As I squeezed myself reluctantly into the wreath-space at one side of Bob’s prone carcass I suddenly thought of Senga, cabined in her coffin in the Catholic church and now, presumably, locked away for ever underground. Andrea and Shug crammed themselves in opposite me so that we might have been at an Irish wake, but with no drink and a corpse that occasionally said to itself things like, ‘Can you repair the ship’s engines in time, Mr Scott?’

Driving a hearse didn’t worry him, Robin explained (although nobody had asked him to), because being a Buddhist he was phlegmatic about death, ‘Because I know I’ll come back.’

‘What as?’ Terri asked. ‘A protozoa?’

‘I think you’ll find,’ Robin said, ‘that protozoa is a plural form, it would have to be protozoon.’ Perhaps Robin was on such a tedious karmic journey that he would just come back as himself. I’m sure it was no coincidence that his name was almost an anagram of ‘boring’.

‘Reincarnation,’ Shug said hoarsely. ‘What goes around, comes around, eh?’ He lit up a joint that immediately filled the all-too-small space with a fug of acrid smoke. If we crashed how would the circumstances of my death ever be explained to my mother? (Or, rather, the woman who has masqueraded as my mother for the last twenty-one years.) Perhaps it would be some comfort that I had eliminated the middle-man and saved her the undertaker’s fees.

‘If you can say what it is, then that is not it,’ Robin said sententiously and apropos of nothing as far as I could see. Terri twirled her moth-eaten parasol menacingly in his direction.

‘Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other,’ a gnomic Bob contributed.

‘Pythagoras?’ Robin puzzled.

‘James T. Kirk.’

Robin manoeuvred the hearse away from the kerb and Bob shouted happily, ‘Warp speed, Mr Sulu.’ What a simple creature he was. If only my needs were as lacking in emotional complexity as Bob’s.

‘Eastern stuff,’ Robin said bobbishly, ‘it’s like so much more in touch with what’s really real. Stripped of materialism and intellectual bullshit. Look at the haiku.’ Robin thumped the steering-wheel of the hearse enthusiastically. ‘Compare that to the moribund structures of English poetry.’

‘What’s a haiku?’ Andrea asked.

‘It’s a three-line poem of five, seven and five syllables,’ Robin said, ‘so simple, so essential. The plural of haiku is haikai,’ Robin said, warming to his subject, ‘or at least that refers to a related series of haiku. The haiku was originally—’

‘The enormous dog stuck in a beautiful vase of white peonies,’ Bob said.

‘What?’ Robin gave Bob a worried look in the rear-view mirror of the hearse.

Bob lifted his shaggy head off the veneer and metal of the bier and declared, in a ponderously poetic way:

‘And meditation,’ Bob said, staring at the ceiling of the hearse, ‘that ought to be easy, it’s just thinking about nothing, isn’t it? But when you try to think about nothing . . .’ Bob lapsed into a mystified silence, aided by the Curly-Wurly he’d just found in his greatcoat pocket.

We were accelerating along the Perth Road at a speed much faster than is normally associated with exequies and therefore causing considerable consternation amongst our fellow motorists, especially when we overtook them. A sedate Wolseley sedan containing an elderly couple mounted the pavement in distress and a rogue nun along Riverside crossed herself in horror. To make matters worse, we were in convoy with another of Balniddrie’s inhabitants, a fey former Harrovian called Gilbert who was driving an old ambulance – so it seemed as though we were hurrying to the aftermath of some dreadful disaster, rather than going for a simple trip to the country – although Bob, for some reason, seemed to be under the impression that we were on a starfleet expedition to collect the element zienite.

‘God,’ he said, once the Curly-Wurly allowed him to speak again, ‘do Buddhists believe in God? And what is God anyway? I mean, who’s to say I’m not God?’

‘There are standing stones at Balniddrie, you know,’ Andrea said, ignoring this metaphysical prattle. ‘They’re supposed to be seven sisters who were dancing on top of this hill and were turned to stone by an angry wizard.’

‘Why was he angry?’ Shug asked.

‘Oh, they always are,’ she said glumly.

Considering they lived at Balniddrie, Robin and Gilbert seemed woefully lacking in any understanding of how to get there so that we crossed and re-crossed our own path several times, even finding ourselves at one point driving through the flatlands of the Carse of Gowrie (or the boundaries of the Romulan Neutral zone, depending on who you were). The occupants of the hearse were no help with navigation as it appeared that none of us had a sense of direction. Bob had once famously caught the circular bus and been trapped on it for hours and I, of course, have been lost all my life.

‘Wow,’ Bob said, peering like a curious cadaver through the window of the hearse, ‘cows.’

Andrea frowned at him and said to me, ‘He doesn’t get out much, does he?’

Robin executed a death-defying U-turn at the Errol turn-off. Not long after that it began to hail, huge mothballs of ice clattering against the windscreen. The hailstones began to accumulate, obscuring the view of the road because the windscreen wipers of the hearse had long since given up the ghost, as it were.

The purpose of two lengths of hitherto mysterious string was now revealed by Robin. One of the pieces of string came in through the driver’s window of the hearse, the other through the passenger window. Robin tugged at his piece of string and one of the windscreen wipers jerked towards him.

‘See?’ Robin said hopefully to Terri. ‘Your turn now.’ Her reply was succinct and negative.

Finally, the hearse made a left turn at a sign that said ‘Wester Balniddrie’, and progressed up a rough road to a boxy old farmhouse that was harled and painted a darker shade of sky, which is to say grey.

‘Prepare to beam down, Dr McCoy,’ Bob said, ‘and investigate new life forms.’

We drove past a front lawn that looked as if it had once been a neat tapestry of box hedges and clipped yew but was now a wilderness of nettles and rusted objects. Robin parked the hearse in a cobbled yard at the back of the house where a range of dilapidated farm buildings were huddled together trying to shelter from the weather. When we were disinterred from the confines of the hearse and its lingering afterscent of embalming fluid and chrysanthemums, I discovered that it was even colder than it had been in town. A frost had already begun to ice over the cobbles of the yard.

Bob had fallen asleep in the time it took to park and had to be winkled out of the back door of the hearse like a sleepy winter bear out of its cave.

‘Magic Bob – how’ya doing?’ Gilbert said when he caught sight of him. Gilbert was the scion of an ancient aristocratic family that had fallen somewhat into disrepute. His mother had obtained a scandalous divorce from his father which Gilbert always maintained was on account of bestiality although what I think he meant was that his father had been beastly to his mother. With his etiolated body and rather inbred eyes he gave the appearance of being slightly defective but he had lovely manners and was rather sweet, not to mention rich. If he hadn’t borne such a close resemblance to a beansprout I would have been happy to leave Bob for him.

‘Hey,’ Bob said to Gilbert, and the two of them wandered off together.

Shug had already disappeared, Andrea trailing on his heels like a lovesick dog. Trying to avoid Robin, I followed Terri into the house, through a disintegrating weatherboarded porch and down a freezing stone-flagged passage which was littered with boots and wellingtons, bits of bicycles, the top half of a skeleton suspended on a stand (a relic of earlier medics who had once lived here), most of the engine from a small car, the stuffed and mounted head of a stag and a jumble of demijohns and carboys – some empty, some fermenting with risky things found in hedgerows. A rack of old Irn-Bru bottles, home-corked and labelled ‘Elderflower champagne’, pointed at us in a threatening way like a broadside of light artillery. An accident waiting to happen, in my opinion.

The passage led to the kitchen, a vast room that must have once been full of warmth and farm-cooking but was now glacially cold and dominated by a huge Aga that Miranda, the current medic (a vocation that seemed to be driven more by the availability of drugs than any desire to heal the sick), was tending listlessly, like someone in a fairy story put under a spell of drudgery.

‘The dog you were with this afternoon,’ Terri said without preamble to her, ‘where is he now?’

Miranda, who looked as though she was mainlining intravenous Valium, said, ‘What dog?’

‘The dog that was following you.’

‘There was a dog following me?’ Miranda said. ‘Why?’ Terri’s interrogation of Miranda petered out eventually but not until she had completely exhausted every possibility on the Miranda/yellow dog axis: (‘Maybe he’s on your bed and you just haven’t noticed?’ ‘Maybe you’ve hidden him in your wardrobe because you don’t want anyone to see him?’ and so on). If Miranda had had more energy – she looked as asthenic as a vampire’s victim – I think she would have punched Terri.

She reluctantly offered us something to drink and Terri chose coffee which turned out to be made of oats or barley, or maybe beans, and she gagged impolitely on it. I didn’t fare much better with the tea Miranda had stewing on the hob of the Aga; the tea leaves were like iron filings and the milk in it was rank with the taste of goat.

Gilbert reappeared, sans Bob, but accompanied by Kevin who had materialized out of nowhere. I was surprised to see Kevin who, despite being born and bred in the countryside, was immune to its pastoral charms (‘Green, green, green – what’s the point?’). He was wearing a short brown anorak that looked as if it was left over from his trainspotting days.

Miranda had grown bored with her task now and abandoned the Aga to Gilbert’s ministrations. She shrugged on a white coat and said, ‘Obs and Gynie,’ by way of explanation.

‘Don’t forget you’re killing the goat tonight,’ Gilbert reminded her in his terrifically posh accent as she went out the door.

‘Why does it have to be me?’ she asked sullenly.

‘Because,’ Gilbert said reasonably, ‘you’re the doctor.’

The occupants of Balniddrie took turns in cooking (although Miranda was generally excused as there was a paranoid house rumour that she was overly interested in toxicology), and today was Gilbert’s day apparently.

‘At home the servants do all the cooking,’ he said, ‘so this is terrific fun.’ He opened one of the doors of the Aga to reveal a loaf of heavy dark bread proving lopsidedly. He took out a large pottery bowl and removed the rather dirty tea-towel that was covering it. ‘Yoghurt,’ he announced as if he was introducing it to us. The yoghurt smelt even more goatish than the milk and had separated into gelatinous curds and a thin wershy whey.

‘Do you think that’s what it’s supposed to be like?’ he asked Terri, who almost fell off her chair in surprise as no-one had ever previously thought to ask her a question about cooking (or indeed about anything). Rather gratified, she did her best. ‘Try jam,’ she said.

‘What a fantastic idea,’ Gilbert said, retrieving a jar of jam from a damp and mouldering pantry that I never wanted to see the insides of. The jam was elderberry and had retained a lot of the little twiggy stalks. It also contrived, strangely for jam, to be sour. He stirred it enthusiastically into the yoghurt.

‘I’ve got more yoghurt somewhere,’ he said, yanking open another of the Aga’s doors and finding, to his surprise, a pile of (we must hope) clean nappies.

‘They’re airing,’ Kara said, appearing in the doorway, her body sagging with the weight of Proteus on her hip.

‘Well, I didn’t think they were cooking,’ he murmured, but not so that she could hear. Gilbert’s childhood nanny had inculcated a dreadful fear of women into him, a fear that Harrow had refined into an art.

Kara sat down at the kitchen table and started breast-feeding Proteus, currently encased in a grubby Babygro. She was followed into the kitchen by another of Balniddrie’s residents, a woman called—

Gilbert had set about – with much banging and clattering of pans – to cook some kind of meal. This might have been lunch, it might have been dinner, I couldn’t really say – it was so very dark outside that it was impossible to tell what time of day it was and I had lost all track of time by now.

Kara inhaled on her joint as if her life depended on it. Every so often a seed exploded like a tiny pistol-shot and sent a glowing red spark skittering across the table or onto an inflammable piece of child’s clothing (which is also how accidents happen). Jill and Kara exchanged their joints. They had embarked on a heated discussion about the age at which you should stop breastfeeding. Jill favoured two years old while Kara thought you ‘should let them decide for themselves’. A decision she might live to regret when Proteus was a thirty-year-old civil servant commuting daily from Tring.

At that moment a small child lunged into the room and gave a bloodcurdling scream. I jumped up in alarm – the cry was so ghastly that for a moment I thought it must be on fire and was searching for something to throw over it. No-one else in the kitchen seemed moved by the noise, all except for Terri who stuck a surreptitious foot out and tripped the child up. It ceased the noise abruptly and I recognized it as Jill’s daughter.

‘If you’re hungry you’ll have to wait,’ Jill said to her. The child unearthed a plastic potty from under the table and threw it across the kitchen.

‘Don’t forget we’ve got to kill the goat,’ Gilbert said, casting a doubtful look over a wrecked Kara. In the hierarchy of Balniddrie – although pecking-order might be a more accurate term – Kara was the unacknowledged leader. The goat to be killed, it transpired, was a little billy-kid because, Jill explained, ‘Billy-kids are no use for anything.’

‘I didn’t know we got executed if we weren’t of any use,’ Terri said. ‘I didn’t realize usefulness was the criterion by which we lived or died.’ (Quite a long sentence for Terri.)

‘We’re not talking about people, we’re talking about goats,’ Kara said.

‘Goats, people – what’s the difference?’ Terri said, looking as if she was about to stab Kara with her parasol.

‘It’ll be a humane killing,’ Jill said in an attempt to mollify Terri. ‘Miranda’s going to do it, she’s the—’

‘That would be a real place, would it?’ Jill scoffed. ‘The Palace of Callyshite?’

‘Calysveron,’ Kevin corrected her. ‘Real as anything else.’

‘Real as this table?’ Jill quizzed. Kevin scrutinized the table as if he was thinking of buying it and finally said, ‘Yes, as real as this table.’ This dialogue would have gone on longer and grown more tedious (although the premise was interesting) if the child hadn’t set off round the kitchen again, at the same hectic pace as before and yet again screaming for dear life. This time it made a beeline for the Aga and was saved at the last minute from immolating itself by a modified rugby tackle from Gilbert. Perhaps they could substitute the girl for the goat in whatever Satanic ritual they were planning for later. A kid for a kid.

Adjacent to the garden was a bumpy field full of some kind of mutant thistle that hadn’t died down in the winter cold. This was where the goats lived when they weren’t shut up for the night in a pig-pen. They were Anglo-Nubians, with floppy rabbit ears and devil-eyes – two nannies and two kids, a big one and a little one, this latter presumably the subject of tonight’s sacrifice.

‘Poor baby,’ Terri said, attempting to kiss it.

Although a little downcast, the goats were quite friendly, certainly friendlier than the chickens, and so we spent some time petting and commiserating until a genuine kind of darkness fell and it grew too cold to be standing around in a field so we made our way back to the kitchen from which was emanating an unappetizing aroma.

‘They’re to sell,’ she snapped, ‘and besides, we’ve got electricity, for heaven’s sake.’

Robin emerged from ‘the wine cellar’, which was actually another pig-pen, carrying several bottles of home-made wine – rose-hip, elderberry and a rather lethal-looking parsnip.

‘I’ll just uncork the reds,’ he said, ‘so that they can breathe for a moment.’ I had a sudden rather unnerving glimpse of the polite schoolboy lurking within the hairy chrysalis – of Robin helping out at parental cocktail parties, handing round salted nuts and topping up the tonic in large, middle-class gins.

‘Yeah,’ Robin admitted, shamefaced, ‘Surrey. Dad owns a firm of estate agents.’

‘Lucky you.’

Andrea and Shug had reappeared by now, their pupils dilated from either drugs or a bout of sexual activity or – more likely – both. Bob also turned up, although where he had been was less clear – another transporter malfunction, I suppose.

‘I am not a number,’ he whispered defiantly to me, casting about warily for a giant bubble that had apparently been chasing him.

Several people I’d never seen before made an appearance for the meal, all of them Balniddrians, presumably.

‘Balniddrians,’ Kevin said, writing the word down in a tiny little notebook. ‘Good name.’

The meal was a strange primeval slop of semi-identifiable ingredients – brown rice, potatoes, carrots, something that might or might not have been a vegetable, all of it vaguely goat-smelling even though not a morsel of goat was in it, according to a vow on his mother’s life that Terri made Gilbert swear on his knees.

‘What did you do with that pan of wax that was on the stove?’ Jill asked Gilbert, who pretended not to hear.

Proteus was ‘asleep somewhere’ according to a rather vague Kara but Jill’s unpronounceable child was up long past her bedtime and had to be force-fed her rice-carrot-wax sludge before falling asleep with her head on the table, by which time she had acquired an almost feverish complexion.

‘You should try Heinz toddler jars,’ Bob said earnestly to Jill, who said, equally earnestly, ‘Never.’

‘Babies should eat what we eat,’ Kara said.

‘I think we should eat what babies eat,’ Bob said.

‘I think we should just eat babies,’ Terri murmured, a remark which, luckily for her, went unheard.

Before long Bob found himself unwittingly taking part in the ‘what age should you stop breastfeeding’ argument, even at one point arguing vehemently against feeding on demand because it would lead to a generation of layabouts and slackers.

‘Watch it, Bob,’ Shug said, laying a reasonable hand on his arm, ‘you’re turning into a Klingon.’ Perhaps there was another Bob inside Bob – a conventional person who would grow up to be a teacher and vote Liberal and worry about his pension. A Bob who would one day rip off the rubbery facemask of the false Bob and take his place in the world of alarm clocks, Burton suits and lunchtime bank queues.

‘Is there a pudding?’ Kevin asked, trying to ignore the whole unpalatable topic of conversation of infant nutrition.

‘Absolutely,’ Gilbert said. ‘In fact here’s one I made earlier, ha, ha.’ He produced a plate of brownies which turned out to be surprisingly good.

‘They’re lovely,’ I said to him.

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘It’s so nice of you to say that.’

Miranda reappeared, more lethargic than ever but not so comatose that she couldn’t eat Andrea’s share of brownies.

‘Well?’ Kara said to her, and she made a face and took a long thin box out of her pocket and opened it to reveal a shiny surgical-steel scalpel.

‘Whoa – phasers on stun, Mr Spock,’ Bob said in alarm.

‘I don’t think Captain Kirk would say “Whoa”!’ Shug said.

‘It’s not logical, Captain,’ Bob agreed. (Bob, you will have noticed, tended to cast himself in his mind as the entire crew of the Enterprise rather than any one particular member.)

‘University?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’ I asked him patiently.

‘And . . . she said she was going to come round tonight. To see you.’

‘And you’ve just thought to tell me now?’

‘There’s a bus,’ Robin said indifferently. ‘The road’s just over the hill.’

No-one, it seemed, was coming with me. Robin had begun a game of Go with Kevin – possibly the most boring board game ever devised – and Terri was intent on staying to save the condemned goat by kidnapping it (naturally) although I couldn’t imagine what she planned to do with a billy-goat in her fourth-floor Cleghorn Street flat. Andrea uncharacteristically offered to show me the way to the bus-stop but only, as I discovered to my cost, so she could talk endlessly about Shug.

Our route, apparently, took us past the standing stones which were ‘Over there somewhere,’ Andrea said, pointing vaguely into the darkness and tramping off before I could question her orienteering skills.

We tripped over brambles, fell into burns, slid on the thickly frosted grass and bumped into badly parked cows before finally encountering a steep hill that we had to haul each other up like funicular trains until we were sweating and freezing at the same time, all the time the air full of Andrea’s Shug catechism – Do you think he likes me? Do you think he really likes me? Do you think he loves me? Do you think he really loves me? And so on.

By the time we reached the seven sisters, Balniddrie was no more than a couple of pinpricks of light in the distance. For a moment, I thought I heard a strange pagan chant of ‘Kill the goat! Kill the goat!’ followed by a scream but Andrea said I’d imagined it and I hoped she was right.

Careless of any bad-tempered wizardry that might be lurking, Andrea began dancing around the stones in an abandoned one-woman eightsome reel. ‘Sky magic,’ she said breathlessly.

The standing stones, although only four of them were still actually standing, were about the same height as Andrea, roughly hewn and pointed like the teeth of a gigantic cat. Andrea flung her arms around an upright one in a dramatic fashion and, hugging it, said, ‘Feel the earth magic.’ I gave the nearest stone a tentative embrace but experienced no thaumaturgy – the stone felt like a stone, clammy and napped with lichen. What was I doing cavorting with boulders in the middle of nowhere? I should have a pair of warm arms embracing me instead of the cold clasp of a megalith.

‘Are you sure this is the way to the bus-stop?’ I asked her, but before she could answer I noticed something astonishing. I was developing astronomical skin! The back of my hand was like a réseau, a perfect grid of lace waiting to be mapped by stars. Andrea was searching on the ground for agates and still wittering on about the mystical properties of rocks, but I was hypnotized by my hand – even as I watched it the skin was expanding and magnifying into a huge stretch of parchment. My pores were like tiny, distant stars and the lines on the surface of the skin were the ghostly paths of the heavenly bodies. My cosmic self was about to have a glimpse of immanence.

‘Wow,’ I whispered (I couldn’t help myself). ‘This is amazing, Andrea.’

‘You ate the brownies, didn’t you?’ she said, rather wearily.

I don’t know how much time passed while I was contemplating my celestial body but when I tore myself away there was no sign of Andrea. I called her name, but received no answer, only an echo ringing in the gelid air. I looked behind the stones, I looked at the stones – perhaps they really were accursed maidens. They gave no indication, however, of harbouring lapidified girls. I touched one cautiously but did not go so far as to whisper ‘Andrea?’ in its mossy ear.

The power must have gone off because there were no comforting lights from the farms and cottages spread around the hillside, no visible topography of any kind. It was so quiet I could have heard a mouse rustling through the stiff grass, or an owl’s wing swooping, but no mouse rustled and no owl swooped.

Then the silence rumbled into unwelcome life with the sound of heavy breathing – a slack snorting that belonged to something teratoid and beastly. From behind the crest of the hill steam clouds of ogreish breath bellowed into the cold air and a phosphorescence rose like a nightmarish sunrise, fringing the stone sisters with an unearthly arc light. I didn’t wait to find out the source of this strange incandescence but took off, stumbling down the hill as fast as I could.

The stertorous breathing, like a labouring steam engine, was following me, but I didn’t look behind. It was accompanied now by a dreadful reek of foul-smelling stinkhorn and hard-boiled egg sandwiches. I tripped over a root and fell into something cold and plashy which I hoped was nothing worse than a burn, although I could feel oozing icy mud. For a second I thought I caught a glimpse of something gleaming in the dark – a flash of silver and bronze, something fishy and scaly and then in an instant it had gone and everything was quiet.

A light appeared in the distance, less alien and monstrous than before but nonetheless bobbing across the darkened landscape like a will-o’-the-wisp. As the light got closer it started to resolve itself into not, as I’d hoped, a bus, but a car. The car slowed to a halt beside the bus-stop and the driver leant over and opened the passenger door.

‘You’ve missed the bus,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get in.’

I got into the car and slammed the door. ‘You are following me, aren’t you?’

‘In your dreams,’ Chick said.

Until very recently, time had been a slow slurry of nothingness for me; now the days were suddenly packed to overflowing, a turn of events that I found surprisingly unwelcome.

‘A dragon?’ Chick queried mildly, as if I’d said something as unremarkable as ‘a door’ or ‘a Dandie Dinmont’.

Chick took a half-bottle of Bell’s from his pocket, took a large swig and then handed it to me. The whisky tasted sour and made me gag, but I kept it down.

‘Good girl,’ he said. We were silent for a long while and then Chick said reflectively, ‘I was a good policeman, you know.’

‘I believe you. Did you work on any famous cases?’ I asked him, thinking about The Hand of Fate, wondering if Chick could be some help with police procedure, modes of detection, and so on.

He gave me a sideways look and after a while said, ‘I worked on the Glenkittrie case. Ever hear of that?’

‘No.’

‘Famous in its day,’ he said, draining the dregs of the whisky.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Some other time,’ he said and peered into the empty bottle as if he was trying to conjure up more whisky.

There was a familiar look to the street we were parked in but it took me a few sleepy seconds before I registered that we were in Windsor Place, parked right outside the McCue house.

The McCues were en fête – from where I was sitting I could see into the brightly lit living-room. I could just make out the faint vibrating thum-thum of rock music. Several people who looked as if they had last danced around the time of the Suez crisis were capering to the music – but in a constrained way, shuffling their feet and occasionally doing something daring with their elbows. Grant Watson was one of them, turning pink with exertion as he pushed his limbs around out of time to the music. I decided I would be in more jeopardy inside the McCue house than I had been in the hands (or whatever) of a rampant dragon.

The party looked dire, although I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a good party. Perhaps there is a perfect form of merriment somewhere but what its constituents are I do not know and cannot imagine.

A different tableau-vivant could be observed in the adjacent window, which looked into the dining-room. I could see Professor Cousins daintily sipping sherry while talking to Martha Sewell, who was wearing sober black. In the background I could just make out Dr Dick having a furious fight with Maggie Mackenzie.

‘Why are we here?’ I asked Chick.

He shrugged. ‘Who knows.’

‘No, I mean, why are we here?’

‘Why not?’ How annoying Chick was. How strangely Bobbish. When I informed him that I was supposed to be at the McCue party he tried to shoo me out of the car and into the house (to see if anything fishy was occurring, naturally). I steadfastly refused, even though I could see that there was much material for narrative there – the drunken faux pas, the misaligned relationships, the forbidden sex, even plot advancement – but none of that was enough to tempt me inside.

A woman appeared at the dining-room window, a glass of red wine in her hand. She gazed into the street, an abstracted expression on her face. For a moment I couldn’t place her because she was so out of context and then I suddenly recognized her – it was the Hillman Imp woman, the woman we had been watching in Fife.

‘It’s the Hillman Imp woman,’ I hissed at Chick and he said, ‘I know,’ from behind his Evening Telegraph.

‘What’s she doing here?’ I said to him. ‘I don’t understand.’

I watched her move away from the window. The next moment she reappeared in the neighbouring room and walked up to Watson Grant. He paused in his inept dancing and lurched drunkenly towards her, pulled her into his arms and started kissing her neck – an unattractive activity that she endured with rather a long-suffering expression on her face.

‘So she is having an affair,’ I said, ‘there’s your proof. She’s having an affair with Grant Watson. You should photograph them or something.’

‘Nah,’ Chick said, dragging hard on an Embassy, ‘that’s his wife.’