DANCER

“You were a long time,” Mr Sunshine said.

“Was I?”

The weight of her body was unendurable; no, it was simply irksome, then a mild annoyance, then perfectly normal. She flexed her fingers and her toes, reminding herself how they worked. “Forty-seven seconds,” Mr Sunshine said. “I was starting to get worried.”

She smiled at him. “I’m a big girl,” she said, “I can take care of myself.”

“Well?”

She realised she was exhausted, as though she’d just run a mile up a steep hill. “Definitely something in there,” she said.

“I’d sort of gathered that. From the fact that the bag wasn’t all floppy.”

“Something strong,” she said. “And very, very malevolent. And scared stiff.”

“Fair enough,” Mr Sunshine said. “Mind you, that could mean anything. I bought some South African brandy once that fits that description precisely.”

“I don’t think it’s brandy,” Gina said.

“Probably not. Did you find out anything else?”

“Sort of.” She told him about the flawless monoatomic shell, and explained what monoatomic means. He nodded thoughtfully. “Built to last, then,” he said. “Like a Magimix.”

“I don’t think it was built,” she told him. “I think it grew. Or was grown, I don’t know. It doesn’t know either. I asked.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Did you now,” he said. “Not sure I’d have had the nerve to do that myself. Have a Brownie point.”

“Thank you. Not sure I’ve earned it, though. I couldn’t get it to tell me anything much.”

“Probably just shy.”

“Definitely that. And, like I said, very frightened. I really don’t know what to make of it, to be honest. There was one thing.”

“What?”

“There was something written on it. But I can’t figure out what it means.”

Mr Sunshine looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. “I doubt that,” he said.

“Oh, I can read the letters and understand the language. But it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Like James Joyce.”

She sighed. She’d known him a long time. “I put it to sleep,” she said, “so we should be all right for a bit, until it wakes up. After that, though, I really wouldn’t like to be answerable for the consequences. I think we should get rid of it, while we have the chance.”

“Can’t do that,” Mr Sunshine said firmly. “It doesn’t belong to us. Client’s property. You know the rules.”

“Fine. Get your client’s permission and then get rid of it. You said she doesn’t want it.”

Mr Sunshine frowned. “But it’s not hers,” he said. “It wasn’t addressed to her. Therefore she can’t give permission, therefore we can’t get rid of it. It’s a nuisance, but there it is.”

“I know. Pity, though. I have a nasty feeling it’s going to make trouble.”

“I think you’re probably right,” Mr Sunshine said sadly. “So what exactly did the writing on it say?”

Gina frowned. “Not sure I want to say it out loud,” she said. “I mean, you never know. It could be a coded trigger command or an incantation or something like that. To be honest with you, it could be anything.”

Mr Sunshine nodded. “Write it down,” he said.

So she did. When she’d finished, Mr Sunshine picked up the envelope on the back of which she’d scrawled the words, in her elegant handwriting—

Not to be opened before Christmas.

Consuela Teasdale (she’d kept the name after the divorce) had been working at JWW for seventeen years or a month, depending on how you looked at it. On her first day, she’d had the misfortune to blunder into an inadequately labelled causality loop, carelessly mislaid by her predecessor, who’d been fired for gross negligence. A causality loop is one of those things where you get trapped in time, the same day or hour or ten minutes repeated endlessly, over and over again. It was sheer rotten luck that Consuela’s predecessor had left one lying about in the ladies’ toilet. When they finally figured out how to get her out of there she hadn’t aged a day or even (remarkably, considering) lost weight, and the firm immediately paid her seventeen years back pay without a quibble, together with a substantial bonus and a gold clock for long service to the firm. Even so.

“I’m not bitter,” she said through a mouth full of salad leaves, “and it’s a really good job with great prospects, miles better that what they had me doing at Bettinsons, which is why I stayed on and haven’t sued their arses into the middle of next week. It’s just—”

“Yes,” Mr Teasdale said. “Quite.”

“And don’t tell me stuff like that hasn’t ever happened at your place, because I know for a fact it has.”

Mr Teasdale frowned. “Really?”

“Oh come on,” Consuela said, carefully selecting a breadstick from the glass. “What about Jerry Dawson?”

“Oh, that.” Mr Teasdale shook out his napkin. “Jerry doesn’t count.”

“He’s a partner.”

“Theoretically.”

“He’s on the letterhead.”

“He’s in a steel box in the strongroom,” Mr Teasdale pointed out, “and he only comes out for partnership meetings. The rest of the time—”

“Still a partner, though.”

A sore point, which a more tactful person would have hesitated to rub in with such vigour. Tom Dawson’s evil twin – hence Dawson, Ahriman and Dawson – hadn’t had a separate existence until an unfortunate mishap during what should have been a perfectly routine transmigration-of-souls job had split Tom Dawson into the two component halves of his own psyche. It had come as a bit of a blow to his (now their) partners, especially since Jerry Dawson proved to be so antisocial and vicious that it was necessary to keep him disembodied and confined in a strong electro-magnetic field while still being entitled, under the terms of the partnership agreement, to an equal share of the net profits.

“What everybody says,” Consuela went on, “is, if Tom Dawson’s what’s left after the nasty side of him got filtered out, what the hell must he have been like to start with? Because let’s face it—”

Her point was largely valid, but a certain residual loyalty to the firm prompted Mr Teasdale to change the subject. “I got a new Reichenstafel case today.”

“Wow.” Consuela was impressed. “I’ve never had one of those.”

He couldn’t help feeling pleased that she was pleased. “You always did like the transdimensional stuff,” he said.

She smiled at him, and his heart fluttered like a songbird caught in fruit netting. The first time he’d spoken to her had been at a transdimensional theory lecture, in second year. He’d asked her if she could make head or tail of all that dopplerised wave form stuff, and she’d explained by answering him from all four compass points simultaneously. You couldn’t help liking someone who could do that. “Tell me about it,” she said.

So he did, and as he told the tale it occurred to him that all through their long and difficult association, they’d always got on best when talking about work. If magic was involved, they were one soul shared between two bodies. The rest of the time, more like a fight between two cats on top of a high wall. “The only bit that bothers me,” he concluded, “is the hats.”

“Hats?”

He nodded. “Three of them. All different.”

She pursed her lips. “I see what you mean.”

Trust her to get the point straight away. It had taken him over an hour to appreciate the significance of the hats; the fact that a Reichenstafel projection is always a constant unified image – always the same, in every particular. Including, it goes without saying, the same hat. But the woman in the photographs had three of the bloody things. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “Glitch in the transmission matrix, corruption in the body of the signal, wet leaves on the line outside Maidstone. No big deal.”

She shook her head. “Not with a CUI.”

“’Scuse me?”

“Constant unified image. Not possible. If there’s three hats, there must be three images. And if there’s three images—”

“It can’t be a Reichenstafel. Yes, but it patently obviously is. Everything else about it is completely textbook.”

In her eyes he could see a glint of foxlike envy; he’d done loads of Reichenstafels over the years and she’d never done one, even though she knew loads more about the theory than he did. “Sounds like it, agreed,” she said.

“But with three slightly different images.”

She froze with her fork a centimetre from her lips. “No,” she said, in a quiet, ecstatic voice. “Not three images. A triple image.”

Oink? “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t follow.”

“Oh for crying out – Think about it, why don’t you? It’s a Reichenstafel, so it’s got to be a CUI—”

“Constant unified image.”

“Yup. Don’t you get it? Constant unified means one subject, one image. So three images must mean—”

“Three subjects?”

She snapped her fingers and pointed to him, the way she used to when they were revising together and he’d got all the questions right. “Three subjects. That’s logic, that is.”

“Yes, but what does it mean? The woman in the pictures is always the same.”

This time she did the impatient sigh. “One woman,” she said, “three images. A triple image. Oh come on, Brian. Have I got to draw you a diagram?”

He felt like he’d bitten into a peppermint cream that had turned out to be toffee. “Just a second,” he said. “Are you seriously suggesting—?”

“A trinity.” She beamed at him. “You bet I am. Only you’ve got to promise me. When we write the paper, my name goes first.”

“No way, Con,” he said. “No such thing as a trinity, you know that. All the books—”

“Screw the books. Three hats. What else could it possibly be?” Her eyes were shining; irresistible, even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t. “This could be it, Brian. This could be my chair.”

Ah, he thought. The sabre-toothed tiger out of the bag. Ever since he’d known her, what Consuela had always wanted, most in the world, hadn’t been money or power or even happiness. No; what she’d set her heart on was a tenured professorship at Cambridge, Princeton or KIC Mombasa. It was the kudos, or the respect, or the research opportunities, or the free parking, he could never figure out which, but that was what she truly wanted, more than anything. And, yes; if she could prove the existence of a genuine triune entity, vice-chancellors would be fighting over her like sharks. But if she tried to and failed, the nearest she’d ever get to a job in further education would be as a lollipop lady. And the thought of Consuela dragging out a miserable existence among the ruins of her dreams was more than he could bear. Consuela triumphant, on the other hand; Consuela with her buttocks irremoveably wedged into a chair which he’d helped her to attain – Gosh, he thought.

“If we really could prove it,” he said.

She leaned across the table towards him. This meant that a lock of her shiny black hair went trailing through her guacamole dip, but he decided not to mention it. “We can do it,” she said. “Together.”

Together – That’s so not fair, he thought. That’s exploiting someone else’s deepest, most intimate feelings for personal gain. On the other hand, why the hell not? “OK,” he said. “She’s my client, mind. I’d have to square it with Tom Dawson first, and presumably you’d have to talk to Humph Wells and get permission—”

Her eyes glowed with scorn. “After seventeen years in a toilet? I don’t see a problem, somehow. They’re terrified of me.”

Mr Teasdale leaned back in his chair. All the intensity was making his head hurt. “If only I could find those stupid paintings,” he said.

“What paintings?”

“Didn’t I mention the paintings? Oh, right. Somewhere at our place there’s these paintings. I think they’re eighteenth century, something like that. And I think the face is familiar.”

“From the photographs?”

He nodded. “In which case,” he said, “it’s a double Reichenstafel, which is rare but not unheard of. And that might make it a bit of a bitch to fix.”

“Don’t you dare.” Suddenly her eyes were steel pins. “Promise me. You don’t fix it till I’ve had a chance to check it all out thoroughly. If you screw up my chance of a lifetime just for the sake of making a few bucks, I’ll never speak to you again.”

He remembered that he had twelve industrial-strength demons booked for Wednesday. “Fine,” he said. “But I can’t keep the client hanging about indefinitely, it wouldn’t be fair.”

“Screw the client.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard that. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said firmly. “You talk to Humph Wells, I’ll talk to Tom, and keep your diary clear for Wednesday afternoon. It’ll be fine. Just like old times.”

The last bit had slipped out before he realised it, but she smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “We could have some fun. We made a good team, I always thought.”

Something was sticking in his throat, and he had an idea it wasn’t the Thai fishcakes. Time to change the subject. “How’s Hanuman?”

“Oh, he’s fine. I think he misses you.”

When they split up, she’d got custody of the familiar. Its corporeal form was a coal-black stump-tailed macaque, though right now it dangled from a chain round her neck in the shape of a little gold monkey with tiny sapphire eyes. He’d never actually liked it much, mostly because of its habit of stealing the dreams out of his brain while he was sleeping. She didn’t know that, of course, and she doted on the little pest. “Give him my love.”

He walked back to the office and stopped in the gents for a pee. He’d unzipped his fly and was squaring up to the porcelain when it cleared its throat, in a manner of speaking, shimmered and turned into Tony Bateman. “Sorry,” Tony said, “did I startle you?”

Mr Teasdale had just done up his zip in reckless haste. “A bit.”

“I meant to put a sign on the door.”

Mr Teasdale decided not to make an issue of it. After all, they’d hired Tony as an assistant sorceror mainly because of his shapeshifting abilities. A firm like Dawsons needed someone who could do that kind of stuff, they’d all agreed, if they wanted to offer potential clients a fully-rounded service in today’s marketplace environment. True, Gina could make herself invisible, which was something, and both Tom Dawson and Mr Teasdale had bits of paper which said they could do it; but neither of them had had occasion to try since their final exams, and there’s a difference between theoretical ability and actually charging the public money for it. Mr Sunshine could do it, of course, but that wasn’t really any use, the way things stood. So they’d hired Tony and he’d turned out pretty well. He took a bit of getting used to, but (thought Mr Teasdale) don’t we all?

“Next time, not a bad idea,” Mr Teasdale said. “Out of interest, why a—?”

Tony grinned. He did that a lot. “Practising,” he said. “I’ve got an undercover job coming up next week, and there’s a couple of bits of plumbing I want to iron out before then.”

Don’t ask. “That’s fine,” he said. “You carry on. Just, in future, a sign, OK?”

“Sure thing, boss. Or I could practise in the ladies if you’d rather.”

“No, don’t do that.”

“It isn’t used nearly as much as the gents.”

“Even so. Better not.”

“Fair enough. I’ll let you get on, then.”

Tony shimmered, turned into a clothes moth and disappeared into the ventilator. Mr Teasdale stood for a moment, rapt in thought – he was speculating as to what the outcome might have been if the toilet Consuela had been stuck in for seventeen years had turned out to be someone like Tony Bateman – then remembered what he’d gone in there for and got on with it.

When he got back to his office, Gina was there waiting for him. “Found them,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“The paintings. You know, the ones you were looking for. Ladies in frocks.”

“Frocks? “You mean hats.”

“Hats, too.”

“Zowee,” said Mr Teasdale happily. “Where are they?”

“You’ll never guess.”

He wouldn’t have done, not in a million years. “What the hell are they doing in here?” he said, when they’d got there and she’d shown him.

“Search me.”

“They weren’t here – hang on, when was the last partnership meeting?”

“Second Tuesday of the month,” Gina said, “so that makes it last week. No, you’re right, they weren’t. I’d have noticed.”

Too bloody right she’d have noticed, and so would he, given what usually hung on the walls of the large downstairs meeting room. “That’s a bit odd, in itself,” Gina said, echoing his thoughts precisely. “I know I didn’t put them here, or you, and I can’t see Tom doing it.”

“Or Tony or Ted or Jenny Swordfish.”

“I don’t know about Ted,” Gina said thoughtfully. “Or at least not him, that bloody Harmondsworth. I wouldn’t put anything past Harmondsworth.”

They thought about that, both of them. “Assuming it wasn’t him, though,” Mr Teasdale said.

“It’s odd, yes. Well?”

“Well what?”

“You wanted to see the pictures. Here they are.”

He’d forgotten all about the pictures. “Women,” he said. “Eighteenth century.”

“Who’s a clever boy, then?”

“You know me,” Mr Teasdale said. “Can be trained to perform simple tasks.” He peered at the three paintings, trying to make sense of what he saw. Three paintings: each one depicting two women, women in frocks; women in frocks and hats. In all three paintings, one of the women was different and unfamiliar, the other was the same and instantly recognisable; a cheerful, smiling woman, stout, dimpled, wearing a hat. Three different hats.

A trinity, thought Mr Teasdale, except everybody knows, they don’t exist. He could picture the diagram in his textbook, First Steps in Metaphysics: a triangle with broken lines and the caption, three into one won’t go. Consuela, he knew from bitter experience, didn’t give a damn about presents. You could buy her diamonds or Lamborghinis or genuine Watteaus or Warhols and she’d just look at you and dump them in the next charity bag that came through the door. But if he could contrive to give her irrefutable proof of the existence of a real live triune entity, something that’d stand up to peer review in the Journal of Transdimensional Studies; that, he felt, would be different. That would be—

“Oh,” Gina said, her voice intruding on his reverie like a brick through a window, “and I looked out the file.”

“File?”

“Wake up, Brian. Yes, the file. I got it out of storage. Found it in two shakes, thanks to your super-duper indexing system.”

“There’s a file.”

“Of course there’s a file, you halfwit, there’s always a file.” She had something in her hand; an old-fashioned padded envelope, the sort filled with fluffy grey stuff instead of plastic bubbles. “I had a quick flick through. Want to know what happened?”

He nodded, still staring at the paintings. Hats. Three hats.

“Well,” Gina said, “it all started in seventeen fifty-something, when a fashionable London portrait painter came to see old George Loveridge about a problem he’d been having – You don’t remember George, do you?”

“Before my time.”

“Of course, he would be. Anyway, this painter—”

“Thomas Gainsborough.”

“That’s right. Isn’t Wikipedia a wonderful thing? In my day we had to make do with disembodied talking heads and magic mirrors. Anyhow, Tom Gainsborough, nice man but seriously bad breath, made his living painting rich women in frocks. Good money, and he had a waiting list as long as your arm. Problem was, he’d finish a piccy and leave it to dry, and when he came back the next morning, she’d be there.”

“In the painting.”

“Precisely. And, no, nobody had a clue who she was, just like your punter with her wedding snaps. Anyway, as you can imagine this was a bit of a nuisance, because aristocratic ladies who’d spent a fortune having themselves done by Gainsborough didn’t really want to share a frame with some stranger they’d never clapped eyes on before, and it was no use trying to pretend she was some kind of allegory, like Wisdom or Virtue or anything like that, because just look at her, she patently isn’t. More like someone’s aunt, you know, the sort you’ve got to invite to things but would really rather not.”

“I don’t know,” Mr Teasdale said. “She looks rather jolly.”

“Jolly,” Gina said, “isn’t a recognised allegorical trope. Anyhow, Tom tried painting her out, but that was no good, it screwed up the composition of the picture, and anyhow, she’d only come back a week later. Very embarrassing if he’d already delivered it to the customer.”

“That’s interesting,” Mr Teasdale said. “When my client Photoshops her out, she stays Photoshopped.”

“That’s modern science for you,” Gina said. “And people say there’s no such thing as progress. Anyhow, you can see why Gainsborough came banging on the door. It was driving him nuts, poor bugger.”

“Right,” Mr Teasdale said. “So what did this George whatsisname do about it?”

“Loveridge,” Gina said. “And he didn’t do anything. He was still figuring out how to go about it when Gainsborough died.”

“Died.”

Gina nodded. “Suddenly.”

“Ah.”

“Without paying his bill,” Gina added, “which is why we kept the piccies in lieu. We felt it’d be embarrassing sending his widow an invoice, since we hadn’t actually done anything useful. Anyhow, that’s how we left it, and the wretched things have been here ever since.”

“I quite like them,” Mr Teasdale said. “The light palette and easy, economical brushwork is strongly reminiscent of late Van Dyck, if you ask me.”

“Bullshit,” Gina said, not unkindly. “So what’s the big deal with the hats?”

He hesitated. On the one hand, if Consuela found out he’d shared her hypothesis with someone else, she’d kill him. On the other hand, Gina was the smartest person he’d ever met, with the possible exception of Ted Sunshine. And he could trust her, couldn’t he? He thought about that.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just, they’re different.”

“Most hats are.” Gina looked at him, then at the artwork. “Of course,” she went on, “it’s a bit unusual to have substantial differences in appearance in the recurring pictorial manifestations in a Reichenstafel affinity.”

“Constant unified image.”

“That’s the baby. Clever old you for knowing that. Usually they’re exactly the same.”

“Usually.”

Gina frowned. “Invariably. You know what, Brian, this might be one for the journals.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mr Teasdale said quickly. “I think it’s more likely that Gainsborough got bored painting the same hat over and over again, so he changed it.”

Mistake. Thou Shalt Not try any funny business with Gina Noctis. The fact that she didn’t comment said it all. Time to divert the attention stream, if possible.

“Someone needs to have a word with Tony Bateman,” he said. “I was in the loo a while ago and just as I was about to—”

“Let me guess,” Gina said. “Your bloody ex.”

“What’s she got to do with anything?”

“You’ve brought her in on this, haven’t you?”

“No. Well, yes. I just happened to mention it, over lunch.”

“You halfwit.” Gina sighed. “You just won’t learn, will you?”

Mr Teasdale resisted the urge to whimper. “There’s no reason we can’t still be friends.”

“Balls,” said Gina. “How many times have I got to tell you, stay away from that woman? She’s no good for you, trust me.”

“I think you’re a bit hard on her, frankly.”

“Oh for crying out loud. Who was it who had to talk you down off that ledge the last time? No, sorry, I tell a lie, the time before last. Last time it was the noose hanging from the hot-water pipes in the boiler room, and the heating’s never been right since.”

“Can we not talk about her, please?”

“You ought to get out more, Brian,” Gina said patiently. “Meet someone nice. Get on with your life. There’s plenty more fish in the sea and guess what? Only relatively few of them are barracudas.”

“I’ll try and bear that in mind,” Mr Teasdale said stonily. “Thank you ever so much for your concern.”

“Screw you, too,” Gina said. “Only, think about it. Please. Believe it or not, I do actually have other things to do with my time apart from following round after you collecting up the shrapnel.”

Ask Jenny Swordfish what was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened in the history of the universe, and she’d have replied without a moment’s hesitation: online banking.

Jenny had been the cashier at Dawsons for three years; not long enough to remember the dark old days before the internet, when doing the banking meant stuffing all the cheques and wire-transfer forms and treasury notes of different currencies and denominations into an old plastic shopping bag and taking them to the nearest branch. Since Dawsons, like nearly all the reputable firms in the trade, had its business accounts with the Bank of the Dead, it’s not difficult to understand why the change to online meant so much to her. All she had to do was tap a few keys on a keyboard; no winding torchlit passages, no trips through the pitch dark on a creaking, leaky old boat, no sacrificing goats, no more walking in under an archway inscribed ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE, all the scary stuff she’d heard about from Mr Bevan, who’d retired the year she joined. True, the BotD’s password and security protocols were a tad more stringent and imaginative than those of its mainstream high-street competitors, but since they tended not to involve feeding honeycakes to three-headed dogs, she wasn’t complaining.

She took a sip of her coffee and typed in a password. Nothing. Frozen screen. Nuts.

She counted to thirty, then tried again. The screen went black for a second or so, and then, in the exact centre, the Eye appeared. It was lidless and red and seemed to stare directly into her soul.

“Oh, fuck a beetle,” Jenny said wearily. “You again.”

There appears, said a voice deep inside her head, to have been an attempt to obtain unauthorised access to your account information, originating from this device. Verification is required before you can be permitted to proceed.

Sometimes at this point, if you switched everything off and turned it back on again – She leaned back in her chair, groping for the electric socket in the wall. A hand grasped her wrist. It was as cold as a corpse and slightly sticky. She looked down but there was nothing to see. She sighed.

Verification.

“Fine,” Jenny said, “let’s do it. I’ll just finish my coffee, all right?”

The invisible hand let go. She leaned forward again, picked up her mug and drained the last two mouthfuls. Then she put the mug down on the desk. It shimmered and turned into Tony Bateman.

“Sorry,” he said, helping her back into the chair she’d just fallen out of. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Don’t do that,” Jenny said. “You know it grosses me out.”

Tony had smears of lipstick on both cheeks and a grin on his face. “Sorry.”

“I could report you for doing that.” He was still grinning. “It’s inappropriate.”

“Yes, all right, don’t go on about it. Can I have a few of those yellow forms for sending money back into the past? I used to have a stack of them but I ran out.”

She opened a drawer, took out a pad of yellow forms and thrust it at him. “Remember,” she said, “three copies. One for me, one for the file and one for Compliance. Got that?”

“Why is there a big red eye in the middle of your screen?”

“Oh, that. Stupid thing’s locked me out and I’ve got to do all that verification rubbish.”

“Ah, right. I thought it felt a bit chilly in here.”

She glanced at him. The glance said, I would never dream of asking anybody, especially you, to hang around and keep me company through the verification process, which is purely routine and which I’m perfectly capable of handling with no trouble at all. On the other hand, if you will insist on staying, that wouldn’t be entirely objectionable. Tony caught the glance and nodded. For a jerk, he was surprisingly fluent in Unspoken.

“So what happens now?” he asked, in a low, talking-in-church voice.

“Well, usually, they—”

Out through the screen, like an actor appearing through closed curtains, came a creature. It started out small, but quickly grew until it was the size of a large ten-year-old. Its skin was the pale, matte grey of unmixed Portland cement, its eyes were huge and green and when it opened its mouth you could plainly see its three yellow teeth. It had skinny arms and very big hands.

“Oh,” Tony said, in a voice very slightly higher than usual. “One of those.”

“Well, it’s since they introduced this new level four security,” Jenny said. “It’ll be all right so long as you don’t do anything it thinks is a threat.”

The creature squatted on the desktop in front of her, its bony wrists on its knees. “We asks it questions,” it hissed, in a voice like oily condensation just inside your ears.

“Yes, all right,” Jenny said. “Fire away.”

“It doesn’t like us, my love,” the creature said. “The nassty fat one doesn’t like us one bit. But we don’t care. We asks it three questions, and if it gets them wrong, we eats it, yes, my love, we gobbles it all up.” The eyes glowed traffic-light green, so bright you could’ve read by them.

Tony was gazing at the creature with horrified fascination. “Is it always like this?” he whispered.

“This is the level-six protocol,” Jenny whispered back. “You should see the level eight.”

A hiss from the creature, like steam. “No helping,” it said. “The ugly skinny one mustn’t help the nassty fat one, no, my love, otherwise we eats them both. We asks the fat one questions, and if she answers wrong—” The green glow was fierce enough to microwave a frozen pizza. “We asks the first question now, my love. Ready or not, here we comes.”

It rocked back on its heels, tilted its head back, closed its eyes and began chanting in a high, shrill voice –

“Where pot steams and knife gleams,

Fire glows and dreamer dreams,

First he fusses,

Then he cusses,

Then he stamps and screams.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Tony said. “Gordon Ramsay.”

“Mustn’t help.” The creature’s hands shot out, the fingers hooked like talons, stopping just short of Tony’s throat. “Ugly skinny one mustn’t help,” it screamed, “or we eats them both. No helping, my love, that’s the rules. Not fair otherwise.”

“Gordon Ramsay,” Jenny said.

“Not fair. Cheating.”

“It’s the right answer, though. Well, isn’t it?”

A long, low hiss, and the eyes glowed a sort of dark ivy. “Nexxt question:

Seven seers with seven stones,

What did they see?

Orange eye in brown face

All in a yellow sea.”

Jenny thought for a moment. “Poached egg on a muffin with Béarnaise sauce. Isn’t that eggs Benedict?”

The creature growled dangerously. “The nassty fat one can’t know, the nassty fat one is cheating, but we can’t prove it, no, my love, we can’t. But we asks the third question and then we eats them—

The other day upon the stair

I found ten bucks that wasn’t there.

Ten trillion bucks weren’t there today,

Enough my many debts to pay.”

“Ooh, I know that one,” Jenny said, clapping her hands together. “Quantitative easing.”

The creature shot her a look so savage that she instinctively recoiled. “Swordfish, Swordfish, we hates it for ever,” it squealed, “however, access to your accounts in now permitted. Have a nice day.” Then it tore out its own throat with its fingernails and vanished.

The lights, which had dimmed, came back up. Her screen cleared and she found that she was looking at the BotD home page, albeit in an alphabet she’d never seen before—

“Ancient Sumerian cuneiform,” Tony said, reaching past her for the mouse. “Hang on, that ought to do it.” He opened a window and clicked. The screen was now in Martian Linear C. “Nuts,” he said, clicking again. “All right, try that.”

The screen went shiny gold and started laughing hysterically. Jenny took the mouse away from him and clicked a few times. The home page reappeared, this time in English. “It’s fine,” she said, “so long as you don’t play with it.”

“Sorry,” Tony said. “Only trying to help.”

“Please don’t,” Jenny said. “And you do realise, you nearly got us both eaten, showing off like that. And if you do that coffee cup thing one more time, I’ll tell Gina Noctis. Got that?”

Tony muttered something about only a bit of fun, then nodded. “Right,” Jenny said, “glad we got that cleared up. Now I’ve got a lot of work to do, so why don’t you run along and play?”

She hadn’t meant to slap him down quite so hard, though he’d deserved it. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just kidding around, I didn’t mean – Sorry.”

Apologies, Jenny thought, are a bit like money: in theory, acceptable everywhere, supposed to be equal in value to the thing they’re traded for; flash around a walletful of freshly printed apologies and everybody thinks you’re the man… Doesn’t work like that, she decided. Still, he probably hadn’t realised that, so in his terms he was doing his best. So she decided to accept his apology the way a grown-up accepts a child’s home-made Christmas present: useless and vaguely insulting that anyone believes you could be palmed off with something like that, but it’s the thought that counts.

“Forget it,” she therefore said. “But unless there’s something else you want, I am quite busy.”

He edged away, a study of a puppy who’s burnt his nose on the hot-water pipes. Jenny reached for the stack of cheque requisitions and the staple remover, which wasn’t there—

“Can you see my staple remover anywhere?” she said, more to the room than anyone in particular.

Tony was just about the leave. “No,” he said, having looked. “What the hell’s a staple remover?”

“You know,” she said, looking in all the drawers of the desk, one by one. “Dinky little thing, looks like a Chinese dragon with really long teeth, and you bite staples out of things with it. Otherwise you’ve got to pry them apart with your fingernails and I hate that.”

“I know what you mean. No, sorry, can’t see it.”

“Hell.” In front of her were the cheque requisitions; a pink form stapled to a green sheet and a yellow memo. Dozens of the loathsome things, all needing to be done in time to catch the post. “Oh well, the hell with it. Why can nothing ever stay put in this place?”

Tony glanced at his watch. “How would it be if—?”

“What?”

He shimmered and turned into a staple remover. Jenny looked at it, sitting there on her desk looking pleased as Punch, and burst out laughing. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You’re an associate sorcerer, you’ve got work you should be doing.”

He shimmered and turned back. “No bother,” he said. “I’ll stay late and do it. Staying late gets you Brownie points.”

She looked at him. “Sure you don’t mind?”

“Nah.”

“In that case,” she said, “if you could make the teeth a tad more curved, and I like the ones with the little plastic pad, so you don’t chafe your fingers.”

He frowned. “You wouldn’t happen to have a picture, would you?”

She didn’t, but Google did. “Like that,” she said. “Maybe the teeth a little bit more pointy.”

“Does it have to be chrome-plated? Only, plating gives me a rash.”

“Ordinary stainless will do fine, if you can manage that.”

“Piece of cake.” He shimmered, and there on the desk was the best staple remover he could possibly be. She reached out and picked it up. It was faintly warm.

The windows of Mr Dawson’s office rattled. All the lights had gone out, but that hardly signified, since the glare emanating from the other side of his desk was painfully bright, even through sunglasses. Forked lightning crackled out of the smoke detector and earthed itself in Mr Dawson’s coffee cup.

“WHERE WERE YOU,” said a Voice from the centre of the glare, “WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?”

Mr Dawson sighed. “Yes, thank you, we’ll let you know,” he said. The glow went out, the windows stopped rattling, a card with a fancy logo and an email address floated flowly down and landed on Mr Dawson’s desk as he crossed a name off a list with a heavy stroke of his pen. He paused, sniffed and switched on the extractor fan. Too much ozone gave him a headache.

He took another look at the list. He checked it twice. He sighed. Fifteen billion sentient beings were going to have to make do with one of those deadheads as their supreme being, unless he could come up with a viable alternative. Why, he asked himself, does everything always have to be my fault?

“Hello, Tom.”

His head jerked up as though he’d been hanged. Sitting in the chair recently occupied by the thunder-and-lightning guy was someone he hadn’t seen for a while, and whose absence had caused him very little distress, if any at all. “Hi,” he said feebly. “I didn’t know you were back in the UK.”

“Oh, you know me, Tom,” said Mr Ahriman, his partner. “I’m everywhere.”

Which was, strictly speaking, true. But Mr Dawson tried very hard not to think about that. “Great to see you,” he said. “You’re looking good.”

“Liar,” said Mr Ahriman pleasantly, “and, no, by any meaningful criteria, I’m not. How’s yourself?”

“Oh, so-so.”

“Yes,” Mr Ahriman said, and Mr Dawson felt like there was a terrier inside his chest, shaking and worrying his heart. “Right, that’s the small talk out of the way. Where’s my money?”

“Um,” said Mr Dawson. “What money?”

Mr Ahriman favoured him with a thin smile, and it occurred to the very small part of Mr Dawson’s brain that wasn’t immediately occupied with registering terror that it was a great pity that Mr Ahriman wasn’t eligible to be on the list. After all, he had all the effortless presence and power that the other candidates so singularly lacked. Also, if he could be persuaded to take the job, he’d be off in a completely different continuum, for ever and ever—

“Sorry,” said Mr Ahriman. “Not my bag. Can you honestly say you see me as the compassionate and the merciful? No, thought not. The money, Tom. Where is it?”

“I wish you wouldn’t read my mind,” Mr Dawson mumbled. “It’s not a very friendly thing to do, is it?”

“Ah, but I’m not your friend,” Mr Ahriman said, “I’m your business partner, there’s a difference.”

“Fine,” Mr Dawson said. “Look, if you know what I’m thinking, why do you bother asking me at all?”

“Because I like to see you squirm,” said Mr Ahriman, with a gentle smile. “But we can do this non-verbally, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

A number of images appeared in Mr Dawson’s mind. He screamed.

“Now that we’re both singing from the same hymn sheet,” Mr Ahriman said, “I’ll just say this. Try harder. Work faster. Get stuck in. Don’t be such a girl. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“Outstanding,” Mr Ahriman said, giving Mr Dawson a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Oops,” he added. “That wasn’t a new suit, was it?”

“No.”

“That’s the great thing about navy, doesn’t show the scorch marks. Be seeing you, Tom. Look after yourself.”

Mr Dawson looked up. The chair was empty. He stood up, tottered as far as the wastepaper basket and threw up. He’d just finished wiping bits off his chin when the door opened.

“Sorry,” Gina said. “Bad time?”

He got up. All his joints ached and his head was swimming. “A bit,” he said. “He was here. You just missed him.”

“Lucky me. What’s that smell?”

Mr Dawson made it back to his chair, just about. “We had a little chat about money,” he said.

“Ah.”

Talking was hard, because the stomach acid had stripped all the surfaces off the inside of his throat. “Bottom line,” he said, “we need to make a lot more money quickly. Otherwise—” He looked at her.

“When you say a lot more money—”

Mr Dawson let his head sink into his hands. It was still spinning like crazy, but it took some of the weight off his neck. “He was a bit vague about actual figures,” he said. “I got the impression it was along the lines of, think of a number, double it, double it again—”

“I don’t think he cares about money,” Gina said, “not per se. What he’s into is the pain it causes.”

“He’s good at that,” said Mr Dawson. “Actually, I don’t give a stuff about his motivation or what he wants out of life, I’d just quite like to get him off my back for five minutes. So, we need ideas. Got any?”

“Probably not. Not the kind you’re thinking of, anyhow.”

“Then get some,” Mr Dawson said. “Stat. Tell Brian, partnership meeting here, Wednesday at six. All the ideas we can possibly come up with, and then some.”

“Hang on.” Gina felt her skin prickle. Goosebumps. Talking of which, why geese, particularly? “Full partnership meeting?”

“Full partnership meeting.”

“Jeez. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Was it her imagination, or had the temperature dropped about five degrees? “Fine,” she said. “I’ll tell everybody.”

“Not everybody.”

A second can be a very long time. It only took a second for the primordial node to blast out the universe, but if you have a really expensive radio telescope you can hear the echoes of that second to this day. A second passed; one of those. “Oh come on, Tom. We can’t not tell him. He’ll be livid.”

“If you tell him, he’ll try and come. I’ve got enough on my plate right now without Ted Sunshine making a scene.”

“But he’ll know anyway. He always knows everything.”

“Fine,” Mr Dawson said. “You tell him. Tell him to stay away.”

When you spend your working life on the edge, in the shaded zone where the Venn diagrams of Real and Unreal reluctantly intersect and To Be Or Not To Be is a very good question rather than a quotation, fear is a luxury you generally can’t afford. But Mr Teasdale had a penchant for luxury, and he indulged himself in the form of a profound phobia about dentists. Mind you—

“There you go,” the dentist said, applying a little gentle pressure. She was Australian and very good at her job. Something gave. “You’ll be better off without that little bastard, I promise you.”

She dropped the extracted tooth into a basin. It made an unusually heavy clunk. “Rinse away,” she instructed, and Mr Teasdale swilled his mouth out with the nice pink liquid, then spat into the basin. The pink liquid swirled away, leaving behind a few shreds of what looked remarkably like gold leaf.

“Fuck a lizard,” said the dentist.

She was staring at the tooth she’d just pulled out. It was, of course, pure gold.

“Id owwite,” Mr Teasdale hastened to assure her. “Peffecly nawmuw. Doan hinkaba’it.”

“But—”

“Doan hinkaba’it.”

He could’ve explained, of course. Maybe he should have done so when he first signed up as a patient. In third year, one of the options had been alchemy; in alchemy you have to do a practical, and Mr Teasdale had chosen making a philosopher’s stone; unfortunate mix-up with a beaker of elixir and a glass of cherryade, which happen to look identical. Ever since, all Mr Teasdale’s discarded body parts and bodily products turned to .999 pure gold fifteen seconds after leaving him. Yes, that, too. And that. And, yes, it can be awkward but he’d had plenty of time to get used to it and arrange his life accordingly. In fact, it had been a prolonged bout of diarrhoea that had provided him with the capital to buy into the partnership in the first place—

But, yes, on balance he really ought to have explained first, because it’s hard to be lucid and convincing when half your face is frozen stiff. Fortunately, he had a fall-back position which never failed. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet and selected a photo-ID card. On it, among other things, were a name that wasn’t strictly speaking his and the abbreviation MI6.

“Cla’ified,” he said. “No a urd to a’ybo’y. Unerstood?”

“Fuck a lizard,” the dentist breathed, awestruck. “You mean, like James Bond and stuff?”

Telling outright lies wasn’t in Mr Teasdale’s nature, so he winked. It seemed to do the trick. He retrieved the tooth and the wisps of gold leaf, signed various bits of paper and left.

The dentist’s surgery was ten minutes’ walk from the office. By the time he got back, the anaesthetic had worn off and Mr Teasdale had grown a new, perfectly sound tooth to replace the old one. In his desk drawer he had a bottle of rather special painkillers that really worked. Two of those, and it was as though the whole disagreeable incident had never happened. Lot of fuss about nothing, really.

His phone buzzed. “Your demons are here from Robertsons,” said a voice.

“Thanks, stick ’em in the waiting room till I get there.” He hesitated. “Harmondsworth?”

“Yup.”

“What are you doing on reception?”

“Helping out.”

Mr Teasdale sighed. “Right,” he said. “I’ll be there in two shakes.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Harmondsworth; he was fine, in small doses, and at times it seemed like he positively enjoyed helping out, filling in, doing small but useful jobs for people. At other times – You had to be careful, that was all. Always remember, this is Harmondsworth we’re talking about, and never ever turn your back on him for an instant.

The reception desk was apparently unoccupied when he got there. Mr Teasdale opened a few drawers, then found one that appeared to be locked. He knocked on it gently with one knuckle.

The drawer slid open an inch. A blue light emanated from the opening. Mr Teasdale pulled his hand away sharply and warmed it under his armpit.

“Thanks for minding the store,” Mr Teasdale said. “You can go back upstairs now.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Ted probably needs you for something.”

“Oh, all right.”

The drawer flew open and Mr Teasdale turned away sharply, though not quickly enough to avoid getting an eyeful of what, for some reason, he always tended to think of as Pentecostal fire; anyway, it was the sort of dazzle that stays with you for ages, whether your eyes are open or shut. “Thanks again,” he called out after it, because you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Harmondsworth, if you could help it. Then he shut the drawer, which was empty and smelt strongly of frankincense.

Which left the problem of who was going to look after reception, answer the phone, all that sort of thing. A perennial nuisance, and it was all very well for Tom Dawson to say they couldn’t afford to pay someone full-time, it looked bad to clients and leaving the front office unattended was a disaster waiting to happen. He sighed, pulled a single hair from his head and breathed on it. Then he let it go. It drifted down onto the floor and transformed into an exact replica of himself.

“Hello,” said the hair, in an idiotic sing-song voice which always irritated him. “What do you want me to—?”

Mr Teasdale scowled at it, though really none of it was the hair’s fault. The hair turned into a fair approximation of Naomi Campbell, circa 1990. Mr Teasdale felt rather guilty about that, but he was in a hurry and it wasn’t his responsibility to organise staff rosters. “Mind the desk. Answer the phone. If there’s any mail, sign for it. Got that?”

“Sure,” the hair said. “That all?”

“That’ll do for now.”

He went through into the waiting room, where the demons from Robertsons were sitting round the table with the elderly magazines on it, playing snap. They looked up as he walked in. “Hi, boss,” said one of them cheerfully. He recognised about half of them from previous jobs.

“Afternoon, lads,” he said. “Sorry to have kept you.”

“No worries,” said a demon with the head of a fish. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

“Thanks,” Mr Teasdale said. “Got everything you need?”

One of the demons held up a black plastic bin liner. “All here, chief.”

That was one of the things he liked about Robertsons. They were professionals. “Great,” he said. “Right, follow me. The punter’ll be here soon, so you can start setting up.”

He led them to the big interview room and left them to it. By the time he got to the front desk the client was already there, with her laptop under her arm, asking his hair if she fancied doing a bit of freelance modelling in her spare time. It’d have been amusing to eavesdrop, but he was paying for the demons by the minute.

“Through here,” he said. “Everything’s ready.”

By the time he got back to the big interview room, everything was well under way. It was bitter cold and pitch dark. “You might want to keep your coat on,” he advised the client. “Watch out, there’s a chair just – Oh, you found it, never mind. Take a seat, we’ll be ready for you in two shakes.”

From all four corners of the room simultaneously came faint whisperings, and a soft but persistent scratching, as of claws on parchment. Something scuttled over his foot. He groped for a chair and sat down—

“Sorry, chief.”

“That’s all right,” he said, as the pain of frostbite shot up his sciatic nerve like information along a fibre-optic cable. “My fault.”

“No worries.”

He settled himself in his chair. “Not long now,” he told the client. “If you could get one of the pictures up on your screen.”

The laptop glowed next to him. The light from it didn’t seem able to travel very far in that environment, but he could just about make out the face of the jolly woman, under her hat.

“That her, boss?” whispered a voice in his ear.

“Yup.”

“Cool. Let the dog see the rabbit.”

A ball of blue fire materialised in mid-air, hovered for a moment, then swooped down onto the screen, passed through it and came out the other side. It curved gracefully through the darkness, came to a halt and gradually moulded itself, as though it was plasticine in the hands of an invisible sculptor, into the jolly woman’s face.

Mr Teasdale cleared his throat. “Hi,” he said. “Thanks ever so much for coming.”

The face turned and looked at him. Its eyes met his and he forced himself not to cry out. You know what they say about not looking into the sun; double that and add 15 per cent for luck. But Mr Teasdale knew about this stuff, especially the vital importance of maintaining eye contact.

“What?” said the face.

“Well,” Mr Teasdale said, “if it’s all right with you, we’d rather like to know who you are.”

The face didn’t like that, one bit. Mr Teasdale felt the intensity of its displeasure the full length of his optic nerve and right back deep into his brain. “Really,” said the face.

“Well, yes,” said Mr Teasdale, whose jaw had started aching again. “You see, you’re making it quite hard for my client to earn a living, so if we can sort of clear up what it is you want, that’d be quite nice for everybody all round, don’t you think?”

“You want to know what I want.”

Little bits of gold leaf were biting into Mr Teasdale’s gums. “Yes, actually.”

“Very well. On your head be it.”

The face, it turned out, didn’t do metaphorical. The ball of blue fire shot in between his eyes. A fraction of a second later, it came out of his left ear. A fraction of a second can be a very long time.

“Right,” Mr Teasdale croaked, when he’d got his voice working again. “Got you. If you’d like to leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Presumptuous mortal,” said the ball of blue fire. “Miserable creature of a day, farewell.”

The ball exploded in a blaze of sparks. Then all the lights came back on, and the demons were busy packing up, folding things and putting them in boxes and zip-up bags, hoovering under the chairs, squirting aerosols of air freshener. The client stared at them, frozen in horror, but Mr Teasdale made no effort to reassure her. He had other things on – in – his mind.

“Cheers, then, boss,” said a demon. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

Mr Teasdale nodded. It was the best he could do, and the demons seemed to understand. They left quietly, closing the door behind them. He stood up, found that his knees weren’t up to that sort of abuse and sat down again.

“What,” asked the client, “were those things?”

It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. “Oh, them,” he said. “Demons. From Robertsons. We could’ve got a better deal from Honest John’s House of Fiends, but in this business, frankly, you get what you pay for.”

“They were—” She shuddered. “Were they real?”

“Real as you and me,” Mr Teasdale said, trying not to sound impatient. It was hard to remember sometimes, when he found himself faced with a new and challenging technical problem, that for the customer all this stuff was new and quite possibly a little bit intimidating. “We don’t need them any more,” he said reassuringly. “So you needn’t—”

“They’re real. They exist. Oh my God. Does that mean there’s, like, you know, a hell? And a heaven? And God and stuff?”

“Moving on,” Mr Teasdale said, “I think I can say we’ve now got a handle on all of this, and with any luck we ought to be able to sort it out for you, though I wouldn’t be happy committing myself to a hard-and-fast timescale at this moment in, um, time. We know what we’re up against, though, going forward, and that’s absolutely half the battle. Five-eighths, really.”

She was staring at him. “Because if there’s, like, you know, a God or something, I – I don’t know. What should I do?”

He looked at her. It wasn’t an uncommon reaction, but he never felt comfortable dealing with it. “Eat more organic vegetables,” he said firmly. “I think He’d like that. And try and cut your carbon footprint down as much as you possibly can.”

“That’d help?”

“Well, it can’t hurt, certainly. Meanwhile, while you’re doing that, I’ll crack on with the next stage of getting that woman out of your pictures.”

The look on her face suggested that the intrusive woman was the least of her problems, right now. Oh dear, he thought. But she’d paid in advance so that was OK, and in his experience these sudden epiphanies tended to wear off in a day or so, leaving behind nothing more than confusion and embarrassment. “Maybe,” she said, “I should get a bicycle. You know, instead of a car.”

He nodded approvingly. “That’s the ticket,” he said. “I’ll show you out. This place is a bit of a maze until you’re used to it.”

He got rid of her. His hair was still on the front desk. He glanced over her shoulder at her computer screen and noted that while he’d been gone, she’d managed to disprove Einstein’s theory of general relativity and was about to have a stab at the laws of thermodynamics. Chip off the old block, he thought. “Jolly good,” he said, “carry on.”

He went up the stairs to his office. His legs ached and his ankles hurt. He remembered that they had a partnership meeting at six. “Bloody hell,” he moaned softly to nobody in particular, closed his door and sat down in his chair.

Well now, he thought. Probably what he ought to do was get it all down on paper, in the form of an attendance note, before he forgot any of it. That was proper procedure, and the insurance company got very stroppy if the attendance notes weren’t on the file and up to date, but he decided that the chance of him ever forgetting anything of what the intrusive woman had told him were pretty slim, in fact size zero. Even so. He woke up his screen with a sullen prod and started to type.

He hadn’t got far when the door opened. Nobody ever knocked at Dawsons.

“Well?” said Gina.

He leaned back in his chair. “Oh, fine,” he said. “I had to have it out, but actually it was a piece of cake and it stopped bleeding almost immediately.”

She glared at him. “After that,” she said.

He closed his eyes and let all his muscles sag. “You will not believe,” he said, “what I’ve gone and got myself into this time.”

She sat down. “Spit it out,” she said.

He took a deep breath, eyes still shut. “I got in touch with the hats woman,” he said. “Three guesses who she turns out to be.”

“Brian, I’m not in the mood.”

“Three guesses.”

Sigh. “Someone we know, obviously.”

“That’s not a proper guess. Try again.”

“I don’t know, do I? Tell me.”

“Fine,” Mr Teasdale said. “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”