel tape. Then I took it into the post office and sent it first class. Two pounds forty.’ He hesitated, and went on, ‘Which incidentally you haven’t paid me back.’
‘Oh, gosh, sorry.’ Professor Newman felt in his pocket and found two pound coins, which he handed over. ‘Here’s… some of it.’

A sudden change came over the professor. His eyes lit up. He looked like a boardroom executive energetically cracking an urgent and difficult problem, even to the point of taking his pipe out of his mouth. He grabbed the phone and keyed four digits, an internal extension. Theo and Gresham stared at him, and then at each other. They had never before seen him in that state.

‘Victoria, can you have a look and see whether the cheque to that clinic in Lochkeld was ever cashed. Thanks.’

He put the phone down and the pipe back, and became once again the university don with the reading glasses and the leather elbow patches, whom nothing ever seemed to trouble.

‘Why didn’t I think of that,’ Theo asked.
‘You probably didn’t realise that we have to pay the clinics for their services,’ Newman replied. ‘Once you know that, it’s an obvious enquiry to make. I wouldn’t worry about it.’
‘So, as far as you know,’ Theo asked Wayne, ‘the product was in the post and should have arrived in the clinic at Lochkeld a couple of days later.’
‘Yes,’ said Wayne, ‘that’s all I know.’

There was a silence.

Professor Newman turned to Horatio and Gresham. ‘Well, unless you two have any more questions…,’ the two shook their heads, ‘Thank you very much indeed for dropping in, Wayne, because we need to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.’

‘See you later.’

As Wayne left the office, the phone on the desk rang.

‘Newman… It was. That’s helpful. Most helpful. Thank you.’

He returned to staring out of the window. ‘It appears that the cheque was cashed. It’s on the Department’s bank statement.’
‘So what happened to the product that was in the same envelope?’
Professor Newman continued to look out at the window. ‘The train from Glasgow should arrive in a minute or two. I always like to watch it. It’s a minute or two late.’ He picked up the little telescope and pointed it at the railway station. ‘Expected 11:13. Ten minutes late,’ he read aloud. ‘They must have been having problems.’ He collapsed the telescope and put it back on the desk. ‘As for what happened to the vial of product, I’m afraid that’s your problem. I don’t think I can help you any more with that. But if you think I can, do phone me. I’m quite often here.’

 

 

 

As they left the Life Science Palace, Theo and Gresham heard the noise of a highly emotional orator bellowing into a tinny but powerful amplifier addressing a supportive audience, coming from the Peace Hall.

The Peace Hall, St Hubert’s University

‘Ah, yes,’ Theo breathed, looking in the direction from which the noise was coming, ‘Rose’s Revolt Party meeting. Put your fingers in your ears, fellow citizen, lest you be subliminally brainwashed into voting for Rose.’

Like most of the buildings that made up St Hubert’s University, the Peace Hall was a near-copy of an older building which Victoria Vincent had thought interesting. It had been based on Achcolm House, as re-drawn and brought up to date by a first class honours architecture graduate, Joël Fletcher. The design had been his first job, and he had now set up his own partnership, designed an all-weather tennis court and a couple of motorway service stations and he was well on his way to becoming a millionaire.

‘When I was starting my second year,’ Gresham remarked, ‘they held Freshers' Week in the Peace Hall. I was recruiting for the English Language Society. I know my way around the place. It’s a surprising building.

Floor plan of the Peace Hall

Looks like nothing more than a Victorian music hall with a stage, thirty seats or thereabouts, windows and doors, but behind the stage it’s all over secret doors, hidden rooms and stairways and corridors. There’s even a revolving book-case in it somewhere. Fletcher must have been intrigued by all the hidden bits, otherwise why would he have included them in the replica?’
‘Why on earth did Achcolm House — the original Achcolm House — have all those hidden features?’
‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ said Gresham. ‘I met Joël Fletcher during that Freshers’ Week. He was here recruiting for the Architecture degree. The story behind the original building was that back in the eighteenth century, Achcolm town council wanted to recruit a sheriff. They hit on the idea of building a courthouse that was also a decent size town-house for their Judge, in a good part of town.’
‘So that the new recruit could live above the shop, you mean?’
‘Yes. It worked. They recruited Justice Lucius Sutherland LLB. Now, his mother was a French Catholic. The Catholics were not emancipated in Scotland until 1829, so Justice Sutherland—’
‘You’re saying that he wanted the Catholics that he sent to the jail to have an escape route.’
‘Quite literally. Yes. He bribed the builders to make the courthouse and the cells easy places to escape from. Not in as many words, of course. He told them he needed hidden corridors and stairways for the servants. Then Justice Sutherland would turn up in the cell of a Catholic prisoner in the early hours, lead him out to the drinking fountain and send him on his way with his blessing, five shillings and a pickled beef sandwich.’
‘He actually got away with that?’
‘Nobody ever noticed,’ said Gresham.

Theo shook his head, as though disbelieving, and asked, ‘What do you think we’d find if we took a look around?’
‘We would find one crazed politician holding forth to fifteen grannies and granddads waving let’s-cut-taxes style slogans written in crayon on the back of a seaside postcard and shouting “Throw them out,” ’ said Gresham, ‘but that isn’t a reason for not going in and having a look.’
‘Well, I’m game,’ said Theo, ‘I’ve got nothing more interesting to do before we catch the train tomorrow.’
‘Well, we start on the street. See that stone column, beside the road, that looks like a drinking fountain?’
‘It is a drinking fountain,’ said Theo.
‘Well, yes, it is,’ Gresham conceded, ‘I mean, you can get clean drinking water out of the tap on the top, but if you open the hatch at the back, there’s a false floor that hinges upwards. You can squeeze through the hatch and there’s a ladder that leads down. Fourteen rungs, and be careful because it’s dark, the rungs are only beechwood and they haven’t seen a tin of Creosote™ since the War.’
‘That’s seventy-odd years ago. Plenty of time for wood to rot.’
‘No, the First World War. Tread carefully.’

Gresham went first. ‘Stay outside until I’ve reached the bottom,’ he told Theo. ‘I’ve done this before. When you do come in here, close the hatch after you and put the false floor back.’
‘How many times?’
‘You only need to close it once. Push it shut and lift the handle, then get hold of the— Oh, I see what you mean. I’ve only been down here once.’

Two minutes later, Gresham called up that he had reached the bottom of the ladder.

Wailing McQuail haunts the grounds of the Peace Hall

Theo replied from the top of the ladder, ‘I had an extraordinary vision of a man in grubby Highland dress watching me standing beside the water fountain, staring into the hatch and telling me ‘That ladder is dangerous. It needs a coat of creosote.’ in a Caithness accent.
‘That must be Wailing McQuail. You saw him?’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He’s the ghost of Sandy McQuail. He was a labourer who fell into the deep earthworks in the grounds of Achcolm House and died. His grave is in the grave-yard of the parish church in Achcolm. I didn’t know you were a sensitive.’
‘Neither did I ’ said Theo, ‘but I saw him as clear as day. I heard him, too.’
‘Either you’re a sensitive or you’ve chosen a fine time to tell me you’ve been experimenting with mind-expanding pharmaceuticals.’
‘McQuail seemed to have reservations about us going into the hidden passages.’
‘I can understand why his ghost would want to haunt Achcolm House,’ said Gresham, ‘but why would he show himself at the Peace Hall at St Hubert’s University?’
‘Wait while I climb down there.’

Theo remembered to close the hatch and put the false floor back into place, but on his climb down, he slipped awkwardly on the last rung but two, landed with a thump and almost fell flat. He grabbed the ladder and pulled himself up. He and Gresham were standing in a narrow passageway with bare brick walls and a low ceiling. Although the replica building had not been opened until 1980 there was already dust and mud everywhere.

Gresham asked, ‘Is McQuail still up there?’
‘No,’ said Theo. ‘That’s the thing about visions. He’s in my head, not really in the grounds, and now he’s standing in the passageway over there and I can hear him saying, “Told you so.” ’

‘Wailing McQuail’s’ memorial stone in the grounds of the Peace Hall

Theo looked around. ‘How come it’s light down here?’
‘There are glass tiles that let some moonlight in. You can’t see them in the grounds because they’re covered by the shrubbery. Come on, it’s this way. This passage comes out into the back corridor. I’ll lead the way because there’s not enough room for us to pass each other. Tread carefully and watch your step.’
Theo was still curious. ‘Why on earth is there a secret passageway that leads to a university auditorium?’
‘Fletcher copied all the hidden passages for some reason,’ said Gresham in a whisper. ‘Down here somewhere there was a secret sanctuary in which a priest could hold a Catholic service of Mass. Those who knew about it could get into and out of the chapel through the drinking fountain. Now shush, or they’ll hear us in the meeting.’

A flight of steps led from the passage up into a broom cupboard. The door into the cupboard was hidden behind a layer of towels and linen, and anyone who looked into the broom cupboard without knowing that the door was there would have been unlikely to see it, although he might have asked why there were so many sheets and towels in the broom cupboard.

‘So far, so good,’ said Gresham. ‘We’re inside the Peace Hall. Honestly I didn’t think we’d get this far. Now, straight ahead and we’re in the guest lecturer’s office, turn left and that’s the theatre, turn right and we’re in the seminar room, and upstairs is the guest room. Which way shall we go?’
Theo listened carefully. ‘It sounds as though the meeting is on our right, in the seminar room. We’d best turn left.
‘That’s the strange acoustics of the place. All those passageways and invisible doors make sounds appear to come from all over. Nah, Rose is a narcissist. He wouldn’t hire the small meeting room even if the only souls attending his meeting were his mother and her Pekinese dog. He’d hire the theatre. So we turn right, and as I promised, Theo, here is the revolving book-case.’

‘It just looks like a door,’ said Theo, ‘like any other door.’
‘Trust me,’ said Gresham. ‘This door was built to deceive the Roundheads. Or, at least, the original was. Had they ridden into the seminar room, their leader would have shaken his head, put his sledgehammer back in his tool-bag and said, “Waste of time coming in here, lads. No way a Catholic fugitive could be hidden in that book-case.” And then the whole platoon would turn around and gallop off along the A761 in search of a decent pub and a bit of the old iconoclasm.’

Gresham took hold of the door-handle and pushed. The door did not move. On the farther side, the door was indeed disguised as a black oak book-case. It weighed several hundredweight. Theo and Gresham put their shoulders against the door and shoved. With a loud creak, the door moved a couple of feet, the hinges parted company with the door-frame, the book-case on the other side of the door swayed, tipped over and crashed onto the floor, sending blocks of wood painted to resemble books in all directions, and broke into half a dozen black-painted planks of wood. Gresham fell flat on his face and Theo tripped over Gresham’s leg and landed beside him.

 

Inside the seminar room, Rose stopped mid-sentence and wheeled around to face the intruders as they struggled to their feet.

‘That’s why,’ he was saying, ‘anyone can join the Revolt Party, everyone is welcome to attend our—’
‘Erm,’ said Gresham.
‘Good evening,’ Theo added.

The audience, two rows of party faithful wearing brown rosettes, turned towards Theo and Gresham. All of them looked as though they of an age to draw their old age pensions. One man, who wore a rosette on each lapel of his verdigris overcoat, muttered, ‘Get out,’ and a woman who was eating popcorn out of a cardboard box cried out, ‘What are you doing in here?’ and very nearly choked.

‘This is a public meeting,’ said bald man in a clerical collar. ‘They’ve every right to be here.’
‘Have they?’ said the two rosettes. ‘Have they? I had to pay for my ticket,’ in a tone that suggested that the ticket had cost three months’ wages.
‘Oh, if that’s what’s on your mind,’ said the clerical collar, ‘I'll pay for their tickets.’ He reached into his pocket and held a handful of coins out to Mr Rose. ‘Here’s two pound coins, Rose. Keep the change.’

Rose was furious. Ignoring the money, he advanced on Gresham growling, ‘I will not be made a fool of,’ and punched him in the stomach. As Gresham staggered backwards, retching, the cleric somehow climbed onto the stage and stood between him and Rose.

‘Mr Rose,’ the cleric began, ‘do not seek revenge. “Say not thou, I will recompense evil; But wait on the LORD, and he shall save thee.” Proverbs, chapter twenty, verse twenty-two.’
‘Get out of my way,’ said Rose, now threatening. ‘They broke into my meeting, they don’t have tickets, and I am going to throw them out.’
‘Violent actions are a terrible thing, Mr Rose…’
‘For everything there is a season, Reverend’ said Rose.
‘Ecclesiastes three, verse one,’ said the cleric, ‘and indeed there is, for some people understand nothing else,’ and with that he thumped Rose in the face with a right hook and the force of a jumbo jet making a crash landing.

Then Two Rosettes threw himself on the Reverend rather in the manner of a suet pudding falling off the lunch table and landing on the dog, while Popcorn Lady ran out of the meeting room screaming for a constable and leaving a trail of half-eaten popcorn.

‘Where’s the nearest exit?’ Theo asked, quite in general.
‘Over there,’ said Gresham, pointing to the main door.

Theo and Gresham left the Peace Hall through the main door and walked down the path to the road. The faint figure of Wailing McQuail stood before them shaking his head. ‘Told you so.’

‘I should have brought a crucifix,’ said Theo.
‘Aye,’ McQuail replied, ‘that would have dealt with Turner Rose. His name is most apt. He would’ve turned and fled.’

The following morning, as they boarded the train from Balgour to Inverness, change here for all stations to Rosentyre and Lochkeld, Theo and Gresham looked up at the Life Sciences Building across the beck and waved to Professor Newman, who was standing at the window looking at them through the telescope. The Professor waved to them and Patch barked twice.

 

A view of Achcolm	Achcolm Main Road
Achcolm Council	Justice Sutherland

 

 

‘What have we learned from that?’

It was a rhetorical question, but one that they expected to be asked sooner rather than later.

Horatio and Gresham were sitting in Horatio’s office. Gresham had a bandage on his nose and a bruise on his left cheek. Horatio was sitting in the comfortable swivel chair and Gresham was sitting beside him, on the wooden visitor’s chair, a little closer to Horatio than might have been necessary. Horatio was holding his mathematician’s 2H pencil and both men were staring at the spiral bound notebook that lay open on the desk. Nothing was written on the page.

‘Divvent walk into Revolt Party meetings if you’re not expected,’ Gresham suggested.

Horatio wrote the suggestion down. He had written as far as ‘Revolt’ when Gresham asked, ‘What are ye writing that down for?’
‘You never know,’ Horatio shook his head. ‘Sometimes writing something down triggers a thought. Writing takes longer than speaking. You have time to think about what you write, phrase it carefully so you don’t say something else by mistake, and ponder the first half of the sentence while you’re writing the second half. When you speak it, a sentence passes so quickly that you put all the effort into getting the words out. Remember the proverb, “Ensure brain is engaged before operating mouth?” When you’re writing, sometimes, suddenly, an idea bursts into your head like one of those flowers that blossoms in five minutes, and after that you have some new insight, maybe so much insight that you can solve the problem. Although usually, it doesn’t.’
‘We know that Wayne posted the kit to a doctor at the clinic in Rosentyre and he must have received it because he cashed the cheque.’ Gresham paused.
‘That’s about it,’ Horatio nodded in agreement.
‘We’re only a mile or two from the clinic,’ said Gresham, ‘so we could gan there and ask them.’
Horatio thought for a moment. ‘We might have some questions for them,’ he said after an interval, ‘but first, let’s work out what the questions are. Maybe we could start by asking—’

The phone rang.

‘Is Theodore there?’
‘Yes,’ said Horatio, ‘it’s me.’
‘It’s your mother speaking.’
‘Yes,’ said Horatio, ‘I recognise your voice. You sound a bit panicked. Is everything all right?’
‘What happened up there, Theo?’ asked his mother.
‘Mom,’ said Horatio, ‘firstly, when you ring me at work, please call me Horatio. It’s my cover name. Just humour them. Secondly, I don’t understand. What happened that made you worry about what happened?’
‘Oh, my God,’ Gresham sighed as the full extent of the problem dawned on him, ‘last night’s scuffle has got into the—’
‘Have you seen the newspapers?’ There was a rustling noise as Mum picked the newspaper up. ‘Listen. “Fight erupts at party rally.” That’s you in the picture, isn’t it? Front row, third person from the left.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Horatio. He knew that his mother was probably right, even though he couldn’t actually see the newspaper down the perfectly ordinary telephone. ‘There was a bit of a kerfuffle because we knew how to get into the hall and watch the show without paying for a ticket.’
‘You mean, you broke in.’
‘Not really broke in, Mum, just sort of…’
‘Just sort of broke in.’
‘Well, yes. One of the audience asked us to leave, a surly goon in a black Group Five uniform started coming towards us, and then Rose punched me.’
‘Did you punch him back?’
‘No. Actually I was already leaving.’
‘Well, you should have done.’ Mom gave an exasperated cry of ‘Honestly. The number of times I’ve told you. Never start a fight that you can’t finish. Are you all right?’
‘We’re both all right,’ said Horatio, ‘nothing broken that I’ve noticed, a bit shaken but not very stirred. How are you?’
‘Seeing red. Not angry at yourself. Angry at the robot that answers your phone. I’ve spent at least ten minutes trying to get some sense out of her. For God’s sake, did nobody think that sometimes somebody might need to speak to you in an emergency?’
‘No, mum,’ said Horatio, ‘I don’t think they did.’
‘She kept on about “In order to satisfy this company’s security requirements, you must do this, that and the other.” ’
‘Drives you to distraction, doesn’t it, mum.’ Horatio put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to Gresham, ‘I think Mum’s found out something useful.’
‘Eventually I told it, “Listen, if you don’t let me speak to Theodore Williams pronto, I shall make my way to your major data banks and reprogram the lot of them with a very large axe,” and do you know what it said?’
‘No,’ said Horatio, ‘What did it say?’
‘The programmer must’ve been a Douglas Adams fan. It said, “Security over-ride activated,” and it put me straight through to you.’
‘Miracles never cease,’ said Gresham. ‘Aa never knew ye could dee that.’
‘So what was Rose talking about?’ Mum asked.
‘Potholes in the roads, I think, Mum.’ He put his hand over the mike and whispered to Gresham, ‘I can’t remember. What was he talking about?’
‘He was sayin’ how much the Revolt Party welcomes all its new members and anyone else who showed interest,’ said Gresham. ‘Always listen to people who disagree with you. He definitely said that. “You don’t persuade your supporters to vote for you. You have to persuade your opponents. The people who like someone else more than you.” And he said, “If you want to win an election, you’ve first and foremost got to listen.” I can remember that much. ’

 

‘Stirring stuff,’ said Horatio in the tone of voice that the Sovereign would have used to re-open Parliament if the Palace of Westminster had fallen down and been rebuilt ten years later, ‘so, what have we learned from that?’
‘How to get around the security on the phones,’ said Gresham.
‘And very valuable that will be too, until somebody realises they’ve left a trap-door in the software.’
‘Trap-door?’
‘Yes. A trap-door: it’s a trick that helps them to test the software before it goes live. Programmes like telephone branch exchanges are as long as your arm and written by teams of people, so no one person knows exactly how they work. If you’re the engineer, testing the end half of the software, you can skip the beginning half by going through the trap-door. You remove all the trap-doors when the software goes into production, but sometimes the launch date is so close that nobody ever takes the trap-doors away. Mom seems to have found a trap-door that skips over a security procedure. Don’t tell anybody that you know about the trap-door and maybe nobody will ever nail it shut like they’re supposed to.’
‘D’ye think there might be other trap-doors?’
‘It’s very likely,‘ said Horatio. ’It’s very difficult to test a complicated chunk of software without putting trap-doors and break-points into it. So there are very likely some more trap-doors hidden in there somewhere. We’re unlikely to find them, though, and even if we did, someone might take them out any time.’
Gresham was new to the world of designing and testing computer software. ‘What’s a break-point?’
‘It’s some event that suspends the entire system so that the engineer can examine it and find a fault. More powerful than a trap-door but of less use.’
‘Horatio,’ Gresham was obviously thinking this out, ‘Do you think that one of these invisible landmines—’
‘Undocumented features, Gresham.’
‘That one of these undocumented features could possibly cause a patient to miss a scheduled dose of product?’
‘Well, yes,’ Horatio nodded, ‘If every telephone in the Works broke down at the same time, and stayed broken down for a day or two, that would obviously cause considerable inconvenience. But I can’t see how it would happen.’
‘Can you talk me through it?’ asked Gresham. ‘What is a break-point?’
‘Well, supposing that when they were testing the new phone system, they found that if you tried to make an international phone call, the phone system couldn’t make the connection through a satellite. It could connect by submarine cable or optical relay stations, but when it tried to connect over a satellite link, the call never went through.’
‘How often might that happen?’
‘Nobody’s using the phone system yet, it’s being tested. Then the engineer puts a break-point just before the stage when the call fails, and then he tries to make a phone call through a satellite. The phone system stops just before the failure is about to happen, and the engineer can look around and see what is going wrong. Look at the magic numbers, see what’s ready to go and what isn’t. That’s why you need a break-point.’
‘And when the test is finished…’
‘When all the tests are finished and everything is working properly,’ said Horatio confidently, ‘the engineer takes all the break-points out.’
‘And he takes all the trap-doors out as well,’ said Gresham, ‘so either the phones were never put in properly, or somebody left in such a rush that he forgot to take the self-tests out.’
Theo saw the obvious. ‘That sounds like something that might be helpful to you and me.’

 

 

At seven in the evening Theo and Gresham were sitting side by side on the couch in Theo’s room in Mrs MacKechnie’s boarding house on Nicholson Street, quietly watching Crime Ship, when someone knocked on the front door of the house. Mrs MacKechnie answered the door, the caller spoke too indistinctly for Theo and Gresham to understand, and Mrs MacKechnie said, ‘Yes, he’s home. I’m sure he’ll want to help. That’s his room, there.’

Theo heard his visitor climb the stairs. He was expecting to hear a knock, but instead he heard Rayner Shaw talking to him quietly through the door.

‘Theo, are you home?’
‘Yes. Yes, wait a moment.’

Gresham seemed to realise what was expected of him in this circumstance. Without Theo so much as pointing to the wardrobe, Gresham went and hid in it. Theo whispered ‘Thanks, hun,’ pushed the wardrobe door shut and tidied his clothes up, ready to open his door.

‘Hi,’ he said. Rayner was in uniform and carried a manila envelope. ‘Sorry, my love, but… But first I want you to kiss me.’
‘Don’t let me stop you.’
‘Hold my cap, then, so I’m not in uniform.’

Theo kissed Rayner lightly, as one might kiss a pet cat.

In a whisper, Rayner asked ‘Are we alone?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, Theo, I don’t want someone walking in on us while we’re in the throes of passion, do I?’
‘Yes, Rayner, I can see that would be a bit embarrassing. We are alone. You can stay the night if you want.’

Rayner kissed him back with real passion, pausing only to take breath and whisper, ‘I’ve missed you a lot.’

Then Rayner held up the envelope. ‘Sorry, darling, but we’ve got some paperwork to do. Do you remember seeing family favourite Hamish Todd rob the post office on Sràid a’Chladaich a week ago or thereabouts?’ Her pronunciation of Sràid a’Chladaich was exemplary.
‘I don’t really need to remember it. I still have a bruise on my leg which talks about it all the time.’
‘Great. For the next week or two, make sure that other people can see it from a distance of ten or fifteen feet.’
‘Why, what’s going on?’
‘You’re a wanted man.’
‘Wanted? By whom for what?’
‘You’re wanted as a witness in Court. You saw what Todd did. The Court just wants you to tell the story.’
‘Fine. I can do that.’ Theo began his tale with the formula which once began every respectable children’s story. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time there was a bad man who wanted a lot of money…’
‘That’s exactly the idea.’
‘Yes, sweetheart, I’ll do that for you.’

Rayner kissed Theo again, reached into the envelope and pulled a massive wodge of papers out of it. She held out a cheap ball-point pen.

Theo baulked. ‘Lord God almighty, look at it — it’s the size of a self assessment, an application for social security, an appeal against a decision of the Egg Marketing Board not to stamp little lions on eggs from your chickens and a recipe for tomato soup thrown in for good measure.’

‘All it really says is, “Please come and tell us all about it.” Sign here at the bottom,’ Rayner said, pointing to the red box and the dotted line at the bottom of page seventeen, ‘in between Yes, all right, if you insist and Cross my heart and hope to die in a cellar full of rats.’

Theo tried to sign the form, but the pen didn’t work. Rayner took the pen and shook it vigorously. The pen slipped out of her hand and flew across the room, striking the wardrobe door with a loud clatter. Gresham pushed the wardrobe door open and stuck his head out. ‘ ’Strewth! I thought she’d never— Oh!’ he smiled and turned bright red in the face, ‘Hello, Ms Shaw, nice to see you again.’

Rayner was speechless, though not for very long. ‘Were you listening to us all the time?’
‘Not really,’ said Gresham, ‘I could hear what ye were both sayin’, of course, but I wasn’t snooping. I was just innocently hiding in the wardrobe.’
‘What about you, Theo?’ Rayner continued, ‘did you know that your friend was hiding in the wardrobe?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Theo said, ‘because I put him in there.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Theo,’ Rayner sighed, ‘I’d end our affaire here and now if I didn’t love you. Theo, if you want a boyfriend I won’t be unduly upset about it. I’ve endured worse. Just keep him out of my hair and out of my life, don’t catch anything and don’t ever ask me me to get into bed with both of you.’ She paused and screwed her eyes closed for a few seconds. ‘Now I really must take a few deep breaths and recover as much of my composure as I can manage. Give me the form.’
Gresham sat on the couch beside Rayner, who was sitting as still as she could and breathing through her mouth at a slow, measured pace. ‘Theo still hasn’t signed it.’ He picked the pen up off the floor and scribbled on the back of his hand. ‘It works now.’
Theo took the pen, found the form and signed it in the red box. ‘Here you are, Rayner. I’m sorry. I’ve made myself look a fool.’
‘You’re not sorry, you just have egg on your face for being caught doing something a bit silly.’ Rayner kissed Theo again, smiled and said ‘And you don’t look a fool. You are a fool. Try not to look like one. Don’t get caught again.’ Rayner breathed deliberately: in, one, two, three, out, one, two, three. ‘I’ve got a day off coming soon. Want to spend it together?’
‘Yes. Very much.’
‘Just you and nobody else.’
‘Yes. I promise.’

Rayner’s radio squawked. ‘Shaw?’
Hiss, snap, crackle. ‘Hasn’t he signed it yet?’
‘Yes, sergeant. He just wanted to read it before he signed it.’
Pop, crunch, whistle. ‘How far did he get?’
‘Halfway down page three.’
Click, sput, plink. ‘That’s some sort of record, I’m sure. If you’re still within hailing distance, >fizzle< his court date is the day after tomorrow at one in the afternoon.’
‘Your court date’s the day after tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours.’
‘Sounds not too difficult. Where do I go to?’
‘The Sherriff Court in Dunnabeg,’ said Rayner. ‘Come alone and you might get to stay late.’
The radio squawked back into life. ‘Shaw, if you can, please get around to Number 35, Distillery Alms Houses? Little old lady, Mrs McBarmside, says she’s seen >crackle< jewellery thieves off Shop Your Neighbour going into Millum’s for a haircut.’
‘Haircut? It’s gone eight o’clock at night.’
‘Mrs McBarmside eats lots of carrots,’ crackled the sergeant.
‘Damn it,’ Gresham cursed and banged his fist on his knee. ‘I missed the end of Crime Ship.’

 

Dunnabeg Sheriff Court was an ugly, ochre coloured building, all concrete blocks, bristling with video cameras and built around an asphalt parking place big enough for six prison vans surrounded by iron gates and razor wire. It had been designed and built to impress upon any person who went in past the Protected by Group Six Security signs and through the plate glass and sheet steel doors that they were not particularly important and they should expect a thoroughly miserable experience, and they should abandon any hope of spending ten minutes chatting to the Sheriff and the lawyers in a beautifully furnished, well lit courtroom and coming out again a minute or so afterwards feeling energised and ready for anything. This was true not only of people who visited because they were accused of a crime, but also included the staff who worked there, the advocates who drifted in and out like seaweed with the tide and, of course, the witnesses, who were directed by a sign and an arrow to a counter where a thin, unhelpful looking official in black Group Six uniform stood behind a sheet of glass puffing on a cigarette. The word Reception was stitched in sky blue on his overalls.

Theo followed the arrow and stood at the counter.

It took the receptionist a few seconds to realise that somebody was waiting to talk to him. Then, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, he asked, ‘Name?’
‘Williams. Theodore Williams.’
The receptionist picked up a clipboard bearing a few sheets of paper. ‘What have you been up to?’
‘I’m a witness,’ said Theo, ‘and I’m looking for the trial of Hamish Todd.’
Reception leafed through the sheets of paper. ‘Hamish Todd before Sheriff Bernice Wright in Room Two. Robbery. Go and sit in the waiting room and someone will call you when it’s your turn. Don’t discuss the case, don’t be scared, and good luck.’

In the waiting room, Theo saw Rayner Shaw looking impressively decorous in a suit jacket and a skirt. She smiled at him, and he took a seat next to her. She took his hand and squeezed it.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.
‘What happens now?’ Theo asked. ‘I’ve never done this before.’
‘The courtroom is through that door there.’ Rayner pointed at a wooden door labelled Courtroom 2. Press button and wait. You wait until someone opens the door and calls your name, and then you go inside, stand where they tell you, read the oath, they ask you questions and you tell your story. I’ve done it hundreds of times.’

A man and a woman came into the waiting room and sat down together. Both were about fifty and dressed as for a cold day. Theo recognised them as Hutchinson and Lorilee, the staff of the Post Office. The man said ‘Thank you for helping us’ to Theo, and the woman looked from Theo to Rayner. ‘Both of you deserve medals.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rayner, ‘although it was really Mr Williams here who did the difficult bit.’
‘I just stuck my foot out,’ said Theo, ‘and Todd fell over it.’
The receptionist yelled at them from his desk. ‘Don’t discuss the case!’
‘Ah… It’s a nice day,’ said Theo.
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Hutchinson, ‘it’s too cold.’
‘And it’s a really bad day if you’re on trial for robbery,’ said Lorilee.

Theo, Rayner and the store-keepers sat and waited, stared at the wooden door, waited, and waited. It was more than an hour later that a Group Six uniform opened the door and came out into the waiting room.
‘Witnesses in the Hamish Todd case?’
‘That’s us,’ said Theo. Rayner didn’t seem to mind him speaking for both of them. Hutchinson and Lorilee looked up.
‘Sorry about the long wait. Good news.’
Knowing that when used by officialdom the phrase good news very often meant the exact opposite, Theo asked, ‘Why, what’s happened?’ while Rayner had already guessed.
‘Mr Todd pled guilty,’ said the official. ‘Can’t say I blame him, being as there were four witnesses to the robbery and a brilliant, clear photograph of him doing it, so your evidence will not be required.’
‘That’s a weight off my mind,’ Theo breathed. ‘I feel as though a great boulder had been lifted off my chest. What do I do now?’
‘That,’ said the official, ‘is entirely up to you. Have a nice day.’

Hutchinson and Lorilee gathered their things together and made for the door.

Theo and Rayner walked behind them, but as they passed the counter, the receptionist called them over. ‘Mr Williams! Ms Shaw! Take these forms with you and when you get home, fill in your expenses, put the tickets and receipts in the envelope and post it back to us. Your bus fares and so on.’

Theo felt in his pocket to re-assure himself that he still had his return ticket. They shoved the door open and stepped out onto the street.

‘Are you in a hurry to be back at work?’ Rayner asked.
‘Not specially,’ he answered. ‘I don’t really have much idea what I’m supposed to do when I get there.’
‘Well… we can claim travelling expenses, so how about spending the afternoon going home the pretty way?’
‘Sounds good to me.’

 

‘This is the most spectacular scenic ferry trip in Europe,’ said Rayner.

She and Theo sat at a table on the deck of the good ship Countess of Cromarty which was ferrying them and a couple of dozen other passengers the eight miles from Inverness to Rosentyre. The sun was shining, but there was a chilly breeze blowing. They were eating cheese and pickle sandwiches from the refreshments counter and washing them down with brown ale.
‘How do you know?’ Theo put in.
‘The most scenic ferry trip in Europe, according to the County Nairn Tourist Board.’
‘I’ll take their word for it,’ said Theo, ‘they ought to know. It’s been an hour and a half well spent. If you hadn’t suggested coming back on the ferry, I would have spent most of that time staring at my desk. Thanks for inviting me.’

Some previous passenger had left her (it probably was her) copy of Metropolitan open on the table. Rayner picked it up and thumbed her way to a story entitled Are You Right For Each Other? The Questions You Need to Ask.

‘This magazine has alerted me to the chance we have to learn a bit more about each other,’ she said as she read the first couple of sentences.
Theo thought about that. ‘What were you hoping to learn?’
‘Just the things that women always want to know about men, it says here. Are you emotionally available for a long lasting exclusive relationship? Have you burdened yourself with any irrevocable commitments which may later turn into obstacles? Are you suffering any news-worthy mental disorder like autism, psychopathy or narcissism? Then there are the run-of-the-mill issues, do you like cheese and pickle sandwiches? Do you ever get sea-sick?’
‘The last two I can answer. Yes and no, in that order. Why did you ask whether I like cheese and pickle sandwiches?’
‘ ’Cause they’re the only things I can cook.’
‘I’ll be fit and healthy on the Whole Life Cheese and Pickle Sandwich Diet, provided you don’t charge as much as the refreshments counter does, and if the relentless diet of cheese and pickle sandwiches begins to pall, I know how to work a tin opener. I could treat both of us to baked beans and frankfurters. But for now, I’ll have to give you a definite maybe on the first three.’
‘And then there’s the question of whether I like you.’
‘That’s very important. You do,’ said Theo with conviction, ‘or hadn’t you noticed?’

The Countess of Cromarty slowed and steered towards the stone jetty that served as the ferry terminal of Rosentyre Harbour.

‘Is your flat empty?’ Rayner asked.
‘Yes,’ said Theo, ‘completely.’
‘Good. Let’s go there.’

 

Horatio arrived in The Works just before nine o’clock the next morning. He was making himself a cup of tea when Gresham arrived a few minutes later.

‘How did ye get on with Rayner?’
‘Better than I expected, to be honest. I feel alive, elated, relaxed.’
‘Did you miss me? I was at home, hiding, because you didn’t invite me.’
‘On balance, yes, but don’t tell that to Rayner. She’s not better than you. Just different.’
‘You can kiss me if you want, you know. Nobody’s looking.’

Horatio kissed Gresham and thought that if they were going to accomplish anything at work today, it would be best to change the subject.

‘Rayner told me something interesting,’ he said, searching in his pockets for a scrap of paper that Rayner had given him.
‘Was this before, or after?’ Gresham smirked.
‘After. You know how you lie together while you get your breath back, and you talk in whispers about whatever comes into your head. Rayner said she’d heard something odd from a detail who’d been sent to Todd’s council flat with a search warrant, to try and recover any stolen goods that were lying about. They didn’t find much loot, Todd probably sold most of it as soon as he nicked it, but they found that he had a wardrobe of women’s clothes. And they found a piece of paper with the names of several women. The sergeant sat with the electoral rolls of half a dozen counties and a couple of population data bases, and he couldn’t trace any of them. He found some women with the same names as were on the list, but none of them had any known connection with Hamish Todd. So, as of now, nobody knows who they are, whether they exist or not, nor why Todd kept a list of their names.’
‘Let’s see it.’

Horatio gave Gresham the scrap of paper, two inches by two or so, and dusty from having lain on the floor for a while. Gresham read the handwritten names out loud.

‘Sarah Parsons. Norma Haynes Stanier. Christine Charlotte Cussons. Sandra Harmony Isherwood. Probably just false identities that he assumed while going about as a woman.’
‘Nowt so queer as folk,’ quoth Horatio. ‘Why have four different female identities, when one would do everything you need?’
Gresham thought deeply for a moment, struggling to remember some event long past. ‘Well, Horatio, I’m going to change my answer. I have an eerie feeling that I recognise the name Sarah Parsons. Fancy a walk in the fresh air? Does Hamish Todd live anywhere near Greengates Church, by any chance?’
‘Just across the road, more or less. How did you know?’
‘Shot in the dark. Come on, there’s no point sitting in the office. Nobody ever achieved anything by sitting in an office.’
‘What’s that have to do with Sarah Parsons?’
‘I think,’ Gresham said, tentatively, ‘I knaa where she’s buried.’

The road to Rosentyre

The wind was almost still and the sun was shining. The road downhill from The Works ran almost straight. There was no traffic on it. Cars came up this hill only to carry their drivers to The Works and downhill only to carry their drivers away from it. On either side of the road, sheep grazed. It was so quiet that you could hear the sheep ripping up the grass. The whole of Rosentyre was spread across the landscape beneath Theo and Gresham as they walked down towards the harbour and the bay.

Gresham asked Theo, ‘Do ye remember The Shingle?

The Shingle sand-side night club

That late night place beside the bay?’
‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘I took you there once, didn’t I? All loud music and single malts. It lasted a few weeks in the height of summer. The owners must’ve thought that in July the town would be warm and full of tourists.’
‘They must’ve thought the neighbours were deaf, as well.’

The road took them to the shore.

‘The Shingle used to be over there.’ Theo pointed to the ferry pier, now a place of dark former warehouses and boat repair yards. ‘We danced and had a couple of whiskies. Then we left and walked towards Nicolson Square, but I felt that we needed a few minutes alone together so we went to Greengates Church and into the churchyard there.’
Gresham looked through the church gate, where a rusting sign, leaning so far backwards that it was about to fall over, informed them that This gate is LOCKED at SUNSET. ‘Why did they build walls around graveyards?’ he mused, recalling David Allen’s enigma. ‘The people outside don’t want to go in, and the people inside aren’t going to come out.’ He pushed the gate open. ‘I can remember this place. It looks so different in daylight. You and I went to the far end, over there, in the dark. Nobody could’ve seen us.’

At the back of the churchyard were some small tombstones. ‘These horrible things,’ Gresham explained unnecessarily, ‘are the graves of little children. God be praised, after two thousand years of medicine, some anonymous floor scrubber realised that buying the occasional bottle of disinfectant at Sainsbury’s would scare even the biggest and most fearsome bacterium into running away in a blind panic, so kids don’t die like these ones did any more.’ Gresham found tears forming in his eyes as he scanned the names of dead children whom in life he had never known. ‘Look along the line, I’m sure she’s here.’ He walked along the row. ‘There,’ Gresham pointed to one stone and read it out loud. ‘I thought I remembered it. Sarah Parsons, 21 January 1894, 21 July 1899. Poor soul. Just old enough to pick up a catapult and ping stones at the boys playing football in the park. See, I remembered right.’
Theo thought about it. ‘Yeah. We did it here that night. Want to do it again?’
‘Yes. For you, my love, anything, but in daylight people will see us, and if we wait until dark, we’ll be locked in. And, important though it undoubtedly isn’t, we have work to do. I think I can show you what happened to Newman’s cheque. Do you have the company phone card? The phone box down by the street corner might be working.’
‘Why, is it dinner time already? Shall I send for two pizzas, a plastic bottle of fizzy cola and two paper cups?’
‘No. It’s time to phone a friend.’

 

‘We really ought to get hold of the paid cheque as soon as possible.’ said Theo, ‘because Ellis needs to know about this, and it’d be more impressive if we had the evidence with us when we told him.’

Using the company phone card was harder than either of them expected. The instructions were printed on the card, but since you had to put the card into the slot on the phone while you were using it, you had to memorise the instructions, which were printed in letters as big as the head of a pin in greenish yellow ink on a yellowish green background. You had to dial a free phone number, where an excruciating, anatine, synthesised female Texas accent crackling with geostationary satellite said, ‘Welcome to Wubble and Careleth. Pleathe dial your card number.’ You dialled the card number, then ‘Your poythonal idendification number,’ and finally…

‘Have ye got Newman’s phone number?’ Gresham asked.
‘Wait a minute, I’ll have to look for it.’
‘Pleathe dial the number you require, including all nethethary country and area codeth.’
‘Divvent rush us,’ Gresham told the electronic voice. ‘Aa’m looking for it.’

For a few seconds the Texan voice stopped nagging Gresham about what to dial, and then it said, ‘If you cannut dial the number you require, thith call will be toyminated after ten thecondth,’ and after ten more seconds, as Theo leafed frantically through his wallet for Professor Newman’s business card, Ker-lick!

‘I can’t find Newman’s number in my wallet.’
‘Nae hurry. I’m gettin’ unobtainable tone.’
‘After all that…’
‘How about the university switchboard number?’
‘I can’t remember that, either.’

Defeated by the alliance of the electronic Texan in the machine and Theo’s note of the Professor’s phone number being in his desk drawer in a secret office up a hill two miles away, Theo and Gresham left the phone box. They had walked a few yards back towards the office when Gresham said, ‘We could try Directory Enquiries.’

They tried Directory Enquiries.

When finally a deaf call centre operative in the Philippine Islands who spoke no English worth bothering about told him the right number, Gresham called it and said, ‘I’m looking for Professor Newman of Life Sciences.’
‘He’s not here just now. I’m his secretary. May I help?’
‘Victoria, is that you?’
‘Yes, yes, it is.’
‘Do you remember, a couple of days ago, Professor Newman asked you to look and see whether a cheque he wrote to the clinic in Lochkeld had been cashed?’
‘Yes,’ said Victoria, ‘I looked at the statement. It had been cashed.’
‘Great. I’m Gresham, and I’m still investigating something that happened when the cheque was sent. Tell me, does the Bank return the paid cheques to you? Are you able to look at the cheque itself?’
‘Yes, they’re still old fashioned enough to return the cheques to us. It will take me a minute or two to find it, though.’
‘Could you do me a great favour and look for it? Let me know who the money was paid to.’
‘I’ll look for it. Don’t go away.’
‘Don’t you have music on hold?’
‘No,’ said Victoria, ‘but you can sing to me if you want.’

Victoria spent a couple of minutes searching in the files, and then she came back to the phone. ‘It was paid to N. H. Stanier.’
‘N. H. Stanier. Are you completely sure?’
‘Absolutely, Mr Gresham. I’ve got the cheque here, in front of me. It couldn’t be clearer.’
‘Do you think you could fax it to me? Dr Gresham, at Sunlight Agricultural Equipment Company in Edinburgh? That’d be most kind.’
‘Of course. What’s the fax number?’
‘I’ve nae idea.’
‘I’ll do my best, so don’t expect too much.’

Gresham hung up the phone and said, ‘Well, we’ve got from now until just after sunset to look around for the grave of Norma Haynes Stanier.’

 

Horatio and Gresham knocked on the door of Professor Ellis’s office early the next day.

‘We think we know what happened,’ said Horatio. ‘It’s a simple trick.’
‘It’s a bit early for me.’ Ellis groaned. ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘Yes, thank you. Very much.’

The meeting continued in the kitchen. Horatio addressed it while making three cups of tea in yellow mugs with a picture of a doll in a pink dress saying, ‘Maths is hard.’

‘There’s a gravestone at Greengates Church bearing the name Norma Haynes Stanier. You see the initials: N, H, S. So someone got hold of her birth certificate. By falsifying just one digit in the year numbers, he created a ghost about the same age as himself. Then he opened a bank account with the faked birth certificate. Then if anyone steals a cheque payable to “NHS,” all the fraudster has to do is change the “S” into “Stanier” and pay it into the account.’
Gresham produced the fax of Newman’s cheque, on which the payee had been altered to read ‘N H Stanier.’ ‘Which is what appears to have happened.’
‘Ingenious. Who did this? Do you know who did this?’
Horatio wondered how much he knew and how much was guesswork, and he found it hard to tell the difference. ‘We don’t think Hodgson was involved.’
‘Naa.’ Gresham concurred. ‘There was a post office robbery nearby, a couple of days after the package to Lochkeld went missing. The package could’ve been stolen in the robbery and rifled later.’

 

‘That was too easy.’

Horatio, using his official name, was sitting with Gresham in Helen’s Café on Sràid a’Chladaich. He looked troubled. He had yet to touch his steak pie. Gresham had ordered fish and chips and had started on the chips. Helen brought them mugs of tea.

‘You divvent have to call yourself Horatio,’ said Gresham, ‘you can use your real name.’
‘Somebody might be listening.’
‘Someone is. Me. And I already know your real name.’
‘I still don’t know yours.’
‘That’s because I like to be called Gresham. My parents had no imagination. They just wrote half a dozen names on scraps of paper, put them all into a hat and carefully chose the worst of them and they gave it to me. When the Works said I could call myself Gresham, I jumped at the chance.’
‘Why? What is your real name?’
Gresham paused for a second. ‘What did you mean by “That was too easy” just now?’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘Promise not to tell anybody?’

Horatio promised.

‘Love comes at a price,’ he said, and he breathed, ‘Marcellus.’
‘That’s a perfectly good name.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Gresham, now also known as Marcellus, appeared agitated. ‘The kids at school called me Marmite.’
‘I won’t,’ Horatio promised. ‘I can’t see why anyone would.’
‘The bloody teachers called me Marmite. My dad went to the school and punched one of them up the bracket. It got into the paper. He had the story framed and he sent a carpenter to fix it to the staff-room wall with unremovable screws. Nobody stopped him. It’s amazing how dirty overalls and a tin of paint open every door.’
‘Did they stop calling you names after that?’
‘Aye. They didn’t care about upsetting me, but they didn't want to upset my dad.’ Gresham felt a sudden chill need for reassurance. ‘You and I. With my silly name. Are we still friends?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Are we still in love?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Horatio paused for thought and added, ‘darling. Did you think I’d break up with you if I didn’t like the name in your passport?’
‘Everybody says, “That’s a perfectly good name.” Either that or “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” ’ Gresham, now also known as Marcellus, picked up another chip and ate it before continuing. ‘They only say it is because it isn’t. Now, to change the subject irrevocably, what did you mean by “That was too easy” just now?’

Horatio drummed his fingers on the table and assumed a strained expression.

‘I don’t really trust my own judgement. You know, when somebody asks you a mathematical question…’
‘You mean like, The area of a square is 25 square feet. What is its perimeter?’
‘Twenty feet. It’s obvious.’
‘No, it ain’t. It would have had Einstein scratching his head and guessing. He would say, „I’m stuck. What’s square and has an area of twenty-five square feet?“
‘I have no idea,’ Horatio looked at the ceiling as though the answer might be written there. ‘A front garden in Salford? A gigantic chocolate biscuit? Thames Water’s entry in the Olympic sewage event?’
‘You see the answer in the air in front of you, don’t you.’
‘Yes, it’s there.’ Horatio pointed to a space about six inches above what was left of his steak pie. ‘It’s in red letters and it says “Wrong.” ’
‘Why didn’t it say that yesterday?’
‘Because I’ve had time to think about it.’

Horatio stared at the hallucinatory red neon sign, trying to make it turn green by effort of mental force, like motorists do at traffic lights. “Wrong.”

‘You know that feeling you get when a problem seems really easy and you solve it, you share the solution with the person who set the problem in the first place, and then the next morning, just when you think you can cross that problem off the list and move on to the next one, you realise that it’s not as easy as you thought and you have to sit and work through it again in case you got the answer wrong.’
Gresham shook his head, as if he were trying to jiggle the rust off his brain. ‘That moment just before the end of the arithmetic test, when you realise that the speed was in miles per hour but the acceleration was in feet per second squared, so in the two minutes that you have left, you have to do the whole question again.’
‘Yes. Something’s wrong. I know it.’
‘Which problem are we talking about?’ Gresham was losing the plot. ‘The square that’s twenty feet around, or what my real name is?’
‘The problem that we just spent a week working on. The problem of what happened to the vial of product that the Works posted to Lochkeld Clinic and who cashed the cheque.’
‘Hamish Todd stole it when he robbed the post office.’
‘That’s what I thought. But I was there when he robbed it.’
‘A hero by all accounts.’
‘Yes, if you believe the Scottish Daily. But I don’t remember him having any parcels or packages — and if he had had any packages, the Police would have found them.’
‘Yes,’ said Gresham as the conclusion sank in. ‘Will Helen put our bill on the company credit card?’
‘Oh, let’s not rush back to the office.’ Horatio turned his head towards Helen, who was busy at the counter. ‘There’s less to do here, there’s a sea view out of the window, and we can get a cup of tea just by asking for it, so we can think better. Helen, may we have more tea for me and my friend Marcellus here?’
‘Who?’ Helen asked.
Horatio burst out laughing. ‘Marcellus. Don’t I love it.’
Gresham appeared about to shout something angry, but instead he too started to laugh. ‘Our parents are not our responsibility,’ he giggled. ‘Forgive them, for they knaa not what they dee.’

 

At 7 Nicholson Close, Theo and Gresham sat together on the couch drinking tea and watching Prisoner Cell Block H.
‘ Miss Ferguson is putting her leather gloves on,’ said Gresham.
‘That’s ominous.’
‘The scenery wobbled.’
Theo looked at his cup. It was nearly empty. ‘Does that mean we have to drink another cup of tea?’
‘It certainly does. Them’s the rules of the game. You have to drink a cup of tea any time the scenery wobbles.’
‘Damn it, my cup’s empty.’ Theo stood up. ‘I’ll have to—’

There was a tremendous clatter from downstairs. Mrs MacKechnie, his landlady, was shouting incoherently. Theo opened the door of his room and shouted to the stairwell, ‘Are you all right, Mrs McKechnie?’

Theo did not hear a reply. There was a light shining in the living room, so Gresham and he went down the stairs and looked cautiously into the living room. Neither of them had ever set foot in this room before.

Mrs MacKechnie was doubled up on her couch with her hands over her face. There was a smell of burning, but there was no sign of flames.

Theo asked Mrs MacKechnie, ‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’
‘I can’t see,’ she said. ‘Something’s got into my eyes.’

Theo’s knowledge of medicine was limited to what had rubbed off on him while he was watching Casualty and Holby City. ‘Let me look at you,’ he said, adding falsely, ‘I know what to do.’ He cradled Mrs MacKechnie’s head in one hand and, one at a time, lifted her eyelids with the other. Mrs MacKechnie winced. Theo knew that you had to lift the eyelid and remove the object by wiping it with the corner of a clean handkerchief, and his handkerchief was cleaner today than it often was, but he could not see any foreign body under the eyelids. ‘Your eyes are very red,’ he told her, ‘but I can’t see anything. No flies, splinters, specks of dirt or anything like that.’

Mrs MacKechnie put her hands back over her face and said ‘Please help me.’
Gresham said, ‘I think we’d best get you to the hospital.’
‘They won’t mind if you feel better by the time the doctor gets to you,’ Theo observed.
‘My mate Theo,’ said Gresham, ‘is always the optimist.’

Theo picked up the phone that stood on the window sill and dialled the emergency number. At least it was an ordinary phone which connected you immediately, without all the surveillance and security. Phone call complete, Theo addressed the room in general. ‘Eight minutes, the operator said.’ After that, Theo and Gresham relieved the tense silence in the living room by trying to think of reassuring things to say while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Mrs MacKechnie was obviously suffering badly.

Theo looked around. The room had a homely, cosy, busy quality entirely lacking from his own room. The contrast was so great that, for an instant, Theo wondered whether he was still in the same house. The room was lighter and warmer than his own, as well as bigger. There was a maroon mat on the fawn coloured carpet, just the right size for a large cat. There were pictures on the wall: looking at them, Theo realised how little he knew about the woman whose house he had been sharing for weeks. He knew her surname, her address, and what she looked like, and that was all. He studied the pictures. One photograph was of a man who might have been a husband or a relative. There was a black and white photograph of an elderly couple, perhaps Mum and Dad. There was a picture of a young woman on a beach. She might have been a daughter, or Mrs MacKechnie herself some years ago. There was a picture of a marmalade cat, lying on a floor wearing a conspiratorial expression, probably the cat that the mat was bought for. Then there were a Vettriano print and a reproduction poster for Brief Encounter.

‘This hurts,’ said Mrs MacKechnie. ‘It’s getting worse.’
‘They’ll be here soon,’ said Theo, who knew from Casualty and Holby City that ambulances on a rescue mission never broke down, never ran out of diesel, never got lost and never skidded off the road and crashed into a tree. Nonetheless Theo wondered what he was going to do if the ambulance did not arrive.

Theo was still taking in the room. There was an armchair that didn’t match the couch, and there was a table with a plate of biscuits and a vase of yellow flowers. Theo couldn’t tell whether the flowers were artificial. At the side of the room, an ironing board lay on its side and an electric iron lay on the carpet. The clatter must have been Mrs MacKechnie stumbling as the pain in her eyes flared up, and the burning smell came from underneath the iron, which was still plugged in and was standing face down on the carpet. Some clothes had spilled onto the floor. The chair, on which the clothes had probably been piled up, was also on the floor on its side. Gresham noticed the iron too, walked over, stood it on its heel and turned it off. The dark, iron-shaped patch of carpet was never going to recover.

They heard the ambulance halt in the street outside. Theo opened the front door.

The caller was a man who looked sixty, wore a suit and carried a traditional large leather doctor’s bag. A young man in green overalls followed him. They both walked into the house and the older man asked Theo, ‘Did you call an ambulance?’
‘Yes. Come in. The patient’s in here.’

The doctor spent a moment looking at Mrs MacKechnie. ‘Good evening, Mrs…?’
‘MacKechnie.’
‘I’m Dr Gilbert and Brian here drives the ambulance. The phone call said you had something wrong with your eyes.’
‘There’s something got into my eyes. It really hurts.’
‘Both eyes?’ Mrs MacKechnie nodded. ‘May I examine you? … Try to open your eyes, wide as you can, so I can see what’s happened.’

He turned to Brian. ‘This one’s an emergency.’ Brian left the room and Theo heard the driver’s door of the ambulance slam and the engine start. Then, to Mrs MacKechnie, Dr Gilbert continued, ‘You have iritis of sudden onset. I’ll give you some antibiotics but we really need to take you to hospital for a few hours so we can make sure you recover. Will that be all right?’ He looked at Theo, expecting him to answer, and seemed a little surprised when Mrs MacKechnie said, ‘Yes, it’s OK, I can come to the hospital.’

Dr Gilbert ferreted in the bag for a small bottle of steroid medicine and dripped some into each of Mrs MacKechnie’s eyes. ‘That ought to cure it in a couple of hours. Now,’ he turned to Theo, ‘do you want to ride to the hospital with your wife?’
‘Oh,’ Theo was surprised to be asked, ‘we’re not married. Yes, I’ll go with her.’

 

In the ambulance, as Mrs MacKechnie held her face in both hands, Dr Gilbert sought to give Theo some reassurance. ‘Your wife will recover in the next couple of hours,’ he said, ‘we caught the disease in good time and it hasn’t really taken hold.’
‘We aren’t married,’ said Mrs MacKechnie.
‘That’s all right,’ said Dr Gilbert, in a tone of voice that left ‘we’re a broad-minded lot’ to be added.
‘I’ve never heard of iritis of sudden onset,’ Theo observed. ‘Do lots of people get it?’
‘I don’t see much of it,’ said Dr Gilbert, ‘but then I’m in the clinic in Lochkeld and I spend most of my days writing sick notes and prescribing aspirins.’
‘You work in Lochkeld?’ Theo recognised the name. This wasn’t really the time or the place. At the moment Dr Gilbert had more important things to do, but he might know something about the missing product and the stolen cheque.
‘Yes,’ said Dr Gilbert, ‘I’m only working on the ambulances because they asked for help. They were short-handed and I had nothing more useful to do.’
‘I think I recognise the name,’ said Theo. ‘Didn’t Lochkeld Clinic have some problem not long ago, something to do with a stolen cheque?’
‘Iritis of sudden onset is rare these days,’ Dr Gilbert said briskly. ‘It’s probably the origin of the phrase “strike me blind.” In the Middle Ages— We’re about a minute from the A and E entrance. It’s best if you try to keep out of the way so that the team can get to the van doors.’

 

When Horatio knocked on Gresham’s office door, Gresham was re-arranging the clock, the books and the papers for the fiftieth time. The clock showed a quarter part eleven.

‘Hi, pet. You look as though you slept in your clothes.’
‘I have. I spent the night sitting in the hospital with Mrs MacKechnie. Did I miss anything?’
‘Only me, re-arranging my desk. Do you know anything about zhu jidan?’
‘Nothing at all. Only that it’s an Eastern philosophy fashionable among interior decorators and landscape architects, and the goal of transmissions is to plant the seeds of rejuvenation rather than dogma.’
‘Pity. I could’ve done with an expert. Re-arranging my stuff has taken ages and I’ve still not got anywhere. How’s the lady you’re not married to?’
‘They put us in a waiting room and we fell asleep. At about seven in the morning, she said she felt all right. The doctor looked her over and said she was fit to go home. I shared a taxi with her, then I had the driver bring me to work. So as far as I know, she’s at home and recovering from a sleepless night and a nasty illness.’
‘You couldn’t wait to get your nose back on the grind-stone.’
‘Well, since you put it in such vivid terms… Yes. Have I missed much?’
‘Not much. Only me trying to work out whatever’s in this book.’

Gresham moved a couple of sheets of paper which looked like an electricity bill and the instruction manual for a high tech doorbell. Underneath them was Zhu Jidan for Blockheads. Horatio picked it up, turned it over and read the blurb on the back cover. ‘I’ve never heard of it. “Zhu Jidan,” he read aloud, “can be characterised by its synthesis of Haoist-inspired naturalism, emotional depth, aesthetic appreciation, individualistic introspection, and its commitment to amassing huge piles of money amid the evolving landscape of the Bing dynasty.” Does this cultural misappropriation tell you where to put things in your office?’
‘Yes. ’Course it does. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it. Negative energy flows out of a rain-cloud and comes in through the window, so there has to be a pot plant in between me and the window.’
‘Is there a pot plant in your office?’ Horatio looked around. ‘I’ve never seen one.’
‘There is now.’ Gresham held up a small plant in a paper cup. ‘I went outside, picked the first plant I saw and planted it in a paper cup out of the canteen wastepaper basket.’
‘That was a stroke of genius. What is it?’
‘I’ve nae idea at all.’
‘Did it make you feel better?’
‘It diverted the negative energy flow around my desk and routed it through the pencil sharpener. At least that’s what it says half-way through Chapter One. I’m feeling happier and more productive already.’
‘Actually, sweetie, I came here to tell you that the doctor who treated Mrs MacKechnie seemed reluctant to talk about— What’s that, over there?’
‘That!’ Gresham looked around at a game board with a chequered pattern of black and white squares and a box of coloured wooden shapes. ‘That came this morning. I ordered it weeks ago from a company in Zubaro and I’d forgotten about it. ’
‘Yes, but what is it?’
‘Wuhuarou. It’s the Zhu Jida version of chess. The pieces are all different. You take shapes out of the box and arrange them in a pattern that you find pleasing.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Yup.’
‘Can there be two players? What happens?’
‘Then you arrange the shapes on the board in a pattern that pleases you, and your friend sizes it up and re-arranges the pieces into a pattern that pleases him, and you take turns.’
‘Is that all there is to it?’
‘Yes, it’s anti-competitive and accessible. Or you can watch Prisoner Cell Block H and drink a cup of tea any time the scenery wobbles.’
‘Yes. We must do that again some time. I was saying, the doctor who treated Mrs MacKechnie happened to be the same one—’
‘Hey,’ Gresham interrupted again, ‘After you left an’ Prisoner Cell Block H finished, Crime Ship came on. So I was riveted for a whole hour.’
‘I know I’m going to regret asking this,’ said Horatio, ‘but did it inspire any useful thoughts in you?’
‘I need to give it a good ruminate, but yes, I think it did. The story was set aboard the HMS Northumberland in 1815. The ship was carrying Napoleon into exile in St Helena. A detachment of soldiers were sent to guard him. They carried building materials so they could erect a decent house for him to live in.’
‘I’m not really seeing the connection with a cheque going missing in Scotland.’
‘You might yet. Did you know that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning? The story was, the painter, sent to decorate the rooms of the house, accepted a bribe to stick up wallpaper that contained arsenic. In those days, the coloured dye that they put on wallpaper contained arsenic, and there was arsenic vapour in Napoleon’s bedroom. In the re-match, the Crime Ship brought a French Foreign Legionnaire with a bag of gold coins from the Banque Nationale to pay the painter an even bigger bribe to use ordinary wallpaper at Fr 2·50 a roll from B and Q instead. Which of course the Legionnaire had brought with him in a tartan shopping trolley on wheels.’
‘So Napoleon’s room was decorated with normal, non-poisonous wallpaper.’
‘Aye, and thus was the life of Napoleon Bonaparte saved. Nothing escapes the Crime Ship.’
‘I think,’ Horatio said, slowly, as the allegory of the plot dawned on him, ‘I can see what you, in your circuitous and deranged fashion, are driving at.’

 

Professor Ellis beamed as he opened the door to Horatio’s office. ‘Ah, I’m pleased to find you both here.’
‘Morning, Professor.’

Horatio and Gresham were writing what they knew on a large sheet of white paper, propped up on an easel in front of the desk in Horatio’s office, just like investigators always do on television. ‘Post Office was robbed’ was written in blue Sharpie at the top left, ‘Jory Hodgson survived,’ was underneath that, along with Gresham’s uncannily recognisable caricature of him, and ‘Cheque missing’ in between the two but on the right of the paper, illustrated by Horatio’s sketch of some glinting pound coins in a hessian bag tied up with string.

Ellis looked with admiration at the easel. ‘Is that helping you to solve our problem?’
‘Yes, Professor,’ said Horatio, ‘in the sense that having a clear aerial photograph of the jungle is useful if you’re trying to ride from Batayo to Nokuri on an elephant without getting eaten by a coconut.’
‘Helps us to concentrate,’ Gresham added.

The Professor thought about that. He changed the subject with what was almost an audible clunk.

‘The diagram would do credit to Harry Beck,’ he said, ‘but you’ll have to put the diagramming aside for a short while. We’re holding an Open Day today, starting at ten o’clock. Can you make some sort of contribution?’
‘Contribution?’ Gresham looked puzzled. ‘I have to pay the phone bill this month, and the mortgage of course—’
‘Not that sort of contribution.’ Ellis corrected him. ‘An exhibit, a lecture, a demonstration of world-beating British technology, that sort of thing.’
Horatio repeated the task, just to confirm that he understood it. ‘We, The Works, are holding an open day at short notice despite being a top secret government establishment that masquerades as an agricultural implement company with a shop in a non-existent street on a housing estate in Edinburgh.’
‘You understand exactly. Can I leave you to get on with it? Be at the main entrance by ten o’clock.’
‘We’ll think of something,’ Horatio promised in an uncertain tone. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Someone in the Ministry of Defence told Turner Rose yesterday that he was welcome to visit us…’
‘Turner Rose?’ Gresham recognised the name. ‘The Turner Rose, who aspires to be our highly esteemed, and highly paid, Member of Parliament?’
‘The same,’ Ellis pulled a face that made him look as though he had recently ordered a fillet steak with yorkshire pudding and been served mashed potato with spring greens. ‘Either he wants to canvass our votes, or he thinks other people will vote for him if he tells them that he’s visited us.’
Gresham put down the Sharpie. ‘Surely he can tell other people that he’s visited us without putting us to the trouble of him actually coming here.’
‘Well, yes, he could,’ said Ellis, ‘But there’s always the risk that someone will ask him when he visited us, and he’ll say “Thursday,” and someone else will say, “No, you didn’t, ’cause I saw you on Thursday at the airport gettin’ off the plane from Las Mujeres Faciles in Nevada” and then all hell would break loose. Accusations flying, lawyers, votes of no confidence, the lot.’
‘I divvent get it,’ said Gresham. ‘Why would anyone want to visit a biological ammunition dump in the frozen wastes of northern Scotland when they could be living the life of Riley in a centrally heated, king size bed in Nevada, all on corporate American Express?’
‘Because he’s standing for the Revolt Party,’ said Ellis, who had worked it all out in advance. ‘England has two political parties on a sort of see-saw, but it’s really a one-party state because the see-saw parties don’t disagree about anything.’
‘So it isn’t like a Punch and Judy show after all,’ Gresham interrupted, ‘it’s more a Punch and Punch show.’
Ellis continued, ‘Yes. So the election candidates don’t talk about things that actually need to be fixed, like the roads, the schools, the decline of industry and the filth in the drinking water, because if anyone says, “What are you going to do about this?” the only possible answer he can give is to point to the only other electable candidate and say, “The same as him.” So they argue about things that nobody gives twopence about, like whether their opponent stood at the Cenotaph in the freezing cold wearing a Coal Board donkey jacket, or whether he put his mobile phone bill on expenses, or whether he picked up the Mace and made a half-hearted attempt to hit someone with it, or whether at the age of five he wrote in his diary that he wanted to take drugs like the big boys. Now, as to what happened yesterday—’
‘I see,’ Horatio nodded. ‘I’d never thought of it like that.’
‘I have my uses,’ said Ellis. ‘Anyway, one of his servants, the butler I think it was, phoned me yesterday and asked if Rose could visit The Works with a camera crew, adding that someone in the MOD had told him it would be all right. Quite on the spur of the moment, without taking thought for the morrow, I said, “That’s a remarkable co-incidence because tomorrow is our annual Open Day” — a remark which, as you may have guessed, I immediately regretted. Rose might turn up any time after ten in the morning. And I'm afraid that’s where you come in.’
Gresham grimaced. ‘Won’t he be a bit suspicious when he realises that he’s the only person there?’
‘He won’t be the only person there. I managed to phone a few of the staff and ask them to come to work in mufti. They’ll be like film extras and look like tourists. Some of them’ll have cameras, maps, phrase-books and thermos flasks. I think we’ll pass inspection provided it’s superficial and doesn’t last more than half an hour.’

 

‘What do you think Rose will expect to find?’ Horatio asked nobody in particular, once he and Gresham were alone in the office again.
‘Well,’ Gresham answered, ‘he certainly won’t be expecting the two intruders who started a full scale brawl at his meeting in the Peace Hall.’
‘You’re certainly right about that. Either we turn all the lights off, or we put a paper bag over his head—’
‘I divvent think either of those is likely to get us very far.’
‘Neither do I,’ Horatio shook his head slowly. ‘We have to hope that he won’t recognise us. Can we try another tack? What is he expecting to see at an Open Day in a secret government building?’
Gresham asked the obvious. ‘How would I know?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘I guess that he probably knows nothing about us that he hasn’t seen on television.’
‘I’m a bit lost.’ Horatio had not seen where Gresham's conversation was leading. ‘We’ve never been on television, so how could he have seen us?’
‘He hasn’t. But I give you ten Scottish Poonds to your English five pence that he thinks he has. So he thinks we’re catching foreign spies, snooping on trades unions, blowing foreign things up and drinking vodka martinis.’
‘Shaken, not stirred.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Gresham, I think you’re on to something.’

 

Horatio had been standing in the cold hill-top breeze just outside the street door of The Works for a few minutes when a single distant chime from the harbour clock announced that it was a quarter past ten, and a large black car swung around the corner of the road. It had two small Revolt Party pennants mounted one above each headlamp. It was the sort of car which was intended to impress the importance and wealth of its passenger upon all who beheld it, rather than simply to convey him expeditiously from one place to another. Besides, The Works was only ten minutes’ easy walk along a countryside footpath from a perfectly good railway station.

The chauffeur stood and held the passenger door open. Turner Rose stepped onto the pavement. Professor Ellis shook his hand, saying ‘Welcome to Sunlight, sir.’ Horatio shook hands after him.

‘Good morning.’ Rose appeared flustered. ‘You must be, er…’
‘Professor Ellis. Director of Strategic Research.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Professor Ellis. I believe that you are the man who invented the, er…’
‘Tin opener,’ Ellis muttered sotto voce.
‘Oh.’ Rose was surprised. ‘I thought that was Thomas Edison. It’s a pleasure to meet such a distinguished British scientist.’
‘Scottish.’
‘Yes, indeed. Your invention is bought, used and revered wherever the flag of Empire used to fly and people eat baked beans. Yet you still find the time to meet and educate us ordinary mortals. Well, well, where would we be today without your tireless and thankless efforts?’
‘I think you might have confused me with someone else,’ said the Professor, ‘People are always confusing us. I get letters about tin openers every—’

At that moment a large van followed the large car and parked behind it. The van looked as though it had been bought from a scrap yard for fifty pence, lovingly restored to working order by the members of the Vintage Van Preservation Society and then spray-painted by the Coloured Blob Lovers Club. It was labelled The Renfrew Channel Outside Broadcast Unit. It braked with a louder and longer screech than necessary and three men piled out. None of them looked a day over eighteen. They wore grubby jeans, canvas shoes, beards and tee shirts marked The Renfrew Channel. The first man out of the back of the van carried an expensive looking video camera, the second a microphone and two sections of brass pole. He screwed the sections together, making a boom some six feet long.
‘Hi, I’m Mike,’ he joked.
The third man clambered out of the driver’s door carrying a tripod in one hand and a loud hailer in the other. As he climbed out, the tripod swung violently to one side and crashed loudly into the side of the van. Professor Ellis mumbled, ‘Looks like he’s already found the King’s Unicorn.’
‘I think I might end up there in half an hour or so,’ said Horatio.
‘I’m buying,’ said Professor Ellis.

Ellis recalled the advice reputedly given to students at Harvard School of Business that they should give to the most junior member of the company’s staff any ceremonial rôle, anniversary, pointless get-together or sundry beano which did not create a penny profit. Doing so made the chosen member of staff feel important while allowing the experienced and highly paid staff to get on with something useful.

‘Allow me to introduce my colleague, Horatio,’ he said as he propelled Horatio into the space between Rose and himself, ‘He shall have the honour of showing you around the Open Day. I’m afraid I can’t spend a lot of time with you, much as I would love to, because I have some urgent strategic research to direct. Everything is on show, and anything you want to know, or see, or read about, just ask Horatio.’

With that, a little faster than necessary, Ellis walked back into the building and disappeared from view before The Renfrew Channel had time to make a movie of him.

Renfrew Television outside broadcast van

The Renfrew Channel crew pointed the camera and the microphone at Horatio and Rose, who remained standing in front of the building. The loud hailer shouted, ‘Roll ’em!’

‘You’ll need this, sir.’ Horatio handed Rose a playing card which he had spray-painted red on one side and green on the other. ‘If you don’t carry it, the doors won’t open.’
‘May I keep it as a souvenir?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Horatio, ‘it won’t expire.’
‘Would you two do that again for me, please?’ shouted the loud hailer. ‘The mike wasn’t plugged in.’
‘Turner Rose is a busy man,’ began Horatio, and the loud hailer replied, ‘Take two. Action!’

Rose gave the playing card back to Horatio, saying that its bright colour would distract the viewers, and Horatio gave the playing card back to Rose, saying that Rose needed to have it with him.

The loud hailer yelled, ‘Cut!’

 

It was dark in the underground lecture theatre. You had to stand still for a moment while your eyes adjusted. A spotlight picked out Gresham, wearing a jacket and tie which he’d found in the lost property cupboard, holding a couple of pages of notes, standing before a not-particularly-interested audience and writing on a whiteboard. Pinned to the wall in the corner of the room was a poster that showed happy, rosy-cheeked children playing among the branches of an oak tree and listening to a radio above the legend, ‘Remember. Keep calm, duck and cover, whitewash the windows, stick a bale of straw up the chimney, hide under the kitchen table with a battery-powered radio.’

‘In the past,’ Gresham began in the middle of a paragraph, ‘as war approached, the Ministry of Defence tried to create an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation. They wanted people to look forward to being at war, to put up their hands and volunteer for the fire watching rota, to send their sons to the Front and their daughters to the NAAFI, to queue eagerly for their rations amid the burning debris of their homes. But of course, because of the strategic research which we have carried on here, the next war will be different from any that has been fought before. Or at least it will be different if the belligerents use the weapons that we’ve been designing here. The whole paradigm of warfare—’

Turner Rose’s television crew made a noisy entrance, followed by Turner Rose. Horatio waited half a minute in the corridor while the camera crew recorded whatever it wanted to, and then he followed Rose into the lecture theatre.

‘Hold it,’ said the bullhorn, as the cameraman moved to the farther side of the room and pointed the lens first at Rose and then at Gresham. ‘Could you just read that last couple of sentences again, love?’
‘Sure,’ said Gresham. ‘Ready?’
The bullhorn turned to the cameraman. ‘You got enough light?’
‘As long as he stands in the spotlight, guv.’

The bullhorn cried ‘Action!’ and Gresham repeated, ‘Because of the strategic research we have carried on here, the next war will be different. We have changed the way that great powers will wage war—’

‘Cut!’ yelled the bullhorn. ‘That’s enough for an establishing shot.’ The video camera turned back onto Turner Rose.
‘That’s your cue,’ said Mike, as he swung the pole above Rose’s head.
‘Lights!’ shouted the camera. ‘Someone turn all the lights on, for God’s sake.’

A man at one end of the back row of the audience stood up, walked to the wall and turned the lights on.

‘The mike’s in shot,’ complained the cameraman.

Rose took a square of cardboard from his pocket and prepared to read from it. ‘Are my notes in shot?’
‘No, sir,’ said the cameraman, ‘you’re fine.’
‘Action!’
‘The amazing British military technology developed at this top secret British research station disguised as a hillside cottage in Rosentyre means that no enemy will dare threaten the United Kingdom on the…’ Rose glanced away from the camera and, in the light, he stared at Gresham, then at Horatio, and then at Gresham again. ‘Hang on a minute. I know you two.’ He continued in an evident fit of rage, ‘You’re the ones who broke into my election rally in the Peace Hall.’
Gresham followed the path of least resistance. ‘I think that must’ve been someone else.’
Rose was turning red with anger. ‘Don’t lie to me. You don’t forget the hoodlums who make you look a complete fool in front of the assembled Party membership. You kind of notice that, you remember it. I’m going to punch your bloody lights out— Aaaagh!’

Turner Rose clutched his chest and fell to the floor, gasping for breath. The speech and the cardboard door key fell from his hand. The audience turned and stared at him with their mouths open.

‘Did you get that?’ yelled the bullhorn.
‘Clear as day,’ said the cameraman, and Mike gave the thumbs-up.
‘See that?’ the loud hailer squawked at Horatio. ‘We got the money shot. Experts, us.’

 

Theo and Gresham sat on a bench on the hillside above The Works. It was lunch time. They were eating sandwiches from the canteen and drinking Six Up out of tins. Beside them, W P C Rayner Shaw sat, making notes.

‘He’ll be all right,’ said Gresham. ‘The ambulance was there in five minutes. They’ll patch him up.’
‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ said Rayner, ‘that was thoughtful of you.’
‘I guessed they’d send you to check on him,’ said Theo, ‘and I saw you through the window.’
Rayner bit a piece off her sandwich. ‘You were right. Was it you called the ambulance?’
‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘Well, no, actually. I asked the chef in the canteen to call them. I couldn’t be bothered fighting with the security on the phone.’
‘Security on the phone?’ Rayner was curious.
‘You have to be authorised to use the phone at all, and then you have to be authorised to call the number. If I ever find a live rattlesnake in my desk drawer I won’t be able to phone a snake charmer unless the computer knows his number.’
‘That must be worrying for you,’ said Rayner.
‘It doesn’t happen very often,’ Theo smiled.

A fox appeared over the hilltop and padded down the path. It sat on the ground opposite the bench and looked at Gresham, then Theo, and then at Rayner Shaw. ‘Giz some food,’ it said silently. Gresham tore his sandwich in half and threw one piece to the fox, who picked it up, carried it a few feet and hid it in a bush. Then it wandered farther downhill.

‘You ungrateful wretch,’ Gresham told the fox. ‘You didn’t eat any of it.’
‘Perhaps he knows something we don’t,’ said Theo.

‘I haven’t heard from you lately,’ said Rayner.
‘Did you want to?’ Theo asked her.
‘Of course. Here, put your arm round me, or I might get cold.’
‘I just remembered,’ said Gresham, ‘I have to… er… do something.’ He stood up, took what was left of his sandwich and walked downhill towards The Works.

The fox sat beside the path, watching Gresham walk past. Silently it repeated, ‘Giz some food.’
‘Nah,’ Gresham told it, ‘You didn’t eat the last bit.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Well, that’s your own fault.’
‘I’ve got a wife and cubs.’
‘Faff off. Find some other mug.’

The fox looked down at its feet and shuffled off downhill, crestfallen.

—

The television crew were climbing back into their brightly coloured Outside Broadcast van. Gresham heard Bullhorn Man congratulating his fellows on filming ‘the whole thing,’ meaning, Gresham hoped, not everything in the building but Turner Rose collapsing onto the floor and being stretchered out by the ambulance crew.

‘Hey!’ Gresham shouted after them, ‘Where did they take Rose?’
The van driver slid the passenger door open and called back to Gresham through the bullhorn. ‘Cottage ’ospital,’ he said. ‘Do you know ’im? Want a lift?’
‘You’ve read my mind,’ said Gresham, climbing into the front passenger seat. ‘I ought at least to let him know we care about people who collapse in agony on the premises.’

The van set off down the narrow, uneven path to Rosentyre.

‘What do you do in that place?’ asked the cameraman, who was now sitting awkwardly on a plastic covered bench in the back of the van, clutching the camera so as not to drop it onto the steel floor as the van bounced along the path.
‘I’m not supposed to talk about it,’ said Gresham, craning his neck around to see whose voice it was, ‘but you won’t be surprised to hear that we do mostly molecular biology, mathematics and’ — some angel took pity on Gresham and inspiration suddenly hit him straight between the ears — ‘eating breakfast.’
The driver reached for his loud hailer, realised he didn't need it, and put it back beside his seat. ‘Breakfast?’
‘Aye. If you want to be happy in your job, choose a workplace where the canteen opens early,’ Gresham gabbled, desperate to keep the subject of conversation away from what he did for a living. For one thing, he wasn’t really sure what he did for a living, nor whether what he had been doing for the last couple of weeks was the job laid down in his contract, or something else. ‘And stainless steel cutlery, not plastic, that’s a good sign, too.’ he floundered.
‘Any other job-huntin’ tips?’ the driver asked.
‘Choose a workplace with a bus stop outside the main entrance,’ said Gresham. ‘Forget about science parks and renovated golf ball factories and anywhere else that the bus only turns up at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoons. There’s never any point in walking farther than you have to.’

—

‘I’m looking for Turner Rose.’

In the lobby of the hospital, Gresham spoke to the receptionist, but the answer came from a tall, thin man in a white coat who happened to be passing.

‘I’ve just been seeing him,’ said the man.
‘Dr Gilbert.’ Gresham recognised him.
‘You have a good memory,’ said Dr Gilbert. ‘Sir Turner is in intensive care. Through the door there, on your right. He’s having a hard time but he’ll pull through. Just now, I have to rush off. Sorry.’ Dr Gilbert stared at Gresham in a disconcerting manner, without blinking, for several seconds, then added, ‘I need to speak to you. I’ll come and find you in ten minutes or so.’

The smell of disinfectant hit Gresham like walking into a lamp-post. Turner Rose was awake, lying flat and moving little. Beside his bed, a trolley load of equipment flashed and beeped, watching Rose’s progress and looking out for problems. Rose saw Gresham entering the room, thought for a second, and said weakly, ‘Not you again.’
‘I’m Gresham. I wanted to make sure you’re all right after what happened.’
‘Heart attack. Happens all the time, nothing to worry about, your heart has broken down but the Health Service will fix it. I’ll be back at work tomorrow, sat in a smoke-filled room just off the Royal Mile, resolving the problems of the Scottish nation one piece at a time.’
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Gresham asked, ‘or anything The Works can help with?’
‘Is that what you call the place?’ Rose breathed in, loudly. ‘The Works. A short and cheerful name for an office for whom starting a nuclear war is all in a day’s work.’
Gresham shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t really think that’s what we do—’
‘Changed your mind, have you?’
Gresham steered skilfully around an argument, rather as the Titanic steered skilfully around an iceberg. ‘Have you got everything you need?’
‘Apart from a regular heartbeat and enough strength to stand up and walk? Yes, I think so. A radio would be nice, I guess. And a toothbrush.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘And I still have this pain in my chest. Doctor says it will go away in a couple more hours but in the meanwhile I could use an aspirin.’

Gresham paused for a moment and stared at the machinery beside Rose’s bed. It was beeping rather like tommy-gun fire on the battlefield in a war film. Six or seven beeps rattled off, then came a pause of a couple of seconds, then another six or seven beeps. To Gresham, Rose did not look strong enough to swallow an aspirin and half a glass of water.

‘Don’t worry about all the pile of ironmongery over there. Enough to fill two scrap-yards. This one’s a fridge and I think that one’s a washing machine. There’s one somewhere that makes tea and coffee. Nobody ever looks at any of them. They just come in and ask if I’m feeling all right, I tell them I feel like a whale that’s recently been harpooned by a floating Norwegian pie factory, and then they go away.’
‘Sir Turner,’ Gresham began, hesitantly, ‘I want to apologise for interrupting your meeting at St Hubert’s. I knew about the secret passages and the way they were preserved when the building was moved to its new site. I was exploring them, and I’m afraid I took a wrong turning. I didn’t interrupt the meeting on purpose.’

Rose did not reply, so Gresham asked, ‘Are you awake?’

Rose snored loudly, and Gresham whispered out loud, ‘Apology, radio, toothbrush, aspirin. The price of peace.’ Another burst of rapid fire came from the ironmongery. Gresham stood up to leave. ‘And the left over apologies, radios, toothbrushes and aspirins filled twelve baskets. Good day, sir. Sleep well and wake up well.’

Dr Gilbert came into the room just as Gresham opened the door. He spoke quietly, yet he was obviously troubled. ‘Can we sit over here?’
‘Are you going to give me bad news about Turner Rose?’
‘No. This has nothing to do with Sir Turner. No, I wanted to ask you…’ He paused, seeking a way into his subject. ‘What the devil did you send for Jory Hodgson?’
‘Who?’ It took Gresham a minute to recognise the name.
‘My patient Jory Hodgson. A patient at my clinic. Someone at Sunlight sent the clinic a serum for injection. I didn’t know what it was so I sent it to the lab. They didn’t know either. So what was it?’
‘You did what?’ Gresham saw where this might lead.
‘I took it to the lab down the corridor. I asked them what it was. They couldn’t identify it, and at huge cost to the Scottish tax-payer, they sent it away to the Scottish Forensic Service. They couldn’t tell me what it was either.’
‘Well,’ Gresham temporised, ‘I really shouldn’t be telling you this — it was an experimental controlled biological substance. I don’t know exactly what was in it.’
‘I don’t need to know exactly what was in it.’ Gilbert sounded as though he was straining to keep his temper. ‘Roughly what was in it would do. What was it — painkiller, steroids, anti-biotics, sleeping draught, bicycle oil, horseradish sauce?’
‘Dr Gilbert,’ said Gresham, carefully, sensing that he was present at the birth of a disaster, ‘I don’t know what was in it, and even if I did, I could be sent to prison if I told you. Forgive me but if I stay any longer, someone will be organising search parties.’
Dr Gilbert sighed with despair and exasperation. He called after Gresham. ‘I’m going to have to take this further. You do realise that?’
‘Try writing to your MP,’ said Gresham as he walked into the cold sunshine. ‘He’s over there.’

 

Rag Man was a small young man who earned some pocket money by collecting a bundle of newspapers off the last northbound train into Rosentyre every night and selling them in the couple of late opening public houses nearby. He had a Glasgow accent, but he might have left the home he had there, since he picked up and sold the newspapers every night without fail. He always seemed to wear a suit, even in the freezing cold of the Highland winter.

Rag Man carried his bundle of newspapers into the King’s Unicorn shortly before midnight, looked at the landlord to get the thumbs-up, and called out, ‘Tomorrow’s paper, tomorrow’s paper, anybody?’

A couple of customers raised their hands. As Rag Man wandered around the crowded room handing the papers out and taking the money, Theo was wondered why they would buy a paper instead of watching the news on television. Did they really want the crossword, the horoscopes and the opinions of pundits who knew nothing about the matter on which they were commenting? Then he noticed the headline and asked if he might buy a paper, too.

‘Eighty pence.’
‘Thanks, and have you by any chance got New Microbiology?’
‘Work for Sunlight, do you?’
‘Just a hobby.’

Rayner Shaw, sitting in the King’s Unicorn beside Theo, holding his arm, drinking Eglantine, and now looking most attractive wearing a skirt and a sweater, read the paper over Theo’s shoulder as he held it in front of him. ‘Whatever happened to Sir Turner?’ the headline ran.

‘Renfrew Channel must’ve given the story to the Scottish Daily,’ Theo tutted. ‘That’s all we need. We’ll have screaming mobs standing outside The Works waving pitchforks and flaming torches by tomorrow lunchtime. Old men with banners and young men with molotov cocktails. Nuns in full dress uniform on their knees praying for our souls. Women waving plastic model viruses—’
‘Is that the plural?’
‘What?’
‘Viruses,’ Rayner repeated in a questioning intonation. ‘Doesn’t it go like genius?’
‘I don’t think so. I think it goes like bonus.’ In his imagination, Theo was at his coarse hewn school desk, scanning his English text-book for guidance.
‘Or it could go like opus,’  Rayner added.
‘Opus, opera.’  Theo recalled everything down to the choking cloud of chalk dust in Miss Darling’s classroom and the splinters that stuck in his fingers when he touched the desk carelessly. ‘All right, microbes. Women waving plastic model microbes made out of bath sponges with buttons sewn on for eyes, and shoe boxes painted to look like coffins.’ Theo swallowed hard. ‘Oh, God Almighty.’
‘Don’t worry. Trust me. I’ll be there keeping order.’
‘I’m much reassured,’ said Theo, not sure whether he was reassured or not.
‘Relax. Breathe normally. Imagine the angry mob, all standing on a large boat, yelling abuse and throwing tomatoes at you over the ship’s rail, and gradually sailing farther and farther into the distance until they disappear below the horizon… Does that help?’ Rayner turned to Theo, held his arm a little more tightly and purred, ‘Look at it like this. You know how you really want to win the Scottish National Tombola but you never do?’
‘I’m familiar with the stomach churning disappointment every Saturday evening, certainly. Ruins my week-end, it does.’
‘It’s the same with fears as with hopes. Two edges of the same sword. What you really want to happen never happens, and what you’re really scared of never happens either.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Theo tried to remember some event which he was really worried about and which had really happened, and he couldn’t think of one. His girlfriend was right, and he hadn’t noticed.
‘Of course.’ Rayner continued. ‘Remember when you were a child and you were coming home alone in the dark and you were scared of being attacked and mauled to death by some sort of prehistoric animal?’
‘Vividly.’
‘That never happened, did it?’
‘No,’ Theo said, still failing to think of a counter example. ‘I think if the Loch Ness Monster had chased me down the street and mauled my leg off with teeth the size of railings, I would have remembered that.’
‘As Charlie Brown said, you wasted a good worry.’
‘Peanuts he say, take no thought for the morrow.’
‘Exactly. Tomorrow’s just going to be an ordinary day, like all the others,’ said Rayner, ‘and it’s my round. Do you want another brown ale?’
‘Yes, that’s a kind offer.’ Theo drained the dregs of his beer. ‘Drink, drink, drink like a fish, for tomorrow there shall be mob rule and we shall likely perish in the blood-bath.’
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘No sleeve shall be left un-rolled up. No hatch shall be left un-battened down. Yes, I am exaggerating a teeny weeny bit. My hopes are hopeless, my fears are groundless, and my ground is fearless.’
‘And every deck shall have all hands on it,’ Rayner smiled. ‘Are you in a hurry to get home?’
Theo shook his head. ‘Not that I can think of.’
‘Good. I’ll buy a round, we’ll drink it, and then we’ll squeeze into the cemetery through a hole in the fence and make love up against the oak tree. I’ve always wanted to do that.’
‘Is there a hole in the fence?’
‘I’ve got my nail scissors.’

—

At about half past five the following morning, Theo awoke. He was in his own bedroom, lying beside Rayner in the dark. Their night-time trip to the cemetery had accomplished its purpose, but afterwards Theo had been visited by a strange dream.

It was night, and nobody else was about. He was walking down a silent, unfamiliar street in Rosentyre. A small but brilliant spot of light on the hillside above the town attracted his attention. The light was yellow or red, and it flickered, dimmed and brightened, in the way that only a burning building can. In the moonlight it was possible to see black smoke rising from it. Theo thought he heard the crackle of burning timbers and the crash of a collapsing wall. The Works was ablaze.

Theo did not run towards the burning building but, in the twinkling of an eye, found himself on the path at the top of the hill. There he saw no flames, no smoke, no blackened brickwork, no trace of his friends and colleagues, and no trace of The Works. Where The Works used to be, there was coarse grass, a couple of sheep, two pine trees and a clump of gorse bushes. All of them appeared to have been in the same place for many years.

One of the sheep glared at Theo and snarled, ‘Stay on the path. Keep off the grass. I eat this. I don’t want the muck off your filthy boots in my food.’
Theo took a step back from the grass. ‘Who did this?’ he asked the sheep.
‘Don’t know.’ growled the sheep. ‘There was an ’ole flock of ’em. Never seen ’em before. They ’ad pitchforks an’ boxes of matches.’
‘Were they people, or sheep?’ Theo asked, bewildered.
‘Which do you think?’ asked the sheep. ‘Now leave me alone. I’ve got wool to grow.’

Two seconds passed, maybe three, before the second sheep hissed, ‘Theo!’
‘Yes?’
‘I ain’t never seen ’em before, either.’

For a few seconds, even after Theo awoke, the grass and the gorse and even the talking sheep seemed completely real. Not things of wonder, but unremarkable things he expected to find every day on the hillside as a matter of course.

Then reality supervened. Moving slowly so as not to wake his girlfriend, Theo wandered over to the window, pulled the curtain to the side and reassured himself that there was no building burning on the hillside. Then he went back to bed.

 

Professor Ellis was all smiles. He walked into Horatio’s office carrying a mug of tea and found him talking to Gresham.

‘Good morning, you two. How did the Open Day go?’ he asked. ‘I would like to say how much I regretted not spending the day in the company of Turner Rose, but I'm not going to, because I was perfectly happy avoiding him and doing something else at the other end of the building.’
‘Oh, what was it?’ Horatio asked.
‘I read the newspaper, did the crossword, went to the shop and got some milk, read the New Microbiology  that came out yesterday and hid from the television crew.’ He thought for a moment and added, ‘After that, I spoke to the Purser’s Office in London and asked them to pay you both a bonus for all the effort you put into clearing the thing up after hours.’
Gresham asked, ‘What did they say?’
‘Two hours,’ and I said, ‘That’s better than nothing, but not much.’
Horatio shook his head. ‘You missed seeing Gresham doing improvisation.’
‘Do you have a flair for explaining the work we do to the general public, Gresham?’ Professor Ellis asked. ‘I hope that you’re not too good at it. As a rule, it isn’t the sort of talent that secret government departments encourage.’
‘I showed them some old posters and talked generalities,’ said Gresham.
‘How did Sir Turner get on?’
‘Well, he arrived on time with his television crew,’ Gresham began, ‘he went and listened to me talking about the future of warfare, and he didn’t seem to think it odd that one of the audience knew where the light switches were in our top secret lecture theatre.’

Horatio and Gresham looked at each other, each hoping the other would continue the story.

Eventually Horatio offered, ‘Five minutes in, he had a suspected heart attack.’
‘Yes, I saw that in the newspaper. Has he died yet?’ the Professor asked cheerfully.
‘I went and saw him in the hospital,’ said Gresham, ‘He was in intensive care and the doctor says he’ll be all right.’
‘Can’t stand the man,’ Ellis said quietly and uncharitably to himself, ‘Quite likely he’ll expect us to hold another Open Day just for him, on a date when he isn’t going to be struck down by anything.’

The phone on the desk rang. ‘Hello!’ Horatio answered it. ‘Sunlight Agricultural Machinery Company. May I help you?’ There was a pause while the voice at the far end of the phone call said something, and Horatio continued, ‘Yes, he’s here… Gresham?’

Gresham stood up and took the phone. ‘Yes. … Yes. … Of course. Yes. …’ He put the phone down.
Horatio asked him, ‘Yes?’
‘Daniel Newman, from St Hubert’s University. He heard that I gave a good talk at the Open Day and he wants me to give a seminar to his final year students.’
‘Are you going to do it?’ Horatio asked.
‘I said yes. I’ve done something stupid, haven’t I?’
‘What’s the seminar about?’ Ellis was aghast.
‘I was hoping that you’d tell me that.’ Gresham was horrified at what he had committed himself to. ‘What do I know that would interest final year students taking an option in Battlefield Microbiology?’
‘We can’t afford to let Newman down,’ said Ellis. ‘Choose one of the chapters in Newman’s book, give your seminar the same title, and fill your talk with whatever the chapter says.’
Ellis’s answer did not reassure Gresham very much. ‘Where will I get slides?’
‘Published sources, of course.’ said Ellis, to whom it was obvious. ‘I have the last few months of New Microbiology on my desk. There’ll be pictures in there that you can copy. I’ll put them in your office.’
‘Pictures?’
‘Nothing too specific,’ said Ellis, and with his hands, he described in the air the shapes of the objects he thought could make useful slides.

A top secret laboratory	A scientist	A microscope	A germ	A double helix

‘ Students love that sort of thing.’
‘But they already know all that,’ Gresham observed.
‘Yes,’ Ellis agreed, ‘they do. It’s all familiar stuff. That’s why they love it.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You’ll knock ’em flat.’
‘Take a decent pen,’ Ellis added, ‘for signing autographs.’

 

It was another unseasonably bright but unseasonably cold morning. The breeze blew through the open front door into The Works canteen, where Horatio was picking breakfast from the buffet. There was little left lying around to remind the staff of the unexpected disaster that had brought the Open Day to a sudden end and brought The Works into unwelcome limelight.

Horatio sat with breakfast in front of him, but not actually eating it. He was scribbling on a reporter’s notepad with his carefully chosen and much loved 2B pencil. He recalled the poster which, a year and a bit before leaving home and matriculating at university, he had stolen from the dustbin of an artist’s materials shop and pinned onto his bedroom wall. It showed an actor made up to look like Albert Einstein looking wearily into the camera, working on some impenetrably difficult problem, the struggle between the indefatigable and the incomprehensible showing clearly on his face. Theo had often wondered what the figure of Einstein was trying to tell him. It was not clear whether the problem was one of those whose solutions had made him a celebrity, or whether he was working out how much income tax he owed, but his weapon of choice was a bright yellow, British made, 2B pencil. ‘British Pencil Corporation,’ ran the legend. ‘Made in Britain, the choice of Mathematicians everywhere.’

One shilling and fourpence

After stealing the poster, Horatio had returned to the artist’s materials shop and asked for two British made 2B pencils, and the shopkeeper had spent ten minutes ransacking the store room. Eventually he uncovered and dusted off his last half empty box of British Pencil Corporation pencils, stamped, dated and delivered on the very day the British Pencil Corporation had finally gone bankrupt. The end of pencil rationing came too late to save it. The shopkeeper had asked Theo for one shilling and fourpence for the two pencils, then suddenly remembered which century it was and changed the price to eighty pence, saying ‘Everything’s gone up since those days.’ But, Theo thought, everything hadn’t gone up. It had, simply, gone.

Theo still had both the pencils. As he recalled those events, Theo realised what Einstein's world-weary expression had been trying to tell him all these years. ‘Remember Block’s Law,’ he was saying, ‘If anything is any good, they stop making it.’

Two yellow 2B pencils

Horatio was so absorbed in his recollections and his problem solving that he didn’t notice Gresham arriving and sitting opposite him at the breakfast table until Gresham pointed to the scrawl and the crossings-out on the notepad and said ‘Hi, Horatio! What’s that?’
‘Seeking… well, guessing, if I’m honest… the magic numbers for a logistic curve.’ said Horatio. ‘Predicting sales of a new product, while as yet not a single one has been made, shrink wrapped or sold.’
‘Logistics curves. Hard sums, those.’
‘As Nostradamus wrote,’ Horatio observed quietly, ‘There’s only one thing that you can’t predict, and that is the future.’
‘Ye knaa, if it hadn’t been for logistics curves, England would still be a land of undulating green fields, hedgerows, hills, trees, lowing cattle, singing birds and babbling streams as far as the eye can see,’ said Gresham, as though passing on some secret understanding.
‘You have seen some logical dependency which has escaped me,’ said Horatio, ‘please feel free to clarify what it is.’

The man who invented the logistic curve	England before logistic curves	England after logistic curves	England as predicted by logistic curves

‘In the nineteen-fifties,’ Gresham began his tale, ‘cars were rare. Members of Parliament had one, doctors had a car, plumbers had a car, most farmers had a tractor, and the wealthy moguls of commerce and industry had a car and a chauffeur to go with it. Children played cricket in the street and they walked to school. Policemen had bicycles and everything from tons of coal to quarter-pound packets of tea were delivered by horse and cart.

Then the Ministry of Transport used a logistic curve to predict how many cars there were going to be on the roads. The curve told them that within fifty years there would be a garage in every house, two cars in every garage and in some cases three, and it would be a disaster if there were not enough roads for all those cars. Which is why today there is nowhere in England that you can see the scenery, hear the peace and quiet, and not see any motorways at all, anywhere.’
‘Are you not exaggerating a tiny little bit?’
‘Yes, I admit it,’ Gresham agreed. ‘But not much. And if we make the same sort of mistake predicting sales as the Ministry of Transport made in nineteen-fifty-odd predicting the number of cars, we'll cover the world six feet deep in lethal biological hyper-toxins, and ye wouldn’t want that.’
‘Fine, I’m all ears.’ Horatio put his 2B pencil down on the table with a clunk and he looked up. ‘How do I predict sales?’
‘Forget about logistic curves, for a start,’ Gresham suggested. ‘Never confuse working out a formula with getting the right answer. Faffing about with all that  1+e^-k(x-x₀)  just wears your brain out and gives the wrong answers anyway. Just assume that history will repeat itself. How did the last new product that Sunlight made get on?’
‘Yesterday I took an order for sixteen horse shoes from a veterinary surgeon in Dumfries—’
Gresham sighed audibly. ‘I meant weapons sales— whoops, medicines, that is. Get five years of sales data, even it out with a moving average, cut it by a quarter, Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Why cut it by a quarter?’
‘You don't want the newest product on the shelves to look like a flop, do you?’ Gresham could see that his reasoning had gone above Horatio’s head. Horatio noticed it too. ‘So that the technology transfer specialists—’
‘The shaven heads and red braces. Marketing.’
‘Aye. So that Marketing can tell the Board that sales are higher than expected. Then come Christmas, everybody involved gets a bonus, based on unexpectedly high sales revenue.’
‘Including you and me?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Gresham, ‘but—’ He brightened suddenly. ‘Hey, that’s Daniel Newman.’
‘Morning, guys,’ said Newman, cheerfully. ‘I’ve come back to haunt you.’
Gresham stabbed a fried tomato and talked through it. ‘What brings ye to stalk the dingy, mouldering corridors of the Sunlight Traditional Farm Implement Company, Daniel?’
‘Just curious to see what you found out about Jory Hodgson. Can’t let that happen again.’
Horatio explained. ‘We sent the product with instructions to his doctor. His doctor was, ah…’
‘Suspicious?’ Newman guessed.
‘Not so much suspicious,’ said Horatio, ‘just curious. Anyway, he sent the vial to the Forensic Service and they couldn’t work out what it was, so he binned it.’
‘And what happened to the cheque? Lot of money to just disappear into thin air.’
Gresham answered, ‘We’re still working on that. We know where it went and how it got there. And the predicted sales volume, we’re working on that as well.’
‘Aren’t you giving a lecture to the Military Applications students this afternoon?’ Horatio thought Newman would have to turn around and hurry back if he wanted to be on time for his students.
‘No,’ Daniel said confidently, ‘I asked Wayne Crawford to do the lectures — that postgraduate you met, very good student — all he needs to do is read Chapter Six today and Chapter Seven tomorrow, glean a few fresh points of fact and a couple of good, relevant jokes off the bush telegraph and read it out loud, slowly, as though it were Story Time in the public library. He’ll stand in for me perfectly. When they find out I’ve got back to my desk, the students will probably feel disappointed.’
‘You have a lot of faith in him,’ Horatio observed.
‘Have faith in people. People that you have faith in work better.’ Newman sliced his fried egg cleanly in two and ate half of it. ‘Is there any truth in the rumour that the fried egg comes from a robot chicken?’
‘None whatsoëver,’ said Gresham, who had never heard the rumour before, ‘but the fried bread’s made by 3D printing fermented proteins and carbohydrates from genetically modified sea-weed, then bombarding it with microwaves until it turns golden brown and the lard melts.’
‘Just what I need to get me started in the morning.’ Newman ate the other half of the fried egg in one single swallow.
‘We just did a million dollar deal with Burger Surfer,’ Horatio chipped in.
‘Serve them right,’ Newman observed. ‘To change the subject,’ he continued, ‘have you seen this?’

Newman put the morning’s Scottish Daily on the table and pointed to one of the minor stories on the front page. ‘Top left. Sir Turner recovering after heart attack.’

‘We haven’t heard the last of yesterday, have we?’ Gresham asked rhetorically.

 

Theo and Gresham were sitting in Gresham’s one-room flat on Pipers Hill in Rosentyre. Gresham was drinking brown ale from the fridge.

Theo grabbed a bottle, levered the cap off and took a large swallow. ‘Delicious. I needed that, after a grisly day. Thanks for inviting me.’
‘I thought ye might’ve had nothing better to do than sit watching Crime Ship. You look as though you need an hour and a half watching TV.’
‘Bring it on. I used to think of myself as a seven stone weakling. After the Open Day and a couple of brown ales, I realise that I am tough enough to face anything.’
‘Hell hath no fury,’ quoth Gresham, ‘like an MP who went to an Open Day in a secret government establishment and had a heart attack.’
‘Don’t remind me,’ Theo groaned.

Gresham’s favourite programme began. The captain and crew were stood on the deck of R M S Kildale, welcoming a line of tourists who were climbing up the gangplank.

‘Ah! I recognise this,’ Gresham exclaimed. ‘This is the one where Mrs Honeycomb takes her son Valentine with her on a cruise to Nicaragua and some jewellery gans missing—’
Theo shook his head. ‘Don’t spoil it for me.’

The theme music played, along with the usual opening shots of R M S Kildale sailing peacefully over a calm ocean. Women lay on the sun deck in swimming costumes, men sat on the foredeck ordering expensive liquor on account, two men and one woman in shorts and tee-shirts were dancing under the flashing lights of the twenty-four hour saloon and the officers pulled levers and turned knobs and watched red and green lights going on and off.

Today there was an extra man on the bridge. A young man was standing beside Captain Bligh, watching the array of instruments. His name badge read Moore. Trainee. He watched the Captain concentrating on the compass needle while turning one of the knobs, and he shouted above the engine noise, ‘What did you just do?’
‘Routine course correction,’ Bligh said, without taking his eyes off the controls for a moment. ‘Did you notice the compass turned orange?’
‘No, Captain.’
Bligh turned to face the man. ‘It’s green now, meaning we’re not lost at sea. That’s the sort of detail you have to look out for in this job. Whenever a light goes off or on, a bell rings or you smell burning, recognise it, know what it means, do what it tells you to do, then cancel the alarm.’
‘Sir. It won’t happen again, Captain.’
‘I should hope not.’ Bligh turned back to the control panel, which seemed quiescent. ‘Don’t want to see your name in the headlines.’
‘Headlines, Captain? You think I might be in the headlines?’
Bligh replied a little more angrily than might have seemed necessary. ‘ Yes. “Captain Moore steers cruise ship onto rocks, thousands dead,” headlines.’
‘I don’t want to see that sort of headline either, Captain.’
‘Cadet Moore.’ Captain Bligh drew himself up to his full height and gazed forward at the empty horizon while Cadet Moore stared open mouthed at the back of his head. Bligh assumed a tone of command without turning around. ‘In this job, what you want matters little. It’s what you do that Admirals look at when they decide whether to put you in charge of two hundred thousand tons of cruise ship.’
‘Sir.’

A small square piece of plastic lit up, showing the words Passenger Alert.

‘See that, Moore?’ Bligh pointed at the piece of plastic, just in case Moore hadn’t seen it. ‘What does that tell you?’
‘It means Passenger Alert, Captain.’
‘Correct. What are you going to do about it?’
‘Ah… Answer the phone?’
‘Correct again. See, you’re less useless than you thought you were.’

Moore stood still, not answering the phone.
‘Answer the goddamned phone, Moore. See what it wants.’
‘Sir.’

There were three phones on the control panel. Cadet Moore guessed that it was the white phone that needed to be answered. Bligh noticed with approval that Moore had guessed correctly.

‘Bridge. Cadet Moore speaking.’

A woman’s indistinct voice told a sob story. Pauses were few and far between, but at every one Moore nodded and said ‘That’s awful,’ or ‘I see,’ or ‘Good Lord.’ After several minutes the voice stopped talking and Moore was able to say, ‘I’ll get someone to deal with it, Mrs Honeycombe.’
‘Mrs Honeycombe,’ Bligh repeated. ‘She’s in First Class. Cabin 602.’

Again Moore stood still.

‘Well, Moore, what are you waiting for?’
‘Do you know all the cabin numbers, just off the cuff like that?’
‘You’ll learn how it’s done, Moore. In twenty years, you’ll know the entire passenger manifest off pat before the ship sails. Now go and fix the problem. Which cabin was it again?’
‘602, Captain.’
‘Well done. You’re acquiring that essential skill already.’

Moore set off for the top deck and the first class cabins, and the commercial break began.

 

‘If you want any more beer,’ Theodore said, ‘I’ll have to go out and get it.’
‘Can you get a couple of odds and ends?’ asked Gresham. ‘Sorry to impose, but Turner Rose asked for them when I visited him in the hospital, and I can’t be bothered.’
‘I suppose so. What does he want?’
‘Aspirins, a toothbrush and a radio.’
‘Has he got toothpaste already?’
‘No. He just forgot to ask for any,’ Gresham recalled. ‘I went to see him in the hospital. I said sorry for disrupting his meeting, and fetching a few things for him is the price of peace.’
‘I can probably find a toothbrush, but where an I going to get a radio at a quarter past nine in the evening?’
‘That’s not my problem. You volunteered. Wrap up warm. See you later.’

Gresham watched Theodore walk out of the flat, looked in the fridge and noticed that there weren’t any bottles of beer left, and then he turned back to the television. ‘Don't settle for boring hair and a boring personality any longer,’ yelled the commercial. ‘Transform your look and your life with Default psychoactive hair colouring and let your true colours shine through. Life is too short for boring hair and boring small talk. Transform body and soul with Default psychoactive hair dye.’

 

A chilly wind was blowing in the street outside. Theo pulled his coat around him and looked around for any shop that still had a light in its window. He saw two: an off-licence, who would surely sell bottles of brown ale, and a pharmacy, which would certainly sell aspirin and probably toothbrushes as well. Theo decided to do what was important first, and he started at the off-licence.

‘Do you want pint bottles?’
‘Yes, please. Twelve pint bottles of Culloden brown ale.’
‘I don’t sell them.’
‘Oh. What do you have instead?’
‘They don’t make pint bottles any more. You’ve got to buy half litres.’
‘Does it taste the same?’
‘Pretty much, aye.’
‘They’ll have to do, then.’
‘Twenty-four pounds exactly.’

The bottles weighed a lot more than Theo thought they would. He arranged the bottles into two carrier bags and struggled to open the door and walk out of the shop. The shopkeeper called him back into the shop and charged him ten pence for the carrier bags.

The road was quiet, no traffic, and the chink of the bottles in Theo’s carrier bags seemed loud enough to be heard a couple of miles away. Theo was much embarrassed. There weren’t any passers-by, but if there had been passers-by, they might have thought he was a heavy drinker. On the other hand, if he had been walking along the same street not carrying any bottles of brown ale, any passers-by might have thought that he was a tee-totaller, and that would have been every bit as embarrassing, possibly more.

Inside the pharmacy, Theo thanked the shop assistant for staying open so late. The shop assistant yawned. ‘It’s my turn to stay open until midnight. You're lucky to catch me. Tomorrow someone else will be open and I will be tucked up in bed.’

Theo told his story. ‘A friend of mine’s got himself into the hospital and he needs some odds and ends.’
The assistant yawned again. ‘What does he need?’
‘Aspirin, toothbrush, toothpaste,’ said Theo.
‘Aspirins are on the shelf there. As for a toothbrush…’

The shop assistant turned to pick up something from a cardboard carton on the floor behind him, then put it on the counter. ‘Here. I just had some airport best sellers in. I haven’t unpacked it all yet. Being open so late at night means I don’t have time to do the work.’ From the carton he took a plastic bag labelled Things a man needs on a journey. ‘Maybe this has everything you need.’ Inside the bag were things that you would need on a journey but forget until after you had checked your luggage in. The assistant pointed to them in turn. ‘Miniature comb, dental floss, face flannel, couple of disposable razors, shampoo, shaving foam, soap, sunscreen, If you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight toiletries would you choose to have with you? toothbrush, toothpaste… Oh, and what’s this? Default brand psychoactive hair colour. Never heard of it, but it’s free.’
Theo craned his neck to look at what else was in the cardboard box.‘Something else that I’m looking for: is that a traveller’s radio on the top of the pile in that carton?’
‘Good Lord… Yes. I hadn’t seen it. A traveller’s radio.’ It was a small radio, black in colour with gilt numbers on its dial and an earpiece. The shop assistant asked, ‘Does your friend want that too?’
‘Yes, he would really appreciate a radio,’ Theo said, silently putting his hands together for prayer and adding, ‘Thank you, God.’
‘How about a fridge and a washing machine?’
‘He’s already got those. And a coffee maker.’
‘What?’ The assistant was astonished. ‘On the National Health?’
’Thus doth the other half live,’ said Theo. ‘How much does all this come to?’

 

Theo arrived back in Gresham’s flat, lay his burden of brown ale down with a loud clink and a sensation of overwhelming relief.

‘Welcome back, sweetie,’ Gresham said. ‘Thanks for fetching all that, and ye didn’t drop a single one. Put the beer in the fridge for me. I can’t be bothered standing up.’
‘There’s only room for eight bottles in the fridge,’ Theo called from the kitchen half a minute later. ‘What are we going to do with the other four?’
‘I can’t think of anything,’ said Gresham, ‘but I think they’ll fit on the little table beside where we were sitting. And bring the opener.’
‘I got the things you wanted as well.’
‘Leave those on the fridge.’

Captain Bligh could be heard intoning, as he always did, ‘Nothing defeats the Crime Ship,’ and the music faded in.

 

‘You missed a treat,’ Gresham said. ‘That was a good episode.’
‘Why?’ Theo drank the rest of the bottle. ‘What happened? Where are Mrs Valentine, her son Jewellery Box and his honeycomb now?’
‘You’re getting confused. Mrs Honeycombe was going on a cruise to Nicaragua, her son was called Valentine and their jewellery box went missing. The ship sailed its passengers, including Mrs Honeycombe and her son Valentine, to Aguaclara.’
‘Where’s that?’

‘Nicaragua. As fictitious equatorial seaside resorts go, Aguaclara is not bad. There’s a harbour, a decent class of hotel, 24-hour bar, lots of handsome wealthy men in yachts and beautiful women in swimsuits, you can drink the water, the beach is half a mile wide and there aren’t too many sharks.’
‘Is there a McDonald’s?’
‘Aye, in between the Town Hall and Levi’s Jeans.’
‘Still seems a strange destination to want to spend your annual fortnight in,’ Theo observed. ‘What on earth was a cruise ship doing docking in Nicaragua? One hundred per cent humidity, wall to wall drug pedlars, guns, venomous spiders and endless bandits.’
‘Because it was a cruise to Nicaragua. That’s what cruises to Nicaragua do.’
‘Right.’ Theo saw the seascape in his imagination and his hands traced its shape in the air. ‘So does anything else happen, or do these two thousand or so passengers just have a relaxing fortnight in the sunshine taking photographs of the macaws, getting shot, falling over whenever there’s an earthquake, having their legs chewed off by sharks and handing over their wallets to a man on horseback wearing a handkerchief over his nose and mouth? Dame todo tu dinero o mueres!’
‘Gosh, you just gave me a terrible fright, Theo darling.’ Gresham regained his composure. ‘I nearly dived behind the sofa. I didn’t know you spoke Nicaraguan Spanish.’
‘I don’t. I once spent a fortnight on a school trip to Nicaragua. We were stuck on paliasses in wooden bunks in a pig shed in Playacaliente, and I heard the phrase so often that it stuck in my memory.’
‘Why did they take a school trip to Nicaragua?’
‘Status symbol. This was Chamberlain School, remember, all silver spoons, top hats and coronets. It was very important to them that we go somewhere that cost a lot of money to get to. The local comprehensive could only afford a youth hostel on the Isle of Wight. But when we got to Nicaragua, all we did was play football, pretend to be spacemen, or pretend to be spacemen playing football on the moon. We could have done that at home, in the playground.’
‘Was that really all that you did?’

A party of schoolboys looks around a sewing machine factory

‘We had one or two trips to what were described as places of interest. We spent a day in the San Luminà sewing machine factory twenty miles away, I remember.’
‘Sounds a strange place to take a school trip.’
I think the teachers wanted to go to Nicaragua because they thought they could get cheap drugs.’
‘Is it true about the sharks?’ Gresham asked.
‘Hundreds of them. But it isn’t true about the drugs. The screws had to make do with cheap bottles of licor de palma. Forty per cent alcohol. Some of them were pretty ill by the time we got back. They weren’t used to it.’
‘So, the rest of the Crime Ship story was, er…’
‘Tell me,’ said Theo, ‘I was wondering.’
Gresham managed to recall the episode after a few seconds of thought. ‘Mrs Honeycombe fell in love and was reconciled with her ex husband Kieran. He was working as a grape treader in a vineyard in El Vallejo, only she didn’t recognise him at first because he was wearing a hat. She forgave him for running off with a pineapple picker from Taconola and Valentine hitched a ride on a boat and went fishing for tuna, but he only caught an Argentine football boot. At the end of the programme, they found all the missing jewellery, and Captain Bligh officiated at their shipboard second wedding ceremony.’
‘What about the jewellery? Where was it?’
‘She lost her jewellery,’ Gresham explained. ‘It all went missing. The Crime Ship magically navigated itself to San Luminà, and Captain Bligh took two police officers with him in the early hours. They found Cadet Moore sitting alone by the light of a pile of burning cotton reels in a long derelict and long deserted sewing machine factory surrounded by boxes of jewellery, banknotes, a couple of expensive cameras and a pile of cigarette ends.’
‘Well? … How did those get there?’
‘Moore had been smoking them and he hadn’t bothered emptying the ash tray.’
‘I mean,’ Theo tried to find a clearer way to express himself, ‘how had Moore got hold of the jewellery?’
‘Oh, I see. He’d just put some empty kids’ pencil boxes into the first class cabins with a note saying, “Place jewellery and valuables into this box, close the lid and leave it outside the door of your cabin at night.” Then come nightfall, he just took them away.’
‘And nobody noticed?’
‘No, Theo. Because they all thought that the jewellery had been put in the hold for safe keeping. Mrs Honeycombe wanted hers back so that Valentine could wear his Boy Scout tuna fish sandwich making badge.’
‘Sounds a fairly typical episode of Crime Ship,’  Theo said. ‘You have a remarkable memory.’
‘Do you want to see another episode? I’ve got all the videos in the cupboard with the saucepans.’
‘To be honest,’ said Theo, dishonestly, ‘I’m a bit tired.’

 

Gresham woke in the morning to see Theo already awake, wrapped in Gresham’s dressing gown and sitting at the desk writing a letter. ‘Who are you writing to?’
‘Myself.’
‘Why?’ Gresham paused. ‘Can ye not just talk to yourself like everybody else does?’
‘Not in this case. Your episode of Crime Ship made me think of a possible solution to our mystery. But to prove it, I might need a self-addressed envelope. So I wrote one and I stuck a stamp on it. When I’ve finished it, I’m going to put this letter in it, and a cheque for forty pence.’
‘If you’re about to solve a mystery, can I join in?’
‘Sure.’ Theo welcomed the offer. ‘Today we’re going to take Sir Turner the luxuries he asked for, and we just might solve our remaining mystery at the same time. At least, I think we might.’
Gresham asked, ‘What are we going to find?’
‘I think we’re going to find how cheques posted to the big corporations were diverted and the money stolen.’

 

The nurse asked, ‘What’s in the carrier bag?’
‘Turner Rose asked us to bring a couple of things he needed.’

She looked up at the clock. ‘It’s not nine o’clock yet. You’re a bit early. Still, I don’t think the doctor needs to see Sir Turner for an hour or so. Just remember not to make him excited, or angry, or anything.’
Theo replied. ‘We won’t. We saw what happened last time.’

When Theo and Gresham reached the small Intensive Care ward with their carrier bag, Turner Rose — Sir Turner Rose — was sitting up in bed with a tray of scrambled egg, toast, orange juice and a small pile of letters. Maybe half a dozen letters.

‘Hello! Welcome back to my world,’ he said.
Theo asked how he was feeling.
‘Not too bad. The machinery to which I am attached has successfully kept me alive. If I carry on progressing at this rate, there’s a chance I might be allowed to stand up this afternoon.’
‘Might you be back at work soon?’
‘I’m back at work already, Theo. Someone kindly sent my post here from the office. Just because you’ve had a heart attack is no reason to stop work, obviously.’
‘Whoever said that must have worked in the Job Centre at some time,’ Theo guessed.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s that distinctive turn of speech that they have,’ Theo explained, ‘when the toothbrush moustache gets stuck to their front teeth.’
‘We’ve brought the things you asked for.’ Gresham picked up the carrier bag and put its contents onto the bedside table. ‘Toiletries,’ he lifted out the box labelled Things a man needs on a journey,  ‘and a radio. Is there anything else we can do to help?’
‘I’m most grateful, really. That’s all very welcome indeed. If you want to help and you’ve got a few minutes, you can help me answer a couple of the letters.’
Gresham was sceptical. ‘I don’t think we knaa much about anything that people write to their MP about.’
‘Most of them are pretty trivial,’ Turner pointed to an unopened brown envelope addressed in squiggly handwriting, ‘but not necessarily easy to answer. Open that one there and read it. You’ll soon see.’
‘ “Dear Mr Rose,” ’ Gresham began, ‘This is from Ruth Smith on Evergreen Drive. “I can’t find my saucepan,” ’ he read. ‘ “It was a polished steel pan with a bakelite handle and I always—” Do you really have to reply to this?’
‘Yes, if I want her to vote for me next time.’
‘ “I’ve had that saucepan since I bought it with wedding coupons in 1941,” ’ Gresham continued reading Mrs Smith’s letter, ‘ “and I feel tremendous grief at its inexplicable disappearance. In 1966 I had just finished warming up some kitchen scraps for the cat—” ’
‘It’s in the fridge,’ Theo deduced. ‘She’s looked on the stove and in the sink, so it must be somewhere she put it by mistake. So unless she mistook it for a flower and planted it in the garden, it’s in the fridge. It’s the only place it can be.’
‘Me gran did that once, Theo,’ Gresham recalled.
‘Did what?’
‘Me gran planted a saucepan in the garden.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Sir Turner.
‘Aye. She only realised what she’d done when her dog mistook it for a bone and dug it up.’
‘And if she were the same sort of woman as Ruth Smith,’ Sir Turner said, ‘she’d have had half the policemen in Scotland looking for it. Theo, I think you have solved her problem!’ Turner gave Theo a piece of headed notepaper and added, ‘Your gift of clairvoyance is hard to find. Write down your insight and I’ll sign it.’
Theo looked at the notepaper. ‘Sure.’
‘Do you want to read another letter? I feel much as though I just won the jackpot.’ Turner picked up another envelope and offered it to Gresham. Gresham opened it.

‘This letter’s from Michael. He’s eight.’
‘Michael writes every week or so,’ said Turner, ‘he gives me a lot of work.’
‘Michael asks, “I’m eight years old. Why don’t electric light bulbs make a noise like a vacuum cleaner?” ’
As he listened, Sir Turner was picking through the toiletries in Things a man needs on a journey. He looked up and stared at the letter in Gresham’s hands. ‘Have you got an answer for Michael?’
‘Well,’ Gresham began by stating the obvious, ‘light bulbs don’t have moving parts—’
‘Don’t confuse causation with purpose,’ Theo interrupted. ‘Vacuum cleaners make a noise so that you can hear them coming. Otherwise you might get sucked into one.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Gresham, ‘specially if yer eight. I’ll gan along with your version.’
‘That’s good work, the pair of you. Can you just write the answers down — I’ve got some headed letter paper here — and I’ll sign them when I’m able to sit up. Would you mind addressing the envelopes for me as well?’
‘Yes,’ Gresham volunteered, ‘we can do that for you.’
‘And, by the way,’ Sir Turner asked, holding up the small plastic tube, ‘what’s Psychoactive Hair Colour?’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Theo, who had heard of it but thought the claims made for it were untrue and really it was exactly the same as every other hair colour.
‘I’ll try it out as soon as I’m strong enough, and we’ll see what sort of transformation it brings about. Meanwhile, how do you listen to Radio Three on this radio?’

Theo turned the radio on, found Radio Three and left Sir Turner listening delightedly through the headphones to the Concerto for Wind Chime and Brass Band by Zaki Camacho. He could hardly hear Theo and Gresham saying goodbye.

 

As soon as they were out of Turner Rose’s earshot, Gresham asked, ‘Did that bring us closer to finding out who or what didn’t finish Jory Hodgson off?’
‘Only in a geographical sense, my dear Gresham,’ said Theo. ‘We did not gain any information from which the identity of the culprit may be deduced. And I doubt that we shall. But yes, we are closer to finding out what he did, because it’s over there.’
‘The plastic bins?’
‘Yes, exactly.’ Theo pointed along a path. ‘This footpath goes up from the front door of the Post Office to the back entrance. The postmen in the town collect letters from pillar boxes, homes and offices use this footpath to take them to the back office there, where they wait for a van to collect them.’

There was an untidy, pitted path that led up to the Post Office, and three red plastic boxes each about the size of a sea-chest stood against the fence. Labels on the boxes read Scottish Power, National Health Service and Cromarty County Council.

‘Those are the children’s pencil boxes,’ said Theo, ‘and inside, we shall find the passengers’ jewellery.’
Gresham shook his head. ‘I’m not really with you, Theo.’
‘Crime Ship last night. The passengers put their jewellery into childrens’ pencil boxes and the jewellery was stolen.’
‘I think it’s dawning on me. The postman isn’t the one who brings your letters to your door. The postman’s the one who empties the pillar boxes and brings all that they contain to the post office. He assumes—’
‘Exactly,’ Theo put in, reassuringly.
‘He is carrying all this heavy correspondence to the back door of the post office, where there is a store room. He gives all the letters to the sub-postmaster, and the sub-postmaster puts it all into a heap, and the van comes and collects the heap. Strugglin’ up the path from the road to the store room, the postman assumes, naturally, that these boxes were put here to help him, so he doesn’t have to carry everythin’ all the way to the back door. If he has any letters addressed to the Health Service, or anything to do with it, he drops those off here, into the bin labelled National Health Service. Any letters to Scottish Power, that would be every payment of cash, cheque or postal order, goes into the bin marked Scottish Power. And that’s where they vanish, and re-appear later with all the money missing.’
Theo nodded. ‘Yes. I think that’s pretty much the way it works.’
‘But the Post Office didn’t put the bins here.’
‘No. They probably noticed them and thought, “These look official. We’d better not touch them.” So the bins have gradually become a part of the landscape.’
‘Good thinking,’ Gresham said. ‘Shall we take these bins up to The Works?’
‘No, not yet.’ Theo took the letter addressed to himself from his pocket. ‘I shall put my stamped, self addressed envelope into the box marked National Health Service,’ he said, ‘and we wait for it to come back to me. Or not.’
‘What do you expect to happen to it?’ Gresham asked.
‘Elementary, my dear Gresham. After office hours the fraudster takes the letters out of the bins. He takes them somewhere quiet, he rifles through them, removes anything that can be turned into money, then puts the letters back into the envelopes, sticks them back together with Gritt-Stick and takes them to the store room at the Post Office. Now, on these cheques, the payee will often be abbreviated to a couple of capital letters. NHS, SP, CCC—’
‘So it’s a simple forgery,’ Gresham continued. ‘He pays the cheques into any of a half-dozen bank accounts that he knows about. NHS becomes N H Stanier. CCC, for Cromarty County Council, becomes C C Cussons. SP turns from Scottish Power into something else. S Prendergast, perhaps. Bingo! He draws the money out of those accounts.’
‘Payees whose names are easy to forge. It’s a believable theory. We’ll see if we can provide a scrap of evidence for it.’

Gresham looked at the bins and looked at the Post Office. Then he looked at Theo and sighed with relief. ‘We’ve achieved summat,’ he said.
‘You know what they say about counting chickens,’ said Theo, ‘but I think we have.’
‘Is the King’s Unicorn open yet?’ Gresham asked.
‘That’s exactly what I was wondering,’ said Theo.