7

Matt found a bike shop open on Walton Street, bought a new inner tyre, and did his own repairs in the empty front carpark of a derelict office building. By the time he’d finished it was midmorning, and Matt knew that Kyaran, or whatever her bloody name was, would be vindicated if he went up the towpath now. There would be joggers and dogwalkers by the score. There would be people up at the weir out for a gander, too. His determination to revisit the scene of the watery crime had not waned, but he didn’t want to do it in front of a gaggle of onlookers. If the urge to hurl himself into the water overtook him, the last thing he wanted was an audience…

Matt caught himself and did a mental double-take. As it had on many an occasion over the last few months, the self-destructive thought had popped up unbidden, yet it suddenly felt very odd. It felt like the legacy of a different mindset. Having escaped it once in so spectacular a fashion, death—whether the Silvy-assisted variety or the DIY type—was now off the agenda. What Matt wanted was an explanation and some sort of closure, not notoriety as the bloke who threw himself into the weir.

Thinking about all of this was making his head hurt, and so Matt cycled back to the centre of town, craving distraction. He parked and locked the bike, meandered on foot around the streets for half an hour, and settled in an internet café that threw in a free hour’s surfing for the price of an above-average cappuccino. There, he Googled the news, the weather and what odds the bookies were offering on “News International” and “trusted journalism” ever appearing in the same sentence again, which helped put all the other impossibilities Matt had come across into perspective. Soon, though, and because it was so seductively accessible with just a few keystrokes, he found himself researching iron jewellery.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, it turned out, the Prussian government had made very fancy iron bling to exchange for gold, which the people (wasn’t it always the people?) were meant to donate to swell the state coffers. Ve haff vays of making you poorer. Not that much had changed in two centuries, then. It was still the punters who were bailing out the Masters of the Universe, and not only in Prussia, either.

Yet, according to the Fair Isle-clad jeweller, his pendant was from a much earlier era than the Napoleonic uprising. Matt found nothing that looked remotely like it until he stumbled on a new-age jewellery site. There, he spotted a looped Celtic cross in sterling silver that bore a passable resemblance to the thing that Silvy had given him. But it was the flowery description of the piece that intrigued him more than anything.

The Celtic cross, Matt read, symbolizes the bridge to other worlds, high energy, and knowledge. The vertical axis stands for the celestial world, the horizontal for the Earth.

The copywriter was a graduate of the Tree-Hugger-meets-transcendental-waffle school of jewellery prose, but it was intriguing nonetheless. Matt logged off and decided that the best thing he could do now was enjoy the remainder of his free time. In line with that, he drank a second cappuccino, wandered in and out of the book shops, splashed out on a Chicken Korai with pilau rice and a mini naan for lunch, and went home midafternoon to prepare for work and the shift he’d been involuntarily volunteered for.

After what he’d been through over the last twenty-four hours, going to work seemed about as pointless as a Nintendo Wii Fit, but what else was there to do? It was best to distract himself with the mundane. And you never knew, now that Matt had his new weirdo vision thing going on, he might be able to while away the hours playing Spot the Zombie. Of course, there was also the risk that he’d cross paths with Roberro and the buxom med student, but there was a chance they wouldn’t be working.

And if they were, so what? They’d had their fun with the pink dildo. Having the buxom med student, fun, and a pink dildo pop up in the same thought cloud sent Matt’s imagination off on a brief but not unpleasant little tangent until he dragged it, kicking and screaming, back to the task in hand. He’d work his shift as usual and in the morning it would be Sunday, when no one would be on the towpath or at the weir. He could do whatever detective work he wanted to do there alone. If Kyeeran’s strident warning about staying away from the place rang any alarm bells in Matt’s head, he ignored them and hoped she’d fallen into the canal trying to resurrect her bloody ristag… so long as she could swim.

The first person Matt saw when he clocked on that night was Jim Staples, the porter he was supposed to be covering for.

“Thought you were off.” Matt asked.

“Stag do was called off,” Jim looked miserable. “Groom’s brother couldn’t get a pass from prison.”

“So, what about me?”

“Oh yeah, Linda wanted to see you,” Jim said, grinning. “She’s hanging about for you in A&E.”

“Why the ear-to-ear grin?”

“You’ll see,” Jim said, leaving Matt with a sinking feeling that settled somewhere around to his ankles.

The Uruk-hai cheerleader was, indeed, waiting for him. She had her hair up in some sort of elaborate arrangement, which looked like a termite mound with combs stuck in it. Whatever it was she was wearing was having great difficulty containing her bulging muscles with its thin straps, and her face looked like a colourblind seven-year-old’s attempt at a Picasso. Ms. Marsh was out on the pull.

“Jim’s in. So you’re not in A&E,” she barked, which was, on the whole, what she did when she wasn’t growling.

“So, do you need me at all?”

“The med students don’t have anywhere for their sodding seminars. Bollocks, if you ask me. Not one of them wears a tie and all the girls look like they’ve never eaten a decent meal. Still, the old dispensary needs clearing out by Monday. You’re not here tomorrow, are you?”

“No,” Matt said.

“Never mind. Can’t see you finishing it tonight, so put everything in the IT room. And be bloody careful. Some of the stuff in there is old and worth real money. In fact, with your track record for breakages, they’re asking for sodding trouble. Still, I don’t give a toss. It’s Saturday night and I’m in the mood for dancing.”

The broad face above a broader neck rearranged itself into what Matt suspected was meant to be a smile. It sent a shudder through him. Linda Marsh in a good mood was almost worse than Linda Marsh in a strop.

“I’m off down the market for a skinful. Just be sodding careful.”

Matt waited until she’d left and took a couple of steps out into the corridor that led back to A&E. It looked pretty normal, but he was disconcerted to see that Roberro and the buxom med student were both at the desk. He could have sworn he saw them look away as his face appeared in their eye line. Matt cursed silently and put it down to paranoia. He was sure that Roberro’s nights had finished on Thursday. But what did it matter, anyway? With a bit of luck, he wasn’t going to see the git for the whole of the shift.

The old dispensary was a throwback to one of the hospital’s many previous incarnations. A pharmacy when the NHS was in its infancy, for the last three decades it had been a storeroom—if “store” meant bunging in every bit of unused and unwanted equipment that couldn’t find a home anywhere else. Matt stood on the dusty threshold and flicked on the light. At least the bulbs lit up, but they revealed a daunting task. Through the metallic carcasses of wheelchairs and drip stands and the battered bits of equipment, he could glimpse stacks of glass jars and vials, some of them very large indeed. Once, they had contained salves and linctus, but even empty they looked heavy and cumbersome. They would be a challenge. Ah, well.

Matt got stuck in. The physicality of the removals was strangely liberating, once he got going. It freed his mind to ponder. And ponder it did, now that it had a whole new Pandora’s box full of barmy data to ponder with. He couldn’t help but pick over Silvy and the Carp, or Karen and the bike collision. The word “supernatural” had never featured a great deal in Matt’s lexicon because, essentially, he had inherited his parents’ pragmatism, attitudes that included a humanistic approach to existence and that eschewed Intelligent Design and the presence of anything all-powerful as being about as believable as the Loch Ness monster. They were happy to celebrate Christmas and Easter, but mainly because of the chocolate.

Matt considered that most things—with the notable exceptions of Tamagotchis and Big Mouth Billy Bass—happened for a good reason which, on balance, could be traced back to a logical series of events. When things happened for no apparent reason, it meant that you hadn’t been paying enough attention when they did. When it came to Silvy and the tsunami, though, either it had been a fantastically elaborate practical joke involving thousands of pounds’ worth of special effects for a hidden camera show called Ordinary People Shit Their Pants or, and this is where it became a little difficult, he had to throw the whole of his rational belief system out of the window and accept that Silvy came from somewhere a long, long way from East Germany, or Macedonia, or wherever the hell she’d said she was from (come to think of it, she never had, had she?). Somewhere that empowered beings with the ability to command an inanimate volume of water to behave like a steamroller on steroids. The plausibility of the latter was supported by Silvy’s equally off-the-wall account of the car accident, and, he admitted to himself, by Karen’s ristag and Ghoulshee angle.

Matt ground his teeth together. He wanted to accept all this about as much as he wanted a free life subscription to The Annals of the Hitler Youth. Because if he did accept it, it meant that his life was heading down the gurgler without touching the sides.

Worse, if he didn’t, he’d have to tell the psychologist and the psychiatrist, who would invite him back for an all-expenses-paid stay at the “Special Hospital.” He’d be back in limbo quicker than a rodent up the proverbial rain conduit, and that was not an option he was willing to contemplate.

He dragged his thoughts back to the dispensary. Matt bent to his task with grim determination. It was a bit like an archaeological dig without the mud, heavy boots and blokes with beards wearing inappropriate shorts and unwanted Christmas-present jumpers. And the time scale was measured in decades, not centuries. A yard in, and a bank of seventies defibrillators the size of fridges suddenly appeared. Behind them was a layer of sixties telephones amongst a collection of Nelson inhalers. After a while, he realised that the goal-oriented nature of the task was oddly liberating. This wasn’t so bad and kept him well out of Roberro’s way. At least, it did until about ten o’clock, when Jim appeared and asked if he could help lift a twenty-three-stone man with chest pain from the ambulance trolley onto a bed.

A&E looked to be running along on autopilot. A couple of nose bleeds sat in chairs clutching paper towels to their faces. Someone was throwing up behind the curtains in cubicle one and, judging by the screams, someone else was in real pain in three. Matt did his lift and was on the way back to the dispensary when the buxom med student, who was loitering near the central station, looked up and smiled at him.

“How’s it going in the storeroom?”

Matt looked at her, unable to help a wary expression. “Fine, thanks.”

“Sorry about the other day and the pink… thingummy. Giles thought it would be a laugh.”

“Oh, it was. Hilarious.”

Her smile faltered. That smile had probably got her through many a sticky patch of social awkwardness, together with those legs, that bum and those large and quite pointy—

“So, have you almost finished? Clearing out, I mean?”

Matt dragged his eyes back to her face. “Not quite. But it’s going okay. Should be done in a couple of hours, I reckon.”

The med student nodded and turned back to the notes she was reading, leaving Matt to wander back to the dispensary considerably perplexed. The buxom med student hadn’t ever spoken to him, other than to set him up for the pink dildo scam. Her role was to follow Roberro around like a lapdog. That she was in his thrall, there was no doubt. So, why was she so curious about how he was getting on in the dispensary all of a sudden? Okay, he was clearing it out for the med students, or so the Uruk-hai cheerleader had implied, so it could be as simple as that. On the other hand…

Matt shrugged. Paranoia was such a waste of bloody time. Better he got on with it. After another ten minutes in the dispensary, he’d pushed the buxom med student and Roberro to the back of his mind. Like many menial tasks, it was proving therapeutic. It was almost eleven when he realised that something was different. It crept up on him like the sun coming out from behind clouds; suddenly the day changes from dull and grey to warm and bright, and you realise that things aren’t quite so bad, after all.

Yet “things” remained tantalisingly intangible until the moment he tried lifting out the carcass of a fold-up bed with one hand as he balanced a tipping operating light with another.

And then it dawned on him.

It was the clumisness—or rather the marked absence of it. Nothing had slipped out of Matt’s grasp the whole time he’d been in the dispensary, and neither had he knocked anything over. When the inevitable toppling of precariously placed items had occurred, he’d anticipated it and caught them. He’d been on top of his game, something he had not been for a long time. Not since before the accident. He thought about that, scrubbed it out and replaced it with, not since before he’d met Silvy.

With that realisation came a little wave of euphoria, and Matt began to work quicker. Not throwing caution to the wind, but with more confidence. By midnight, he was through to the older, early twentieth-century stuff. Matt smiled wryly. He still had a bit of difficulty with that one. Still couldn’t quite get his head around the fact that he’d been born in a previous century.

But this stuff did look old. There were huge glass bottles and jars, some three feet tall. Above them, on the racks and shelves of an old wooden display cabinet, lay tubes and vials and retorts and pestles and mortars and brass weighing scales, so that the whole looked like a set from Jekyll and Hyde, the one-hundred-and-ten-part TV adaptation. Most were coated with thick dust, but some looked surprisingly clean. Right, so he’d move all the glass first to get it out of the way. There was less chance of knocking anything over that way. He’d start with the big stuff, one receptacle at a time.

He went for the first—a massive, red, round-bottomed glass jar that looked like a huge decanter. He got down on his haunches and put one hand round the neck, the other under the widest part of the base. It was all made more awkward by the proximity of an old wooden stepladder. Carefully, Matt moved the ladder, disturbing decades of dust and spiderwebs in the process, and repositioned himself at the decanter.

He was about to take the weight of the thing when he saw a gossamer patch of web drift down past his face and hang suspended in mid-air about a foot off the floor. Intrigued, Matt leaned in to peer at the floating web and saw that it had caught and folded on a thin piece of what could only be thread. He followed the almost invisible line and saw that it had been looped around the decanter, the tall jar next to it, some of the brass weights above, and then around the retorts and the test tubes. In fact, it connected almost everything on display. Correction: everything that looked in any way breakable on display. Sheer luck that it hadn’t been attached to the ladder. Then, the Uruk-hai cheerleader’s words came back to him with a vengeance.

“In fact, with your track record for breakages, they’re asking for sodding trouble…”

It all clicked depressingly into place, like the thud of a guillotine at the bottom of its travel. The buxom med student’s feigned interest. The smug look on Roberro’s face underneath the pretence of not noticing Matt when he’d arrived that evening. The one crumb of doubt Matt had was how much the Uruk-hai cheerleader had been in on it. For one sod-the-lot-of-them second, Matt had a sudden urge to yank on the fishing line to bring the whole lot crashing down. It lasted no more than a moment. He couldn’t, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

Matt reached out to touch the big decanter’s shiny and remarkably un-dusty surface. It felt slick.

Too slick.

Smiling to himself, he hurried off to the locked cupboard wherein lay the secret unguents and potions of the porter’s trade. Inside were bottles of powerful disinfectants for the bodily fluid leaks that occurred from time to time in hospitals. The ones that were too vile for hotel services—or at least the bunch of feckless seventeen-year-olds they employed as their operatives—to deal with. Here was stuff that could kill 99.5 percent of all known germs and strip the paint off your car in one container. Next to them were the glues for fixing waiting-room seats, glue remover for toilet-seat victims, gallon cans of WD-40 and the little specialist bottles of solvents and degreasers.

Appropriately armed, Matt went back to the dispensary. Whatever it was they’d applied to the glass was incredibly slippery. He’d concluded that it wasn’t KY jelly; that was water-based and would have evaporated off too quickly. No, this felt greasy. Liquid paraffin would be his bet.

Matt used a roll of industrial absorbent paper and one of the solvent-based products from the cupboard to clean the greasy film off. Then, he carefully cut the line that was wound around all the breakables. After that, he worked very quickly, revelling in his deftness and sure-footedness. He was only interrupted once, when he caught sight of the buxom med student loitering in the corridor as he passed through to the IT room laden with glass jars. He backtracked, still holding the jars, and caught her eye.

“Anything I can do for you?” Matt asked.

“Oh, no,” she said, with about as much conviction as a fox whistling as it passed a henhouse. “Just stretching my legs.” She gave him one of her hundred-watt smiles and disappeared.

By twelve-thirty, the dispensary was virtually empty. Matt stood in the middle of the room with the last of the glassware in his arms, enjoying the way his footfalls echoed around the empty walls. Job done.

Matt walked across and placed the final jar on the floor of the IT room. His distorted, sweat-stained reflection looked back at him from the intact surface. “Bloody miraculous, if you ask me,” he said to it. “Think I deserve a cup of tea, don’t you?”

He could have gone up to the main porter’s lodge, but A&E was the quickest place to cadge a cuppa. Besides, the buxom med student’s earlier appearance was bugging him. Matt sauntered straight into a stranger-in-the-local-pub moment. Everything stopped for three seconds of a momentary hush as everyone turned to look at him. From somewhere came the sound of a child crying, and everyone went back to what they were doing, pretending they hadn’t seen him. But Matt saw the buxom med student suddenly find a set of notes compelling, even though they’d been left for collection two days before.

“Hi,” he said. “I didn’t catch if there was anything you wanted. Only I’ve finished, so I won’t be hanging around for much longer.” That wasn’t strictly true, in that he wasn’t going to leave the General, but there were one or two very quiet corners in the hospital that only porters knew about, where it was easy to get a couple of hours’ sleep, if you were lucky and weren’t needed. But the buxom med student didn’t need to know that.

“Finished?” she echoed with a horrified expression that would not have been out of place had he announced that a major pile-up from the M1 was headed their way. “But…” she let the sentence hang.

“Well?” Matt said after a few seconds of waiting for her to finish, “If there is anything, I’m just getting a cup of tea, okay?” He turned away, but she put her hand on his arm.

“Could you wait one tiny minute?” She held up a finger before disappearing behind some curtains. Matt heard urgent whispering, followed by a bellowed “WHAT?”

The curtains flew open to reveal Roberro with a face like thunder. He strode belligerently across to Matt.

“You can’t be finished,” he spat. “Leanne, go and take a look.”

The buxom med student hurried away.

“Do you fancy a cup of tea?” Matt asked. “I’m parched.”

“You think you’re so bloody sharp, Danmor,” Roberro snapped. “You conniving, weasly, ingratiating little piece of dog shit.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then.” Matt didn’t move. He was watching the staff, who were, in turn, staring at Roberro with much more than the usual interest in seeing an idiotic prat being an arse. A couple of anaesthetists stood near Jim in one corner, whispering, looking at their watches.

A light bulb lit up in Matt’s head..

“You’re running a book,” he said to Roberro with a mirthless smile. “What is it, time to Danmor smashing the first piece of glassware?”

Jim found something else to do, and the anaesthetists might as well have started whistling, they looked so guilty. Meanwhile, Roberro’s jaw muscles clenched hard enough to crack walnuts. Leanne reappeared, flushed and out of breath—a look that would have finished off any male cardiac patients in the building. She looked at Roberro and nodded.

“Shit,” he said and threw down his notes in disgust before thrusting his face three inches from Matt’s and seething, “You had help, didn’t you, you sneaky little turd?”

“No help. But I did find this…” Matt raised his voice by twenty decibels, “…almost invisible fishing line twined around all the breakables in the room. Lucky for me I did, or the whole lot might have come down around my ears.”

Jim and the anaesthetists turned to glare at Roberro.

“Shut up,” Roberro ordered.

“No,” Matt said. “I will not ‘shut up.’ Compared to you, Machiavelli was a children’s entertainer. You are what is known as an extremely sad case, Giles.”

Roberro didn’t answer, but some very strange, high-pitched keening noises were coming from behind his clenched teeth. Matt shook his head and turned away, only to feel a hand clamp onto his arm.

“It wasn’t me who paid a whore to walk in here the other night to make him look like he had a sodding girlfriend,” Roberro sang out, shrill as a choirboy.

Matt turned slowly. “I didn’t pay anyone anything. As it happens, she might not be all she was cracked up to be, but I’d be careful not to call her ‘whore’ to her face, if I were you. She has a nasty habit of turning really ugly.” Matt dangled the fishing line, shaking his head. “But this… You have serious issues, Giles. As it happens, I know a very good psychiatrist and a godawful psychologist who specialize in hopeless basket cases. I’m sure they could help. I’ve even got their numbers here in my wallet.”

If cartoon steam could come out of people’s ears, it would have been whooshing Flying Scotsman-like out of Roberro’s at that point. All that was needed was some frothing at the mouth coupled with an aversion to water, and the word “rabid” might as well have blistered itself on his forehead. Whatever comeback he was building up to deliver never materialised. He opened his mouth to speak, but before a word came out, his attention shifted to a woman who had walked through the doors of A&E, and who now strode towards them.

Roberro wasn’t alone. Indeed, conversations involving males on all parts of the floor dwindled into a breathless silence as eyes turned to watch the visitor, who, unlike Silvy, seemed refreshingly oblivious of the effect she had.

“Excuse me,” she said to Roberro, “sorry to interrupt the rutting. If you could lower your antlers for a moment, I need to speak to Matt on an urgent matter.”

They both turned to stare at her. Matt’s face took on a resigned expression, but Roberro’s was like a cat with the combination to the lock on the fridge, about to score a litre carton of double cream.

“Well, hello.” He gave her his best lounge-lizard drawl.

Matt’s response was a little more underwhelming. “Look, Karen,” he said, “if you’ve come here to take the piss again, join the queue. This idiot was first.” He nodded at Roberro, who had gone from rabid berk to drooling dog in one brief moment.

“This can’t wait,” Karen said, pulling Matt to one side.

Roberro, with skin as thick as an armour-plated rhinoceros, stepped between them. “Hi. My name is Giles.” He grinned at the girl. “Don’t worry if you can’t remember it now. It’s written on my bedroom wall, so it could be the first thing you see on waking up tomorrow morning, if you play your cards right.”

Karen’s face registered a kind of detached puzzlement as she leaned to one side to look around Roberro at Matt. It was an “Is this bloke for real?” look. Matt shrugged. Karen shoved Roberro to one side, stepped past him, and started talking at a hundred miles an hour, like one of those adverts with a thousand-word disclaimer at the end that they needed to get through before it finished.

“I know what you must be thinking I really do and this wasn’t meant to happen like this I mean the accident this morning it was all wrong and I should have explained properly… Oh blast. There is only one way this is going to work.”

“Work?” Matt asked. Even though he half-despised her for what she had done that morning, she did have the most amazing eyes.

“Please, I know it’s hard for someone like you who has the pick of anyone you want, but if our foreheads meet I can do the transfer.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “But it’ll only look natural if we kiss, so…”

Matt’s eyes narrowed. There was so much information in what she’d said that it would take a good ten minutes with very fine tweezers to tease it all apart. Instead, he zeroed in on “the pick of anyone they want” and let slip a wry smile. She gave good sarcasm, he had to admit.

“Is he putting you up to this?”

“He?” the girl asked.

“George the drop-the-C-from-Clooney, behind you.”

Karen glanced at Roberro, whose jaw was working again, this time with overt hostility, and shook her head. “No.”

“’Cos I’m warning you, there’s only so much humiliation—”

“Please,” she sounded desperate. “Just one quick little kiss.” She turned her face up to his. Matt sighed in resignation. Oh well, he thought, in for a penny. He’d already kissed one stunner in this room recently and almost ended up as fish food, so what difference would one more make? He held up both hands in a gesture of acquiescence and saw Karen smile in relief. Could the world get any weirder? Not even, Matt decided, if Roberro turned into a quivering blancmange and started singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” in Spanish. Two seconds later, Matt knew that it could.

Karen’s mouth was slightly open, and up close, her eyelashes seemed inches long. Her lips weren’t bad either, soft and warm and tasting of black cherry. She cupped his neck in her hand and pulled him forward, so that as they kissed, the edge of her forehead met with his, and then…

Whether the Earth actually moved or simply shifted slightly on its axis was a moot point.

Half a million synapses fired simultaneously in his head. It was a bit like suffering a mini-epileptic fit at the same time as swallowing a whole Frappuccino down in one. His head jerked back and twitched against her steadying hand. That meant that she knew what she was doing, and that she’d done it before. Matt was glad of the former, but felt strangely disappointed at the latter. Those thoughts all registered in a millisecond, and were then instantly brushed out of the way by the horde of images stampeding through his brain, trying to find the corral they should rightly have been fenced in by. In the middle of it all, Matt remembered.

He pushed back and stared at the girl, whose real name he now knew, and who’d developed the anxious look of someone waiting for the result of her driving test.

“Gggylah?” Matt said. “’owwsmmssssoobbliiip?”

Kylah breathed a sigh that was clearly one of huge relief. Matt was too busy with the new things in his head to worry about it. But then, they weren’t new things really. Being memories, they’d been in Matt’s head all the time. But like those annoying folders full of hidden files on your computer, they’d been unavailable for review. Until now.

“I know, I know,” she said. “A billion apologies and all that. I promise, there will be time for explanations, but that time isn’t now.”

“Innit?” Matt said, still confused.

“No. And neither is this the place.”

“Innit?”

“Look, rationalisation is not the way to go. Slow assimilation is better. I know just the place where we could share a nice warm drink.”

“Chilllllun…nnuncl?”

Kylah groaned. “I hate this bit. Everything’s jostling for position in your brain, looking for their correct order in the middle of all those other memories. It’s best to do this lying down, with a towel over your head. Come on, let’s go.”

She pulled on Matt’s hand and he followed with a gormless, lost expression. Roberro, however, was still looking for his pound of flesh now that his “smashing of the dispensary” plan had foundered.

“This is pathetic,” he sneered. “You another one of his escorts, then? Your rate the same as the blonde’s, is it?”

Kylah kept walking, and Matt dutifully followed. He wanted to say something, but couldn’t; there were major mental road works on the neuronal superhighway connecting his thinking to his speaking. All he could do was shake his head in a desperate appeal at Roberro that was meant to say “Big mistake. Big mistake,” but which came out as an impression of a large bleating lamb, “Inngmmmeea. Inngmmmea.”

But he also knew that, even if he had been able to enunciate every word, it would have been like rain off a duck’s raincoat. Roberro, angry and frustrated, had the bit very much between his teeth. And he now approached with all the subtlety of a yellow stretch Humvee.

“Fifty quid? A hundred? For that one snog?” He followed them and leaned in close to Kylah to hiss a lecherous whisper, “What’ll you give me for three hundred?”

Kylah had walked past him at a tidy pace, but now she stopped, let go of Matt’s hand and turned slowly back to Roberro. His leer rapidly faded into mild panic. He wasn’t used to anyone challenging his bellicose ranting. But she was just five-six in heels. And a girl. That, combined with the fact that he was a patronising chauvinistic arse of the first water, meant that any lingering doubts over the wisdom of his outburst were as short-lived as a damson fly’s libido.

“What did you say?” Kylah demanded.

“I asked, girlie, how much you were getting from that card-carrying idiot over there for making him look like he has a sex life, or any life, outside this place.”

“So let’s get this straight. One, you just called me ‘girlie,’ and two, you’re implying that I’m for hire?”

Roberro knew that everyone was watching now. It was all the egocentric fodder he needed. “Oooh, very PC. Yes, for hire. So, how much do you charge to buzz the brillo with me watching, eh?”

Kylah looked across at the sister in charge and said, “Better get a suture kit.”

She turned back to Roberro and offered him one dazzling, and very dangerous, smile. Then she kicked him hard between the legs and, as he doubled up, let fly with a stabbing punch to his forehead using only the knuckle of her middle finger. It was like poleaxing an ox.

It was over that fast. No one moved, least of all Roberro, who lay crumpled on the floor. Kylah did the “dismissive wiping off the dust from her hands” bit, which was a touch theatrical but well worth it, before walking back to Matt and taking his hand again.

“We’ll be gone for a while,” she said to the sister.

In return, she got a double thumbs-up and a small round of applause from the other female staff, none of whom were rushing to Roberro’s aid.

The cold air was like a slap in the face when they got outside. There was a taxi waiting with its engine running. Kylah helped Matt in and he heard her tell the driver to take them to Canal Street.

“Whaooinohhhn?” Matt said.

“Give it a soupçon longer,” Kylah said, sitting back. “It gets easier, believe me.”

The taxi took no more than five minutes to get to Jericho, pulling up outside Hipposync Enterprises. Kylah paid the driver and helped Matt out. Two minutes later, he was sitting in an office, one half of which was full of the most bizarre antiques he had ever seen, whilst the other half looked like an IKEA showroom. Of course, he had seen the office before. In fact, he had sat in this chair before. Matt shook his head like a wet dog, trying to get those disjointed thoughts to settle into place. Kylah was fussing with a drinks cabinet and came up with something deep purple in a small glass.

“Drink this,” she said. “It’ll help.”

Matt took the glass and sniffed the liquid. There didn’t seem to be any alcohol, but the herbal bouquet reminded him of autumnal walks in the woods as a child. Warily, he sipped it. Yep, definitely no alcohol and so, mindful of his med student training, he necked the rest. A warm buzzing began to spread outwards from a point below his sternum, through his abdomen, and out into his limbs.

“Wow,” Kylah said in a faintly horrified tone, “that was meant for gentle medicinal sipping.”

Matt wasn’t listening. The buzz had transformed into a three-bar electric fire. But it wasn’t at all unpleasant. On the contrary. His mind was clearing faster than a Weight Watchers’ conference lecture hall at the sound of the dinner bell. His bulging eyes stared at Kylah with untrammelled inquisitiveness. Whatever was in the purple stuff, it had cleaned and polished all his jumbled thoughts and put them back in date order in the trophy cabinet of his mind, where they glistened and gleamed, ready for inspection.

“Right,” Matt said. “You’ve got three minutes before I tear off all my clothes and run screaming into the street.”

“It’s almost worth keeping quiet,” Kylah grinned.

“I bloody well mean it,” warned Matt. “There’ll be police and ambulances and little old ladies screaming and you’ll have to explain yourself to the authorities. If my memory serves me correctly, which I’m still not sure it does, that’s something you want to try to avoid.”

“Three minutes isn’t that long.”

“Two minutes and forty seconds.” Matt tapped his watch.

Kylah held her hands up. “Okay, okay. You remember the bit about rescuing my uncle in the play area?”

Matt thought for a moment. “Yep, you can skip that bit. What I want to know is, what happened after you stuck that thing on my head?”

“The pentrievant?”

“That’s the one.”

Kylah squirmed. “What you have to bear in mind is that it’s company policy. I wanted you to understand that—”

“People use ‘company policy’ to make something that’s crap sound official,” Matt said in a steely tone. “But all that does is confirm that it’s official crap.”

“The pentrievant,” Kylah continued as if she hadn’t heard him, “allows us to examine your memory, and is very useful as evidence, but it also allows us to eradicate anything of a…sensitive nature.”

“Sensitive?”

“You’re doing it again,” Kylah said.

“What?”

“Turning my last sentence into a question.”

“Does it irritate you?” Matt demanded. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll just go and stick my head in a bucket of water for three days, shall I?”

“Sarcasm is such an unattractive trait.”

“So is me running naked down Walton Street.”

Kylah sighed. “It’s a security issue. We can’t have any Tom, Matt, or Joaquin blabbing to the Oxford Mail about trans-dimensional incursions, can we?”

“Can’t we?” Matt echoed.

“You’re doing it on purpose now, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

Kylah gave him a slitty-eyed glare. “There’d be panic and mayhem in the streets. People would be crying and wailing. Violence would be rife.”

“You’re describing a normal Saturday night in my place of work.”

“Well,” Kylah said, “it’s something that we see as a security issue. I was only doing my job.”

Matt snorted. “Oh, I see. And how many atrocities down the centuries has that little nugget of misguided fealty covered, I wonder?”

“I can see why you might be a little angry.” Kylah squirmed under his gaze.

“Can you, indeed? I’m so glad, because for a moment there I was beginning to think I was being unreasonable. You didn’t think that perhaps being the only witness to a bunch of child-sized psychopaths attempting to sacrifice your uncle might have put me at risk of reprisals, by any chance?”

It was like throwing pebbles into a pond. Kylah was on the back foot now, he could see that. From the look on her face, his words had struck home, because her cheeks had flushed a wonderful rose colour and her eyes flashed like demented traffic lights.

“I can explain everything, but it’s going to take more than three minutes,” she said, her expression full of pleading.

Matt sat back in his chair and folded his arms so as to enjoy her discomfort. “Go ahead. I’m all ears. Do your worst.”