I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. Suddenly (and quite illogically as far as I could see), I felt my spirits lift. I was aware of the strange feeling I’d experienced at the standing stones in Balniddrie – a kind of bubbling in the blood and an aerating of the brain – as if I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed, perhaps the meaning of life itself and – but no, it was not to be, for at that moment a dark shadow fell across the world.

The icy interstellar winds whipped rubbish along the footpath and caused a great tsunami to travel up the Tay, overwhelming the road bridge and sweeping the rail bridge away. Volcanic ash rose into the air and encircled the earth, choking out all the air and blotting out all the light. The terrible figure that was the cause of this stood before me. Dressed in widow’s weeds like an unravelling shroud, this daughter of Nemesis was gnashing her teeth and wringing her hands and rending the air with lamentation and woe. Black smoke rose from the top of her head and her aura was composed of nothing but scum and scoria. Yes, it was Terri.

She was waving a black ostrich-feather fan in an agitated manner and wearing long black gloves and jet earrings as befits a woman in mourning, for she had discovered the fate of her beloved – encountering the Sewells in the street, in the company of a docile Hank/Buddy trotting along on a lead, and had engaged in a vigorous wrestling match with Jay’s six-foot-two inches of jogger’s flesh from which he was lucky to emerge the winner and only did so because Martha threw her dignity to the winds and started brawling and scrapping like a streetfighter.

‘I’ve lost him,’ Terri said forlornly, sinking onto the bench and lighting a cigarette. ‘So now we have to get him back,’ she added, glaring at Fife in the distance.

‘Kidnap Hank, you mean? It didn’t work with the goat, did it?’ I reminded her.

‘All the more reason to make it work with the dog, then.’ Terri threw the stub of her cigarette away and stood up. ‘So – do you know how to break into a house?’

‘No,’ I said wearily, ‘but I bet I know someone who does.’ We had walked all the way up Roseangle before Terri wrinkled her nose as if smelling something bad and said, ‘Where did that baby come from?’

On the very top floor we found one of Chick’s Premier Investigations cards stuck on a door with a piece of chewing-gum. The door was locked and the glass in the door covered by a blind made of waxy blackout material. Terri hammered on the door and after a considerable interval Chick, looking even more seedy, if that was possible, opened it cautiously.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.

He seemed to be in the middle of manoeuvring an old filing-cabinet across the frayed linoleum of the floor, panting with the effort, droplets of sweat exuding from his balding head. He looked as if he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest – pasty and damp – but that was how he looked every time I saw him.

‘What do you want anyway?’ he asked gloomily. ‘Not money, I hope, the cow’s cleaned me out. Well, don’t just stand there,’ he added, ‘give me a hand.’

The filing-cabinet turned out to be lighter than it looked because it was empty.

‘I thought I’d get a woman,’ Chick said, contemplating the filing-cabinet as if he was thinking of actually keeping a woman in it, ‘to file and type,’ he said, ‘that sort of . . . stuff.’

I thought about recommending Andrea’s typing skills to him but she’d just finished carrying Proteus up four flights of stairs and was lying on the floor, panting, with her eyes shut.

‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ Chick said to her, stepping over her prone form to reach a poke of chips in the in-tray on his battered desk. ‘I didn’t know you had a kid,’ he remarked to me, offering a cold chip to Proteus.

‘He’s not mine.’

‘You should be careful,’ Chick said. ‘Kidnapping’s a crime.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Terri said, ‘it’s funny you should mention that.’

‘No, I told you,’ Terri said impatiently. ‘I heard them say they were going to Edinburgh. And they were leaving the dog.’

Inside Birnham, we entered each room cautiously, speaking in the hushed whispers of church-goers (or burglars).

‘This feels so . . . illegal,’ Andrea said.

‘That’s because it fucking is,’ Chick said, ‘and if I go down for stealing a dog that doesn’t even run for money, someone’s going to pay, I tell you.’ This last remark seemed to be addressed to me but I ignored him.

‘His bark’s worse than his bite,’ I reassured Andrea, who was regarding Chick with horror, never having been exposed to him before. Terri was sniffing the room for musk and spoor of dog. ‘He’s definitely here,’ she said with the conviction of a medium.

I had never been in such a clean house, it was like being in a showhouse or the home of a robot. All the décor was in muted shades of magnolia and there wasn’t a single thing out of place, not a cup unwashed or a cushion unplumped. We tiptoed around the place like cat-burglars – or, to be more accurate – dog-burglars.

In the bedroom the Sewells’ night clothes were lying neatly on the end of the bed, maroon pyjamas for him, a lacy honeymoon-type garment for her. I placed Proteus on the eiderdown – a thick quilted-satin affair that was asking to be reclined on, and I couldn’t overcome an irresistible urge to lie down on it next to where Proteus was drowsily sucking his thumb. I would undoubtedly have fallen asleep if Hank/Buddy hadn’t suddenly bounded out from nowhere in a paroxysm of barking and bared teeth, like a hound from hell.

Chick and Proteus both started screaming while Andrea tried to faint, but Terri dropped to her knees and held her arms open like a beseeching martyr so that I was convinced she was going to be torn to pieces; but luckily at that moment Hank/Buddy recognized her and fell into her arms. (A girl in love is a frightening sight.)

‘Ah, true love,’ Chick said sarcastically. ‘Right, mission accomplished, can we go?’ he said, hustling everyone out onto the landing, just in time for us to hear the most unwelcome sound imaginable – the noise of the key turning in the lock downstairs.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Chick said expressively.

‘Maybe it’s burglars,’ Andrea whispered. I didn’t bother pointing out the odds against two sets of burglars breaking into a house at the same time and instead, trying to stay in the shadows, I peered tentatively over the banister rail into the stairwell below, where Martha and Jay were depositing piles of Jenners’ carrier bags on the terrazzo and looking around for the sight of their dog running to greet them. Which he was unable to do because Terri had him pinned to the ground with her entire body.

‘Where’s Mummy’s little pooch?’ Martha cried and Jay shouted, ‘Buddy boy, where are you, boy?’ to no avail as Terri had wrapped her hands round Mummy’s little pooch’s muzzle so that the only bit of his anatomy able to greet his owners was a mute tail. Jay suddenly bounded up the stairs – too quickly for any of us to react – and stopped in surprise when he reached the top stair and saw the little party waiting to greet him. He frowned, trying to make sense of it.

‘Aren’t you all Martha’s students?’ he puzzled. ‘Is this some kind of college prank?’ He caught sight of Chick – clearly not a prankster of any kind – and looked alarmed. At that moment Hank/Buddy escaped Terri’s stranglehold and leapt towards Jay Sewell to greet him. Terri leapt as well, in an attempt to hang onto the dog, resulting in both dog and girl lunging into Jay at the same time. Which is exactly how accidents happen.

I suppose the laws of physics could explain what occurred next – pivots and fulcrums, et cetera; the way that there was more of Jay’s body above the banister than below it; the ratio of the Hank/Buddy/Terri combination to the singular Jay Sewell – but however you explain it, the effect was that Jay went cartwheeling over the banister rail and plummeted down into the stairwell – so quickly that not even a single cry escaped his lips. We all stared at each other in dumb amazement, all except for Proteus in my arms, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.

I rushed to look over the banister. Jay was spreadeagled on the floor below, blood pooling around his head and freckling the terrazzo. His eyes were open, giving him an air of, if anything, surprise.

‘Dead as a doorknob,’ Chick muttered to himself.

‘I think that’s as dead as a doornail,’ Andrea murmured, gazing at the blood-glazed tiles. In the profound silence that had befallen us – broken only by a faithful whine on the part of Hank/Buddy – I could hear Martha in the kitchen chatting blithely on about cashmere sweaters and the ‘cultural oasis’ that was Edinburgh. Any second now she was going to come out into the hall and discover her previously healthy husband as deceased (which is a longer form of dead) as an item of door furniture.

‘If you’re ever going to succeed at magic,’ I whispered to Andrea, ‘then now would be a good time to begin.’

Proteus woke up with a start and began to cry, breaking the trance that we’d been plunged into. I rifled desperately through my pockets for his dummy but all I could find was a torn piece of paper, the stray page of The Expanding Prism of J in which J plunges over the banisters and dies.

A sudden horrendous scream rent the suburban air, indicating that Martha had discovered her spouse’s unexpected demise.

‘Give me your lighter,’ I whispered urgently to Chick. He raised an eyebrow at me as if this was no time to take up smoking (although if not now, then when?) and passed me his lighter – a lurid affair displaying a naked female on its casing. I grabbed it off him and set the flame to the piece of paper in my hand. (Well, it was worth a try.) The Expanding Prism of J flared up with a malevolent hiss in a greeny-blue flame – perhaps cyan, who knows? – and turned into a thin charcoal skin that floated up and hovered over the stairwell before disintegrating into a little shower of carbonized fragments like black snow.

‘Fucking hell,’ Chick said, looking down at the hall, ‘where’s he gone?’ For there was indeed no sign of a blood-boltered Jay, no screaming Martha, no sign of life or death. It was as if we had suffered a mass hallucination.

‘This is so freaky,’ Andrea said quietly.

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here now,’ Chick said, a sentiment we all agreed with heartily, and we ran out of the house and piled into the car anyhow so that for a brief and surreal moment Hank/Buddy was sitting behind the Cortina’s steering-wheel. Chick and the dog finally sorted themselves out and as we pulled away from Birnham with Chick in the driver’s seat we saw the Sewells’ car rounding the corner and drawing to a halt outside their home. I was glad to see that Jay was not only driving the car but was also in possession of a fully intact skull. Martha caught sight of us and her features contorted in a little grimace of recognition. She didn’t espy Terri or her erstwhile dog, as they were lying on the floor of the car.

‘So he was dead,’ Andrea puzzled, ‘and now he’s . . . not dead?’

‘Apparently,’ I said.

‘We’re outlaws now,’ Terri said dreamily; ‘we have to go where desperadoes go.’

‘Where’s that?’ Chick asked. ‘Glasgow?’ and Terri said, ‘No, but it rhymes with that.’

‘Where?’ I said. ‘Aleppo? Cairo? Truro? Fargo? Oporto? Quito? Jericho? Soho? Puerto Rico? Kyoto? Chicago? Bilbao? Rio de Janeiro? Io? El Dorado? Kelso?’

‘Who would have thought,’ Andrea said wearily, ‘that so many places rhymed with Glasgow?’

‘There’s more if you’re interested.’

‘Where’s Io?’ Chick asked.

‘She’s going to that party tonight,’ Andrea said, ‘the one in Broughty Ferry.’

‘Why didn’t you say that before?’

‘I didn’t know whose baby it was,’ she said huffily; ‘they all look alike to me.’

Bob was excitedly explaining to Robin what had happened in the concluding part of Dr Who’s latest adventure, The Curse of Peladon, which he had just viewed. ‘And then this evil alien ambassador, who’s just a brain on wheels basically –’

‘Where do you suppose Shug is?’ Andrea said, interrupting this sophisticated critique and speaking to Bob as if he was a slightly retarded chimpanzee.

‘Dunno,’ Bob said.

‘Did he say anything to you?’ Andrea persisted, ‘about me, for instance?’

‘He said . . .’ Bob closed his eyes.

‘He’s thinking,’ I explained to Andrea.

‘He said – “Don’t forget to bring the Thai sticks.”’

Andrea sniffed the air and set off, following her moonstruck nose. Bob followed her, leaving me with Robin in the kitchen of the house which was dimly illuminated by one yellow lightbulb. A trail of people were coming and going, all in a desultory state of drug overload – the doctors and dentists of tomorrow presumably. On offer was the usual student party fare – a couple of large pan loaves and a block of red Scottish Cheddar, cheap wine and a metal keg of gassy lager squatting in the walk-in pantry, the floor of which was swilling with spilt drink. The bottles of wine on the table were almost all empty by now, although a milk crate of Balniddrian elderflower champagne remained untouched.

Robin poured the remains of a massive bottle of Hirondelle into a couple of plastic cups and gave one to me. Miranda, the dopey goat executioner, wandered into the kitchen, an almost visible aura of torpor about her, and started knocking back Tiger’s Milk from the bottle. She caught sight of Robin and gave him a lethargic ‘Hi.’ I don’t think she recognized me. Was she a fit person for me to hand Proteus on to, I wondered. Hardly. I asked her if she’d seen Kara and she made a vague gesture towards the door before slumping onto a chair and apparently passing out.

I pushed my way out of the kitchen, past a crush of people in a hallway and up a staircase, Robin trailing on my heels. We came upon what appeared to be a small ballroom – a space that was like a cross between a railway station and a bordello. There was a fireplace at either end of the room in that red-and-white marble that looks like uncooked beef and huge mirrors fixed to the wall, set in ornate ormolu frames. A massive milk-glass chandelier shaped like a palm-tree hung from the middle of the ceiling and smaller versions sprouted from the walls. I could almost imagine myself being waltzed off by a dashing cavalry officer, my mousseline de soie skirts swirling, a dance card dangling from my wrist.

‘Really?’ Robin said, apparently quite aroused by this vision. Something rather slimy, like a snail’s silver trail, had dribbled down his beard.

‘No, not really.’

Sadly the chandelier was unlit and the only light was provided by candles from Balniddrie, which were dotted perilously around the room, just waiting to be knocked over and catch on the drooping tattered curtains.

There was no furniture apart from two incongruous chaises-longues, covered in a red velvet that had frayed to almost nothing, and on which people were slumped like wet sandbags. Around the edges of the floor, where there must have once been elegant little gold chairs for the fairer sex to rest on, there were now heaps of old, stained mattresses. On one of these, on the far side of the room, I spotted Bob already wired up to a hookah.

The ballroom was still fulfilling its original function, to some degree anyway, as someone had set up a primitive disco with red, green and blue flashing lights and the occasional unnerving strobe. Quite a few people were dancing, if it can be called that. Andrea, still Shug-less, was one of them. Andrea had refined her rather abstract terpsichoreal style at the Isle of Wight Festival so that she now danced like a four-legged octopus in extreme pain.

To my surprise a few of the supposedly more voguish members of staff were present, although that adjective hardly applied to Dr Dick, loitering palely in a corner of the room and deep in conversation with his arch adversary, Archie. I think Dr Dick might have been drunk but Dr Dick drunk and Dr Dick sober was pretty much the same thing.

Andrea danced up to us and Robin said to her, ‘Do you want to dance?’ more in fear than hope, but I said, ‘No, she doesn’t,’ and thrust Proteus into her arms. ‘Just while I try and find Kara,’ I said, when she tried to run away. Before I could say anything else to her she was swallowed up by a mob of people and disappeared.

Robin was now dancing to ‘Spirit In The Sky’ with his eyes closed and moving like a Woodentop, jerky uncoordinated movements that at first made me think he was having a fit. The music changed to ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and Robin opened his eyes and grabbed me and pulled me to his thin bird breast. His granddad T-shirt smelt of cheap joss sticks and sweat.

I was beginning to feel nauseous and oddly disassociated. I wondered if I’d accidentally eaten brownies again without noticing. There was a buzzing in my ears that I couldn’t shake out and I almost welcomed the support of Robin’s body. He started trying to kiss me but his general ineptitude, coupled with beard and droopy moustache, proved something of a hindrance, thank goodness. My head was beginning to feel very strange, as if my brain had been replaced with a skullful of wheat grains. If I tilted my head to one side all the grains of wheat seemed to roll in that direction.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot recently,’ Robin said softly, so close to my ear that I could feel how damp his lips were, ‘about Life Sentence. About the dynamic interplay between character and theme in the play. You see, Kenny’s the eternal outsider—’

‘I thought that was Rick.’ Oh no, I mustn’t enter into this conversation. ‘I’ve got to find Kara,’ I mumbled.

Robin started fumbling with my clothes. I was wearing so many that it would have taken him hours to get down to skin. I appealed to the estate agent’s son in him. ‘I think I need another drink, Robin.’

‘Right, I’ll get you one,’ he said, setting off eagerly across a dance floor that was now strewn with discarded plastic cups and the dog-ends of cigarettes and joints. The room was pitching and bucking like an ocean-going liner in distress and a strange centrifugal force affecting my body made sitting down a sudden imperative and I subsided quietly onto the spare corner of a filthy-looking mattress.

The rest of the mattress, I suddenly realized, was occupied by Roger Lake, locked on like a lamprey to a first-year girl less than half his age. I would have asked him how his wife and his mistress were but I couldn’t really speak; my tongue had grown too big for my mouth and the centrifugal force was trying to drag me down a black hole. My head had the gravity of a small planet. My mouth felt dry and clinkerish and I reached for an opened can of Export on the floor and swallowed a great draught of it before gagging it all out again, along with its flotsam of ash and butts. Someone loomed in front of me and asked me if I was all right. It was Heather, wriggling unrhythmically to ‘Go Ask Alice’, her nipples jumping in my face. Her voice boomed and ebbed in a distorted way as if we were underwater. Eventually she got fed up with getting no response from me and started talking to Roger in a familiar way which confirmed that they had previously shared more than an interest in Marxian economic theory or a copy of Cairncross.

I decided to try and make it across the floor to Bob, although it was unlikely that he would be able to do anything to make me feel better. I had once fainted in the Ladywell Bar in Bob’s company and, at a loss as to what to do, he had simply lain down on the floor next to me. An action which resulted in our both being thrown out. I could see him, without the hookah now but with the Finnegans Wake girl, who looked to be sprawled across his lap in uncharacteristic hedonistic abandon.

I stood up and the room immediately broke up into thousands of little dots, as if I’d suddenly stepped inside a pointillist painting. I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn I saw the elusive shape of the yellow dog on the far side of the room. I wondered if it was an hallucination or a mirage? And was the yellow dog now my quest since Terri had gone to hide in a place rhyming with Glasgow? Perhaps, Lassie-like, it was trying to show me the way to Kara.

I struggled heroically across the wasteland of the ballroom floor, occupied now by a frenzy of people dancing to Santana, only to find when I arrived on the other side that there was no sign of Bob anywhere, or of the yellow dog. It was very hot and airless by now and a herd of people milled around aimlessly, amplified and distorted by the candlelit mirrors and my dappled vision. My blood pressure was low and falling and there was a blackness closing in around me and I knew I had to get out of that room or I was going to pass out, and the last thing I wanted was attention from any of the drug-fuelled medical students in Forres.

I finally managed to fight my way out of the room, passing Davina on the way –

I tried a door at the far end of the billiards room and found it opened into a small room that was entirely dark, save for the light coming from a television set that was showing Dad’s Army. In the doorway I bumped into Shug, who said, ‘Out on the ran-dan, eh, hen?’ and put his arms around me. He was very drunk and said, ‘So how about it – you and me?’ and I had to push him away and remind him that he was ‘Bob’s pal’ and therefore couldn’t shag me. Where was Bob? Shug shrugged (as he had to do sooner or later). ‘Dunno.’

‘You got him back OK, then?’ I said, looking at Proteus’s peaceful sleeping face.

‘Are you all right?’ she said to me. ‘You look a bit pale.’

‘I feel a bit pale.’

Kara reached out and grabbed my wrist and took my pulse in a professional sort of way. ‘I’ve got a St Andrew’s Ambulance Brigade certificate,’ she said, but then she let go of my wrist and said indifferently, ‘You’re dead.’

‘Do you want to stay here and babysit for us?’ Jill asked. Dead Babysitter, now that would be a good title for something. I made a vague mental note to tell Robin.

‘Do you mind?’ a disembodied voice said. ‘This is a serious massage class.’

I hurried away; nothing would have induced me to stay. I went, instead, into the bathroom, a place of glacial chilliness boasting all its original fittings – complicated brass pipework and florid tiles that would have looked more at home in the Speedwell Bar. An ancient bath, like an ornate catafalque, stood in the centre of the room, its enamel pitted and chipped. Empty of water, it was tenanted by a fully dressed boy wearing a top hat. On the edge of the bath was perched another, very thin, boy in a Black Watch dress jacket. He was clutching a copy of Sgt. Pepper and explaining to the boy in the bath how depressed he felt in a conversation that seemed to have been scripted by Robin: ‘Like really down. I mean what’s the point of it all?’

The boy in the bath nodded sympathetically. ‘I know – the meaning of Liff and everything.’

A girl on her knees, as if in prayer in front of the filthy toilet, was moaning quietly. It was the first-year student I had lately seen in Roger Lake’s arms. She lay down on the floor, her forehead pressed against the cold stained tiles. I put her in the recovery position (maybe this was all I was good for in the world) and told the Sgt. Pepper boy to keep an eye on her, but I doubted that he would.

‘I really don’t feel well, Kevin. I think I need a doctor.’

‘In Edrakonia,’ he said, ‘the physicians are also alchemists, transmuting base metal into gold and so on. Of course since the Murk fell all kinds of strange diseases have arisen, the fading disease, for example.’

‘The fading disease?’

‘Self-explanatory.’

Maybe that was what happened to The Boy With No Name. Maybe that was what was happening to me. I was relieved when Gilbert joined us, remarkably fresh for one who was unconscious so recently.

‘Good party, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully.

‘Or the falling disease,’ Kevin continued relentlessly.

‘Have you seen a yellow dog?’ I asked Gilbert, ignoring Kevin.

‘A yellow dog?’ Gilbert repeated. ‘I didn’t know you got yellow dogs. No, sorry.’

I pushed my way outside. A bonfire had been built out on the back lawn and was now blazing fiercely. The air was ringing with frost, sparks rose like tiny barbs of light into the night sky, a sky that was swimming with stars. Some people were dragging old furniture out of the house to keep the conflagration going. I saw one of the ballroom curtains go up in a roar of dust and flame. Other people were dancing round the bonfire like members of a lunatic coven. Andrea was one of them. She spotted me and danced over.

‘It’s like a planetarium,’ a stargazing Andrea said, looking at the heavens in open-mouthed awe, ‘a kind of . . . open-air planetarium.’ I told her Shug was upstairs and she danced off eagerly. I felt suddenly cold and sick. I looked around for Kevin or Gilbert but couldn’t see them any more. A threatening figure suddenly appeared in front of me. It was a nightmarish Archie, dressed in a daring pair of youthful flares that were an uncomfortable size too small for him.

‘You,’ he said, obviously very drunk.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘me.’

‘Have you seen Dickhead?’ Archie asked, casting his eyes vaguely around the garden. (I was glad Professor Cousins wasn’t there to witness this.)

‘Who?’

‘Dr Dick,’ Archie said irritably, ‘he’s—’ but just then a tremendous explosion drowned out whatever it was he’d been going to say.

‘The protesters are using elderflower champagne? How does that work?’ Archie puzzled to me but I didn’t hang about to explain. I felt claustrophobic, even though I was in the open air, and started trying to find a way out of the garden that didn’t involve going back through the house. I could feel myself falling. Fading and falling – and then a pair of arms encircled my waist from behind and held me up. In my fevered brain I thought I smelt Ferdinand’s masculine scent. ‘Time to get you to bed, young lady,’ a familiar voice said.

‘Ferdinand,’ I murmured and rested my head gratefully on his shoulder before finally fading right away.

I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at him in horror. His eyes opened slowly and I was able to observe his brain catching up with them.

‘Effie,’ he said, yawning and fondling the pale stalk of his penis in a boyish, asexual way. Had we been having an extra-curricular tutorial of some kind? And would it result in better marks for me? Or worse?

‘What have we been doing exactly, Dr Dick?’ I asked tentatively.

He groped on the bedside table for his little spectacles and put them on and said, ‘I think we’re on first-name terms now, don’t you? Call me Richard, why don’t you?’

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that worse things could happen to me but just then I really couldn’t think of any.

A wretched cold fog was coming in from the sea and crawling over the city. The melancholy sound of the foghorn boomed at regular intervals and set up a strange melancholic echo in my bones.

‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I really have to go, I have to hand in an essay.’

But first I had to see Bob. Because the last time I caught sight of him was in the massage room in Forres in the oily hands of the Finnegans Wake girl and I wondered if he could give me an adequate explanation of his behaviour. I doubted it somehow. Was he going to leave me before I could leave him?

There was something melancholic about an empty dressing-room, Madame Astarti thought, even threatening in a funny way. It reminded her of Stage Fright or clowns. Madame Astarti had always found clowns frightening. They were so . . . unfunny.

There was no sign of a packet of cigarettes anywhere, but there were clothes hanging on a rail and a coat on a hanger on the back of a door and Madame Astarti went through the pockets of all of them, gingerly, because you never knew what you would find in a strange pocket, but she found nothing. She tried the cupboard. The door handle was stiff and she had to pull hard on it. She nearly fell over backwards when it suddenly responded—