SLOW DOWN

The driver of a red Peugeot, who’d just been about to pull out and overtake, caught sight of the board, frowned briefly, and checked his mirror again. The gap in the traffic he’d intended to pull out into had closed up. He clicked his tongue and braked slightly.

The cowled man watched until the red Peugeot was out of sight, then shouldered his board and walked back to the foot of his folding stairs. The dog wagged its tail hopefully, but the man shook his head and climbed the steps. The door closed behind him, and vanished.

Because everything takes time, even Time itself, there was a pause before nothing happened.’

‘This way,’ the manager whispered nervously. ‘Mind your head.’

Because she was only five feet tall, she didn’t bother to duck. Low ceilings and doorways were one of the few hazards of life that happened to other people and not to her. ‘Could we get on, please?’ she said, loudly and briskly. ‘I’m due in Fenchurch Street at eleven.’

The manager didn’t reply, but the back of his neck stiffened. Oh dear, she thought, the public. Still; it was possible that this was his first time, and one had to make allowances. The public had some very funny ideas about this sort of thing. They thought that if you crept along with your shoulders hunched and spoke in whispers, you’d be safe. Probably just as well. If the silly man had any idea of the danger he was in, he’d be halfway to Luton by now, and accelerating.

To put him at his ease, she decided to ask questions. She didn’t actually need the data, but the public liked to get involved. Up to a point.

‘How long’s it been here, did you say?’

‘At least—’ The manager stopped, straightened his neck and dropped the whisper. ‘At least two days,’ he said, ‘possibly longer, we can’t be sure. We don’t come down here very often, after all. I mean, we’ve got all that expensive CCTV stuff, there shouldn’t be any need. But—’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I expect it was the temperature that gave it away.’

‘Humidity level, actually,’ the manager replied. ‘We have to be very careful about damp, you see, so we monitor the humidity.’ He frowned. ‘What I don’t understand is, if the damp meter registers that it’s there, why didn’t it show up on the CCTV?’

‘It’s technical,’ she said, taking a little grey box from her briefcase and looking at it. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘this is as far as you go. I’ll take it from here.’

He turned to look at her, and his face was pale grey. ‘Are you sure?’ She knew better than to be offended. She was twenty-eight years old, five feet nothing and slightly built. It was understandable. ‘Quite sure,’ she said, without snapping. ‘There shouldn’t be any bother, but if you could please keep your staff out of the lower ground floor until I give you the all-clear—’

The manager was frowning. ‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘when we used to use JWW, the chap they sent was - well, taller, and …’

She smiled at him. She had a nice smile, under different circumstances. ‘Let me see,’ she said. ‘That would probably have been Ricky Wurmtoter - six foot seven-ish, broad shoulders, lots of blonde hair, bit of an accent?’

‘That sounds like him, yes.’

She nodded. Normally she wouldn’t get heavy with a client, but it was turning into a long day, her shoes were rubbing her heels and she very much wanted to go to the lavatory. ‘Ricky and I trained together,’ she said. ‘He came second in our year, actually. He’s dead now,’ she added. ‘I’m not.’

The manager looked at her. ‘Oh.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, as reassuringly as she could be bothered to be. ‘If you just go back to the lift and wait for me there, I’ll be back as soon as I’ve finished. Shouldn’t take long. If you hear a bang and a loud thump, that’s perfectly normal.’

‘All right.’ He turned, walked away for a few steps, paused and looked back at her. ‘So if Mr Whatsisname came second in your year, who—?’

‘Me.’

‘Ah. Fine.’ Pause. ‘Sorry.’

She waited until his footsteps had faded, then forced herself to relax. Piece of cake, she told herself. Just another day at the office. She shifted the briefcase into her left hand and carried on up the corridor.

Usually she was able to feed off the chauvinism and the patronising comments. A little tiny bit of anger helped, if used properly. This time, though, instead of fuelling her resolve, the manager’s obvious doubts lay heavy on her stomach, like a hot dog with onions at lunchtime. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because he’d dragged Ricky Wurmtoter into it, and she’d always loathed Ricky. Maybe. It was, of course, perfectly true that she’d beaten Ricky in their finals by a clear six marks. But in accountancy, not in this.

The smell. Oh God, the smell.

With a tremendous effort, she put it out of her mind. They smell: so what? Big deal. The smell never killed anyone. It was probably the only harmless thing about them.

Even so.

She knelt down, laid her briefcase on the tiled floor and flipped open the catches. There was a theory (Ellison and Macziewicz in New Thaumaturgical Quarterly, June 1997) that they generated the smell deliberately, to confuse predators and disrupt their concentration. The article she’d read made out a pretty convincing case, but she didn’t believe it. She reckoned they smelled bad because they ate a high-fat, low-fibre diet and had no concept of hygiene. To a certain extent, her views had been shaped by her first encounter with one of the loathsome things, in the vaults of the First Mercantile Bank of Cleveland, Ohio. It stood to reason, after all. Any creature who ate Americans was bound, sooner or later, to suffer from chronic flatulence.

She’d originally intended to use the sixteen-millimetre, but a glance at the white encrustations on the tunnel walls and the evidence of her nose made her change her mind and go for the eighteen-millimetre instead. This wasn’t a cub or a pricket; it was a big old bull. She stuck the needle into the bottle of SlayMore, drew the plunger back smoothly, and pressed the base until a single amber drop dribbled from the needle’s point. Then she laid the syringe carefully down beside her, unwrapped the pound of fresh raw liver she’d bought on the way over, and injected the SlayMore into it.

Piece of cake, she told herself nervously.

She left her briefcase leaning against the wall and advanced slowly and cautiously down the tunnel. The smell was getting stronger - it was like breathing poison custard - and under her feet the tiled floor quivered slightly. That was, of course, how you knew you were coming into olfactory range; the point at which you could feel the beating of its trip-hammer heart through the soles of your shoes.

The vibrations underfoot were starting to give her a headache; not to mention the effect on her unfortunate bladder. Never have a second cup of coffee before going out on a job. She scowled into the grey shadows; this was far enough, her instincts told her. It’ll be able to smell the raw meat from here, and then it’s just a matter of time. She laid the liver down on the floor, turned and walked back the way she’d just come. Vital, needless to say, not to run at this point. Their huge brains were hardwired to detect the sound of running feet, and once they’d registered it they had no choice but to pursue, the same way a cat can’t help batting at a trailing bit of string.

Back to where she’d left the briefcase. She opened it, took out a two-inch-thick wad of typescript, settled herself down with her back to the wall and began to read.

Ten minutes later, she heard the first groan.

She didn’t look up from her paperwork, but she allowed her top lip to twitch into a trace of a smile. From first groan to stone-cold dead was always, invariably, fourteen minutes. You could set your watch by it. You could regulate atomic clocks by it. Whatever the hell the SlayMore people put in the stuff, it was totally reliable. She folded a page over and carried on reading.

(Totally reliable is, of course, just an upbeat way of saying that it hadn’t failed yet; or at least, nobody had lived to notify the manufacturers of an authenticated case of failure. It’s hard to complain when you’re a pile of fine white ash on the floor of a bank vault and in no position to draw comfort from the fact that the warranty you never lived to claim under in no way affects your statutory rights.)

Second groan. As the roof of the tunnel shook and flakes of dust and mortar drifted down and settled on the page in front of her, she looked at her watch. Bang on time - good old SlayMore. Without realising she was doing it, she began to count under her breath. She also read the same paragraph five times, without taking in a single word.

It was perfectly natural to be a bit apprehensive at this point, she told herself. After all, she was no more than a hundred yards away from a fully grown bull dragon currently dying of acute indigestion. Everybody in the trade knew that once you’d heard the first groan you were safe. The stuff was doing its job, eating its way through the dragon’s intestines; the last thing on the wretched creature’s mind at this point would be springing to its feet, spreading its wings and going out looking for a fight. That was what made dragon-slaying such a doddle, though naturally you never let the client know that. The client, if he thought about it at all, pictured you hacking away at the monster with a bloody great big sword, dodging plumes of blue fire and elephant-tusk-sized teeth. Mental images like that helped reconcile him to the awesome magnitude of the bill. To the client, dragon-slaying was heroism. To the trade, it was just pest control, and the difference between dragons, rats and silverfish was merely a question of scale.

No pun intended.

The third groan was a blast of burning hot air that ruffled her papers and left her face and hands feeling scorched and raw. Exactly on time: six minutes to go. She unwrapped a peppermint and ate it.

The document she was reading was nothing special; still more DEFRA guidelines on the eco-friendly disposal of triffid waste, to comply with the latest EU directive; no more than five thousand kilos to be incinerated per hectare, separate disposal of the stings and venom sacs at designated triffid-elimination depots sited at least five kilometres from the nearest inland waterway, a list of chemical reagents authorised for residue neutralisation … She clicked her tongue and sighed. Whoever drew up this garbage lived in a world of their own. Everybody knew that in the real world, you got a JCB and dug a very deep pit and that was that. According to the old-timers, you could grow the most humongous runner beans on the site of a triffid dump; not being a gardener herself, she was prepared to take their word for it.

Five minutes. Ho hum.

If the bards of old had told the truth about dragon-slaying that the worst part of it’s the hanging about waiting in draughty tunnels - there’d be a great deal less epic poetry and, quite probably, a lot more dragons. Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth; it wasn’t just hanging about waiting, it was hanging about waiting while being in mortal peril (because one day a subspecies of dragons on whom even SlayMore has no effect will evolve, at which point expect to see financial meltdown on the currency exchanges and gold going through the roof). That kind of boredom, as any soldier will tell you, is every bit as mind-numbing as, say, accountancy, but with the added mental toothache of cold, bowel-loosening terror lurking a millimetre or so under the surface of the subconscious. There was also the nagging thought that, a hundred yards down the tunnel, a magnificent and highly intelligent animal was dying an extremely painful and protracted death. That was one aspect of the job she tried very hard not to think about; which was a bit like the old gag about not thinking of an elephant.

She knew, of course, that Western capitalism simply couldn’t function unless dragons were strictly controlled. Their instinct was to seek out large accumulations of wealth and sit on them, carbonising anybody who came within nose-shot; which was why the firm she worked for had such an impressive client portfolio in the banking and art-gallery sector. Even so. There was still a small, idealistic, whale-saving corner of her mind where she couldn’t help thinking there had to be a better way. Dragon safari parks, maybe, or really long-term designated deposit accounts. But the closest anybody had ever come to making a go of it was the US military’s secret trials at Fort Knox; and it had taken the legendary Kurt Lundqvist and two thousand gallons of SlayMore TripleX-Xtra to sort that one out. No: it was really quite simple, when you looked at it sensibly. Harsh commercial realities. Them or us.

Time. She got up, knocking over her briefcase in doing so. The lid burst open and a load of stuff spilled out of it onto the floor. She sighed and patiently shovelled it all back in, then tried to close the lid. Needless to say, it wouldn’t shut. She shuffled the contents around a bit, took out a tube of manticore-rated tranquillisers and stowed it away in her pocket, and tried again. Success.

From her other pocket she took out a small black box, like an old-fashioned photographer’s light meter. She turned a dial at the side and watched the needles on the three dials. When a dragon dies, the temperature drops, humidity levels rocket and the ambient Mortensen quotient falls back to a constant 6.339. It was all over bar the dentistry.

Even so.

Other practitioners - taller, more powerfully built members of the profession: men - liked to draw a sword at this point, or at the very least lock and load a fifty-calibre Barrett sniper rifle or a rocket launcher. She knew better than that. If the bloody thing was still alive, no amount of hardware would save her. There’d be a blinding white light, and the last thing she’d hear would be the hiss of her bodily fluids boiling inside her and a soft, reptilian snigger. But the meter said that the dragon was dead, and if there was one thing you could rely on in this business it was a Kawaguchiya XP770 E-Z-Scan. Gripping the briefcase tightly in her left hand, she started to walk up the tunnel.

According to the company’s literature, the vaults of the City branch of the National Lombard Bank are the biggest in Europe. They’re proud of the fact, the implication being that NatLom have got more money than anybody else, and so need somewhere big to keep it all. She was used to all that sort of thing, of course, having seen and de-infested them all in her time, but nevertheless, the sheer scale of what she saw as she walked through the melted ruin of the massive steel door made her catch her breath. You could have built a cathedral in there, or a railway terminal. The roof was disturbingly high, its proportions emphasised by the shiny white tiles and brushed-steel fittings— what was left of them. The dragon had been busy, ripping out what it couldn’t be bothered to melt. Dragons like space, and an absence of clutter behind which their enemies can hide.

She felt something soft under her feet; but she paid it no attention. She was looking at the dragon.

It was, quite unmistakably, dead. In its last throes it had twisted itself up like the rubber band on a balsa-wood aeroplane, its head jammed tight under its left wing, its open jaws pointing at the roof, its claws frozen in the air in a last frantic scrabble. She deliberately froze her emotions and noted that it was indeed a full-grown adult male, somewhere between three and five hundred years old (after three hundred it’s hard to tell precisely without careful examination of the claws and the ring of bone at the base of the horn); in any event, it was an old example of a species that improves exponentially with age. The teeth-she counted, then did the mental arithmetic. The teeth were traditionally the dragon-slayer’s perks; except, of course, that under the terms of her contract, they belonged to the firm, not to her. Annoying, since it’d be her job to gouge the bloody things out. At twelve thousand dollars a tooth … She sighed. One of these days, the banks were going to find out how much those things were worth, and then there’d be trouble.

Green scales, she noticed. Who were they using as dragonknackers these days? Ibbotsons did a quick, efficient job but their charges were vicious. K & J Dragon Removals were quite reasonable, but they were sloppy about details such as acid leakage and blood clean-up, which annoyed the clients. (Understandable: no conscientious employer liked to see its staff dissolving from the feet up, or suddenly gifted with the ability to understand the language of birds.) The last she’d heard, Hancocks had been using Harry Fry, who was the most appalling cowboy. Zauberwerk UK were rumoured to be doing all their disposals inhouse. That made sense, given the high value of dragon-salvage. There were enough scales on this one alone to insulate a whole fleet of space shuttles.

Under her feet, something soft. Also, something that wasn’t there. She knelt down and picked up a handful of fine white ash.

The something that wasn’t there, she realised with a jolt that shook her whole body, was money. According to the bank, there should be— She took the briefing memo out of her pocket, counted the noughts and swore. And, as well as the cash, there ought to be bonds, securities, debentures, all that sort of thing. A substantial part of the wealth of the country should be down here, neatly parcelled up in bundles and sealed in wrappers. Instead, there was ash, and a great deal of empty space.

She looked at the dragon. For some reason which she couldn’t begin to imagine, the dragon had incinerated all the money, every last note of it. Which was crazy. The love of dragons for cash money was, according to all the best authorities, the fiercest, most passionate emotion in the whole world. They scooped it up, nested in it, played with it for hours like happy kittens and, as far as they were concerned, nice soft paper was even better than gold. A dragon would be as likely to eat its own young as to damage a banknote.

With the side of her foot she traced a little furrow in the ash. Unthinkable, she thought. Unless—

She walked slowly across the floor until she was standing next to the vast contorted carcass. She studied the way the ash lay scooped and heaped into dunes around it. She put her head on one side and squinted a little. A bit like a sandcastle, or rather, a ring of sand forts surrounding a citadel. Even in its last convulsive moments, as the SlayMore dissolved its guts and burnt away its heart and lungs, it had been trying to shield something with its enormous bulk.

What, though? She could tell from the lie of the ash that it had done everything it could not to roll on one particular spot, but there was nothing there; just a fine layer of ash covering the white tiles. Something: something so valuable, maybe, that as far as the dragon was concerned billions of dollars’ worth of negotiable currency was just more clutter to be got rid of, along with the shelves and the cabinets and the surveillance hardware. In which case, something truly beyond price. But there wasn’t anything there. Just ash and floor.

Not my problem, she thought; and then it occurred to her that, as soon as she gave the all-clear, the manager would come scuttling down the tunnel expecting to see all that money, and wasn’t he ever going to be disappointed. She winced. It wasn’t her fault and she’d done a thoroughly professional, efficient job, but she had a strong feeling that the client wasn’t going to be happy. Never mind, she told herself. Let’s finish up and get out of here, before the ash hits the fan.

Serpentine dentistry is a miserable affair. She got the pliers out of her briefcase, pulled on her Teflon-impregnated gloves and made a start. She had a plastic box to put the teeth in. Mercifully, they came out relatively easily, but her wrists and elbows were still painfully sore by the time she’d finished. The key thing, of course, was to make sure that you didn’t drop one…

She clipped the lid onto the box, stuffed it into her briefcase, put away the pliers, took off the gloves. Ash powdered under her heel. The next bit, she reckoned, was going to be awkward. She took her phone out of her pocket and thumbed in the number.

‘All done,’ she said.

‘Are you all right? Is it—?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the— I mean, did it do much damage?’

Deep breath. ‘You’d better see for yourself.’

‘Not the shelving,’ the manager’s voice whimpered. It was brand new last month. God only knows what the board’s going to say if we’ve got to have all new shelving.’

‘I don’t think you need worry too much about that,’ she said, and rang off.

One last look back at the dragon. It was wrong to feel sympathy for it. Anything that big and powerful that allowed itself to be killed by a squirt of chemical hidden in a gobbet of liver was a disgrace to supernature and deserved whatever it got. But all that money; she’d seen yearling dragon colts fight each other to the death over a Scottish five-pound note. Burning all that money because it wasn’t worth anything, because it was irrelevant … She squeezed her brain for an alternative explanation, but there wasn’t one. The only possible reason was that it had found something else buried in the vault; something so valuable that, in comparison, money had no meaning. Even in the last stages of a SlayMore death it had avoided a small patch of the tiled floor, so as not to damage something. But she’d looked. There was nothing there.

She was positive there was nothing. After all, she’d looked.

Clearly, not carefully enough. Dropping her briefcase, she sprinted across the floor, kicking up little spirals of ash as she ran. Scrambling over an uplifted scaly leg, she dropped to her knees and scrabbled.

It had burned all the money, just as it had trashed the fittings and smelted the built-in fixtures. Dragons were like that, obsessive-compulsive. When they went broody, everything that wasn’t treasure had to go. So if there was anything, anything at all, on that patch of desperately guarded floor, that’d be it, the something. A gemstone, perhaps - no, too bulky. All right, then, a microchip. What about the legendary ninth-generation Kawaguchiya sentient microprocessor prototype, which was believed to be locked away in a bank vault somewhere, waiting for the day when the global economy had grown enough to afford its existence? That’d be a hoard worthy of a really knowledgeable dragon. And it’d be small.

Her fingernails trailed furrows in the ash. Some things are too small to see but big enough to feel. In the distance she could hear footsteps echoing in the tunnel. The manager was coming, and she really didn’t want him to find her like this, it’d lead to all sorts of awkwardness. In despair, she made one more sweep with her left hand, and touched something.

A cardboard tube. Just like the ones you find in the middle of toilet rolls.

Oh, she thought.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. Whatever it was, supposing it even existed, it sure as hell wasn’t hers. It occurred to her that her motive been pure curiosity, because she urgently needed to know why the dragon had destroyed all that money. If she’d actually found it, this notional little thing of inestimable value, there was always the risk that she might have slipped it in her pocket without thinking, the way you do, and that would’ve been stealing.

She stood up, pocketed the toilet-roll core, brushed five thousand dollars’ worth of ash off her knees and walked away. She met the manager halfway up the tunnel. He was carrying a torch and a big box file. ‘All yours,’ she said briskly. ‘We’ll send over the clean-up squad around lunchtime.’

He was looking at her. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘You aren’t even singed. How did—?’

She smiled at him; and she knew that, in spite of the hurricane of trouble and sorrow that was about to envelop him, it’d be that smile that haunted him as he lay awake in the early hours of the morning. ‘Piece of cake,’ she said. ‘We’re professionals. This is what we do.’

‘Yes, but you’re all covered in—’

‘Sorry, must rush. Another appointment.’

She managed to keep from breaking into a run until she was out of the building.

Nobody gets to see Mr Sprague without an appointment. Nobody.

Mr Sprague sat behind his desk, reading. It was a beautiful desk, figured burr walnut, Louis Something, with nothing on it to cover up the exquisite grain of the wood apart from three green telephones and a framed photograph of a sad woman and a plump, scowling girl in jodhpurs. The document in his hands was a report on a horrendous multiple pile-up on the A779, which was going to cost the company something in the region of twelve million pounds, assuming that liability could be established.

Mr Sprague frowned, opened the top drawer of the desk and extracted a single Malteser from the bag.

He’d been in insurance all his working life, and he knew that really it was just a series of bets. You bet people money that they wouldn’t set fire to their homes, smash up their cars, fall off ladders or die in their early fifties. Bets like that ought really to be safe as houses (safer, Mr Sprague thought sadly, safer) since the mark had a vested interest in losing, surely. Apparently not. Every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year, some damn fool of a policyholder somehow contrived to win his bet, which meant that the company had to pay him (or, if he’d won the bet really conclusively, his heirs) sums of money which should have gone to the shareholders, or the company reserves, or wherever profits went when he’d finished with them. Mr Sprague really didn’t care about that. What concerned him was that there should be profits; huge ones, and bigger every year. It was the only way he had of keeping score, and he had a very competitive nature.

He crunched the Malteser and sucked the honeycomb centre. Yum.

According to the report, some complete idiot of a policyholder had won the jackpot by ramming his nasty little red Peugeot up the tailpipe of a lorry carrying - you had to laugh or you’d cry - fifty thousand gallons of concentrated nitric acid. The lorry had swerved, hit a number of other cars (some of them expensive cars containing even more expensive people), overturned, sprayed acid everywhere; then other cars had hit other cars, which in turn hit the central reservation, blasted through it like a bullet through butter, and spread the general carnival atmosphere to the traffic on the northbound side of the road. Twelve million quid, gone with the wind. It wasn’t fair.

Mr Sprague sighed. He was, at heart, a gambler; he knew and accepted the fact. But gamblers come in all different shapes and sizes. Some of them spend their days behind newspapers in bookmakers’ shops and sleep under the railway arches. Some of them wear fancy waistcoats with a derringer in the pocket. Not all gamblers are completely honest. Some of them even cheat.

Mr Sprague turned a page and whimpered. The odds against a V-reg Astra leaving the road, cartwheeling twenty yards down the central reservation and completely flattening a brand new Mercedes had to be— As it happened, he was an outstanding mathematician and could calculate the odds to three decimal places, but he knew it’d only depress him if he did. He sighed instead, and ate another Malteser. There were days when Maltesers were the only thing that kept him going.

He was so preoccupied with the report that he didn’t see the lines appear on the blank wall opposite the door. First a single black line, where a door lintel would be; then two vertical lines running down at right angles to the first one, forming three sides of a rectangle—

He looked up, frowned; then, as a carefully buried memory broke cover and scampered across his mind, he smiled. It was a rather special memory, since it related to something that hadn’t actually happened yet. You got used to that sort of thing after thirty years in insurance.

The outline became a door, with a round brass knob. It swung open, and a young man dressed rather like a monk stepped through it.

‘Hello, George,’ he said.

Mr Sprague was old-fashioned, and didn’t really hold with the first-name stuff, except when angled downwards, from superior to inferior. It was insidious, he felt, so American that it was practically Japanese, and the thin end of a wedge whose back was baseball caps with the company logo and compulsory early-morning t’ai chi on the roof. But he was prepared to make exceptions.

‘Hello, Frank,’ he replied cheerfully.

The young man grinned at him. Mr Sprague closed his eyes and moved his head just a little before looking down at the pages in his lap. They were blank.

‘Thanks,’ he said, with feeling.

‘No worries,’ the young man replied briskly, in a medium-strong New Zealand accent. ‘You know me, anything for money. Ten per cent, as usual, right?’

Mr Sprague’s face went blank. ‘Ten per cent of what, Frank?’

The young man frowned and, when Mr Sprague glanced down at the sheets of paper, they were covered in words again. He sighed. He was pretty sure he understood how the rest of it worked, but he’d never been able to figure out how he did that.

‘Sorry,’ Mr Sprague said sheepishly. ‘But you can’t blame a man for trying.’ Frank clicked his tongue. ‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘But not every single bloody time.’

Mr Sprague nodded. From the second drawer of his desk he took a chequebook and wrote out a cheque for one point two million pounds, payable to Frank Carpenter. He blew on it to dry the ink and handed it over.

‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘you also saved seven lives, not to mention the debilitating injuries, which included—’

Frank shrugged. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t like that sort of stuff.’ He folded the cheque and stuffed it in the sleeve of his robe. It always annoyed Mr Sprague intensely when he did that. By way of revenge, he asked, ‘Bobby not with you today?’

A scowl flickered on Frank’s face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I left him at—’ He stopped short as the door wobbled and a scruffy brownand-white dog bundled happily through it, tail wagging. ‘Yes,’ he amended. ‘Sit, Bobby. Good dog. Bobby, fucking well sit.”

The dog brushed past him, jumped up onto Mr Sprague’s lap, turned round three times and went to sleep. Mr Sprague stroked its head gently and smiled.

‘I’ve tried taking him to training classes,’ Frank said wretchedly. ‘But it’s no good. Last one we went to he got expelled.’

‘Really.’

‘Mphm. Setting the other dogs a bad example.’

The dog wriggled a little and snuggled its nose against Mr Sprague’s fly. ‘Fancy,’ said Mr Sprague. He opened the drawer again, took a Malteser and fed it into the dog’s mouth. The dog crunched it without waking up. ‘One of these days, you’ve got to tell me how you came to—’

‘No.’

‘Ah well,’ said Mr Sprague, and to a certain limited extent the look on Frank’s face made up for the one point two million. ‘Well,’ he repeated, and his tone of voice was meant to suggest that he was eternally grateful and would never forget what Frank had done for him, but he did have work that he needed to get on with. ‘Another successful mission, then. I expect we’ll be in touch again soon. In the meantime—’

‘You want me to go away.’ Frank grinned at him. ‘Fair enough. You know how to reach me. Come on, Bobby. Here, boy, good dog.’ The dog opened its eyes, yawned and nestled a little more firmly in Mr Sprague’s lap. ‘He likes you,’ Frank said. ‘Anybody can see that.’

‘Odd, isn’t it?’ Mr Sprague said. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a cat person.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Frank said. ‘Especially when there’s a full moon. Oh look, bless him,’ he added, with extra syrup. ‘He’s so happy, it’d be such a shame to wake him up.’

Mr Sprague opened his knees. The dog dropped through them like a stone, landed on all fours and wagged its tail. ‘Mind how you go, Frank. And thanks again.’

Frank walked towards the door in the wall he’d come in through. ‘You know what I always say, George,’ he said. ‘Gratitude and half a dollar will buy you a— Oh for crying out loud, you stupid animal, leave it. I said leave it? He sighed. ‘Oh well. Sorry about that.’

‘Not to worry,’ Mr Sprague said amiably. I was going to get a new one anyway. Of course, that particular example was sixteenth-century Florentine, but what the heck. We’re insured.’

Frank made a noise in the back of his throat that communicated more than mere words ever could, and pushed open the door. The dog darted between his legs, hurled itself through the gap between door and frame, and vanished in mid-leap. It’s just as well, thought Mr Sprague, that my eyesight’s so poor these days that I can hardly see at all without (he quickly took them off and laid them on his desk) my glasses. Otherwise my brain might fool me into thinking I just saw a dog vanish into thin air. And that’s not possible. Just as well I didn’t see it, in that case.

(He frowned. There had been all sorts of reasons why, as a young man, he’d opted for a career in insurance - earning money, acquiring wealth, getting rich, making a fortune, to name but a few. Expanding his metaphysical horizons and finding out the truth about how the world actually worked didn’t feature anywhere on the list; which was unfortunate, seeing that since Frank had entered his life his horizons hadn’t been so much expanded as blown to bits, and the truth was no longer safely Out There where he could ignore it, but roaming around inside his living space looking for him with its tongue lolling out. Nevertheless. It was Frank who’d made it possible for him to outperform his rivals and scramble to the top, in the process making him so wealthy that he genuinely no longer really cared about the money, except as the one true way of keeping track of how he was doing. And that, of course, made everything worthwhile: all the strangeness, all the unwanted and intrusive insights, Frank, even the disappearing bloody dog. Besides, he liked dogs. Not as much as cats. Much, much more than people.)

He tried to concentrate on his work, but he was finding it difficult; not unusual in the aftermath of one of Frank’s visits. For instance: open in front of him was a thick wad of papers stapled together at the top right-hand corner, but all the pages were blank. He scowled at them. He knew that, before Frank arrived, there had been words on those sheets (bad words, nasty words) and that Frank had somehow contrived to send them away. As for what those words had been about - the last shreds of memory were stripping away like a dream upon waking, and in the time it’d take to boil a kettle every trace of them would be gone for ever. Splendid. But he couldn’t concentrate on anything else, because a part of his mind knew that by rights the full force of his considerable intellect should still be focused on a problem that no longer existed, that had never existed in the first place—

No wonder he got headaches; a bit like toothache in a tooth that’d long since been pulled. A gentle knock at the door (the permanent one, not the temporary hole-in-the-wall, which had vanished when his visitor left). In came Ms Dennaway, with a thick wad of stapled-together paper.

‘The report on the Eccleshaw factory explosion,’ she said, putting it down in front of him as though it was a plate of nasty greens that he’d have to eat before he got any pudding. ‘Oh, and Mr Cartwright rang. He’d like to talk to you about it before he briefs the loss adjusters.’

Mr Sprague winced. He remembered seeing the TV footage. It wasn’t till the next day that he remembered that they covered the Eccleshaw plant. Tentative as an engineer defusing a bomb, he flicked to the last page and read the double-underlined figure at the bottom. So many noughts trailing after the integers. Somewhere in the West Midlands a gambler had just hit the jackpot, though he hadn’t lived to enjoy it. Nor, apparently, had a lot of other people.

He sighed. Twice in one day. He thought about ice packs, paracetamol, ibuprofen. He thought about all that money.

His fingers did a little dance on the number pad of the nearest phone. Three electronic burps, and a familiar voice said, ‘Hello?’

Oh well, thought Mr Sprague. ‘Hello, Frank,’ he said.