Fell Purpose

EIGHT

Whale Sandwich

‘We released the victim’s name this morning, so we’ve had to put someone on the house to keep the vultures off,’ Porson said.

It was always a delicate decision to make, when and how much to release to the press, and Slider was glad it did not fall to him to make it. On the one hand, there was the danger of clues being lost under the inevitable media stampede; on the other hand, it was the quickest way of reaching people at large, and people at large might know things that were useful and come forward with them. They never released the name until the family were told, and in this case it had meant they had had the first day to themselves; but now the feline had been defenestrated, every gawper and gutter hound in the region would be hammering round to Violet Street as fast as his cloven hooves could carry him.

‘But we’re not telling ’em any more than her name and that we’re treating it as murder. Don’t want them getting prurient about it. Her parents have got enough to be coping with, without the sex angle.’

‘It will leak out that she was strangled. The dog-walker who found her will tell.’

‘It’ll get out in time, it always does, but that’s not our providence. You can’t make an omelette without breaking step. So what are you up to? Got any lines?’

Slider told him where they were on Carmichael.

‘Looks like the evidence is stacking up on him all right,’ Porson said. ‘I’ll get on to Woodley Green, ask them nicely to keep an eye out for him, especially at his mum’s house. You’ve got people out in Notting Hill?’

‘Yes, sir, looking for a flat above a tarot shop.’

‘Be a few of those,’ Porson said, echoing Atherton. ‘Can’t chuck a brick round that way without hitting some of that dippy mystic stuff.’

‘We’ll find it, sir.’

‘And what then?’

‘If he’s there, we’ll arrest him for questioning. We’ve got enough to nab him, given that he ran away.’

‘And if he isn’t there?’ Porson moved restlessly back and forth, unwinding a paper clip and then bending the resultant length of metal back and forth in his big, chalky fingers until it snapped. ‘Can’t search his gaff without a warrant, and it’ll be hell’s own job getting one without more evidence than that. If it was on our own ground that’d be one thing, but you know what our brothers in Notting Hill are like. Don’t like people raining on their shed without all the eyes crossed and the tees dotted.’ He selected another paper clip and resumed the exercise. ‘He’s got to come home sooner or later,’ he concluded. ‘If he’s not there, put someone on obbo and nab him as soon as they see him.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And meanwhile,’ Porson went on, ‘what about Ronnie Oates? Now there’s a little toerag you can get your teeth into.’

‘I’m sending Hollis out to see his mum. He’ll get it out of her where Ronnie is. And we’ve got a sighting of someone who fits his description hanging around the Scrubs that evening.’

‘Good. Excellent. I’d like to get him put away properly. They didn’t jug him half hard enough last time, and if it was him . . .’ The paper clip snapped audibly. ‘That pretty girl, not even seventeen . . .’ His eyes lifted to Slider’s. ‘Sometimes I hate this job.’

‘At least we get to do something about it,’ Slider said, offering his own comfort, ‘even if it isn’t enough.’

The steel re-entered Porson’s soul. ‘Is that you sympathizing with me?’ he barked.

‘No, sir. Just passing a comment,’ Slider said hastily.

‘When I want pity, I’ll ask for it. And it’ll be a warm day in Hull before that happens, I can tell you.’

‘I know that, sir.’

‘Well, get on with it, then. No use to anyone standing round like a spare plate at a wedding. Get weaving.’

Slider was hardly back in his office when the phone rang.

‘Is that Inspector Slider? It’s Derek Wilding here, Zellah’s – Zellah’s father. I understand you’re the person to talk to.’

‘I am the investigating officer. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr Wilding. Is there something I can help you with?’

‘I hope perhaps I can help you. The other officer – I think his name was Atherton?’

‘Detective Sergeant Atherton, that’s right.’

‘Well, he asked about Zellah’s mobile phone, asked me for the number and make of it. Said it could be traced from the signal.’

‘That’s right. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to trace it because it seems to have been turned off.’

‘Yes, Mr Atherton said it could only be traced if it was turned on,’ said Wilding. ‘The thing is, I’ve just found it.’

‘You’ve found the mobile?’

‘Yes, it was here in her room. In the drawer of her bedside cabinet. I was just – I was in her room. Looking at things.’ He swallowed audibly, and resumed, his tone pleading. ‘Her things are there. It’s all I have left. It still . . . smells of her.’ His voice broke altogether, and Slider fought with his own pity to remain steady and grounded.

‘I understand, Mr Wilding. Please don’t feel you need to explain. Now, this mobile – you’re sure it’s hers?’

‘Of course I am. I bought it for her.’

‘I’m just surprised she didn’t take it with her.’

‘She must have forgotten it.’ His voice wobbled again as he said, ‘It’s terrible that she didn’t have it with her that night. I can’t help thinking—’ He cleared his throat and regained control. ‘What if she wanted to call me, and she couldn’t? What if she was frightened? What if I could have saved her?’

‘You mustn’t think like that,’ Slider said. ‘There were lots of houses within a few yards of where she was. She could have knocked on any door for help.’

‘At that time of night? Everyone would have been fast asleep.’

‘But there was no report of any disturbance or shouting or anything like that. I think it happened very quickly, and she wouldn’t have had time to telephone you, even if she’d had her mobile with her.’ It was a perilous way to try to console a father: there wasn’t much comfort in it whichever way you sliced it. He didn’t want Wilding to think too deeply about what he had just said, and went on, ‘I’d like you to put the mobile into a bag – an ordinary freezer bag will be fine – and we’ll collect it. And don’t handle if, if you’ll be so kind. Pick it up by the end of the aerial stalk and drop it into the bag.’

‘You’re thinking of fingerprints? But – what fingerprints can there be on it, if she didn’t have it with her?’

‘It’s a very long shot, of course, but it may have been someone she knew and they may have touched it at some point recently. We have to go through the routines.’

‘I see,’ he said dully. ‘Of course, I touched it when I took it out of the drawer.’

‘I understand. I’ll send someone round to fetch it, and we’ll be able to get a record of her calls, at any rate. We’ll know who she was in the habit of calling.’

‘Very well,’ he said, resignedly. ‘I expect it will just be her school friends. And this number here. It won’t tell you anything.’

‘We’re doing all we can,’ Slider said kindly, answering the thought behind the words.

Atherton took the news with more interest than Slider had shown. ‘Wait, wait, this could be something,’ he said. ‘What girl ever goes out without her mobile? They’re surgically wedded to them. The only way to stop a teenager texting her pals is to prise the phone from her cold, dead fingers.’

Slider winced. ‘A happy turn of phrase. I agree with you in general, but even a teenage girl can be absent-minded on occasion. She just forgot it, that’s all.’

‘That’s what I’m saying, she wouldn’t have. Never in a thousand years. She’d have put it into her handbag as automatically as her door keys.’

‘Well on this occasion she didn’t. Why are you getting so excited?’

‘Suppose the murderer brought it away from the scene with him?’

‘You want Wilding to be the murderer?’

‘I don’t want him to be. But it usually is the victim’s nearest and dearest, and he was hugely controlling of her. Maybe he followed her, discovered what she was up to, sex-and-smut wise, had a violent row and strangled her.’

‘With tights he just happened to have brought with him.’

‘He may have found out beforehand that she wasn’t the little angel he had always believed in, and went out to execute her, to save her soul from worse to come. There would have been plenty of tights in the house, his wife’s and his daughter’s. Look,’ he said to Slider’s rejecting expression, ‘we know he’s a religious nut—’

‘He’s a churchgoer,’ Slider said indignantly. ‘Why has everyone with a religious belief got to be a nutcase?’

‘Well, they don’t have to be. But he’s too good to be true – all that charity work and helping out at the school and being on committees and going to church. Yet he wasn’t above stealing that piece of land behind his garden – because that’s what it comes down to. And he knocked off his secretary, which involved immorality and deceit. Old Wilding’s not as squeaky clean as he likes to seem.’

‘It’s others who praise him,’ Slider pointed out. ‘He never said he was a saint.’

Atherton waved that away. ‘And look at the way he treated Zellah – wouldn’t let her go anywhere or do anything for fear of her purity being sullied. Brooding away out in his shed about disgusting youths putting their hands on his lily-white treasure. You’ve got to admit it’s a compelling scenario. I mean, the shed alone condemns him. Men who spend all their leisure hours alone in a shed at the bottom of the garden have got to be up to no good.’ He was only partly joking. ‘And if he hasn’t got a stack of hygiene magazines in there, then what is he doing?’

‘Woodwork,’ said Slider. As he said it, he remembered with a horrible chill another shed in another garden, which had belonged to a religious nut. The smell of new pine and old sweat pierced his memory. It was always smells that brought back the past the most vividly. He had been tied up by a man with a knife who was going to kill him; and instead it was Atherton who had been stabbed, near fatally. He met his subordinate’s eyes and knew he was thinking of the same thing. He said, ‘Even allowing your analysis for the moment, what are you supposing happened?’

‘Don’t you think it’s suspicious that it’s only after I tell him the phone can be traced that it turns up? He hadn’t thought of it before – it was certainly news to him at the time that you can trace a mobile with pinpoint accuracy from a signal. So he dashes home and switches it off before we can start looking, and then decides the safest thing is to tell you he’s found it in an unexceptional place.’

‘But why is it there at all?’

‘After he killed her, he took her handbag away with him. To conceal her identity, probably,’ he said in anticipation of Slider’s next question, ‘to give himself time to work out his story. He disposed of it somewhere – or maybe hid it in his wardrobe.’

‘Or his shed?’

‘Yes, better. Wifey might find it in his wardrobe, but I’ll bet he locks the old wooden hacienda when he’s not using it. Then he was alerted that the phone would lead us straight to him. He’s probably destroyed the handbag by now – might be interesting to ask the neighbours if he was burning leaves on Tuesday afternoon.’

‘Burning leaves? In August?’

‘Well, whatever gardeners burn in August. By the way,’ he short-circuited himself as he remembered, ‘what would he be growing in his vegetable patch that looked like coriander?’

Slider thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Parsnips, you philistine. So if he burned the handbag, why didn’t he get rid of the mobile at the same time?’

‘You can’t burn a mobile. Maybe he was going to take it out and dump it down a drain somewhere, but then he thought it would be better for us to have it.’

‘Why?’

Atherton looked triumphant. ‘Because if she was regularly telephoning a gentleman of the male persuasion, it would make him a suspect.’

‘Oh, you’re clever,’ Slider said bitterly. ‘You’ve got it all worked out.’

Atherton looked wounded. ‘Why do you want it not to be Wilding?’

‘Because he’s her father,’ Slider said. He was silent a moment, and then said, ‘You’re right, I’m not being objective. And there is one thing.’

‘Tell me, tell me.’

‘He was imagining her fleeing the murderer in terror and not being able to phone daddy, so I said there were lots of doors she could have knocked on. And he said, “What, at that time of night? Everyone would have been fast asleep.” We’ve never released a time of death. We don’t even really know it. It could have been any time after about ten p.m.’

‘He could have just assumed it was in the dead of night,’ Atherton said.

‘Now you’re being perverse. It was you who wanted him.’

‘Just playing your part.’

‘Well, don’t. You were right that we have to consider every possibility. We ought to look into Wilding. If he did know, or even suspect, that she was getting away from him, he might feel strongly enough. He was certainly passionate about her. And it is odd, at least, that she left her mobile behind. We’ll have a completely objective goosey at him, ask the neighbours what they thought of him, check what he was doing that night. It won’t be easy without making him think he’s being accused of something, and if he’s innocent, that’s the last thing I want.’

‘Salt in the wounds?’

‘More like boiling lead.’

‘Nobody said this was an easy job,’ Atherton commiserated. ‘First thing is to send someone for the mobile, I suppose.’

Slider was pondering. ‘I think I’ll go myself,’ he said. ‘I haven’t met the man – I’d like to get a look at him, and at the shed. And I’d like to have a look at her room.’

‘What do you hope to find there?’ Atherton asked.

‘Some clue as to who she was.’

‘Angel or devil?’

‘She won’t have been either. Nobody is. But I can’t see her clearly, and I want to. I think,’ he concluded sadly, ‘that I would have liked her if I’d known her.’

‘You always say that about everyone,’ Atherton said. ‘You’re just an empathizer.’

Hollis knew Ronnie Oates was living at home because his mother opened the door at once when he rang, and said, ‘Left your key behind?’ before she saw who it was. Then her face sagged like a disappointed child’s. ‘Who’re you? I don’t know you.’

‘Yes you do, love,’ he said kindly. ‘Sergeant Hollis from Shepherd’s Bush. You know me from when Ronnie had his last little bit of trouble.’

‘Well, he ain’t done nothing this time,’ she said, but yielded anyway to Hollis’s body language and let him in.

It was a ground-floor council-owned maisonette in a tiny terraced house in East Acton, in a turning off the A40, where the traffic thundered past night and day like the migration of the mastodons. Hollis was fortunate in not being cursed, like Slider, with a sensitive nose, or like Atherton with a refinement of taste, but even he quailed a little before the Oates establishment. It was filthy, and it stank.

The front door opened directly into the single living room, whose far end, under the window on to the garden, was the kitchen. In this end there was a sofa, two armchairs and a television set, but all the furniture was hidden under a silt of clothes, fast-food packaging, sweet wrappers, food residue, and saucers containing dabs of left-over cat food. The kitchen end festered under a silt of dishes and rancid food. The window to the garden was open and a succession of cats hopped in and out. The place smelled of urine, cats, and the sweetish, eye-burning odour of dirty bodies, which was also Mrs Oates’s parfum du jour.

She was a shortish woman, wide rather than fat, with dirty grey hair held back from her face by a child’s pink plastic hair-slides. She had a startling number of missing teeth, but when you saw the condition of those remaining, this seemed rather a cause for celebration than otherwise. She was dressed in a wrap-over floral cleaning overall, so amply stained it looked as if she had spent the day butchering piglets, and below the hem her tights hung in festoons on legs that disappeared into battered carpet slippers. She wore the slippers everywhere, inside the house and out in the street, and besides being stained each had a hole in the top where her big toe had poked through, on account of her never cutting her toenails, which were long and sharp enough to geld the piglets with.

‘So your Ronnie’s staying with you, then,’ Hollis said.

‘No, he ain’t. I dunno where he is,’ she said automatically. A look of cunning entered her face. ‘He’s in jail. My Ronnie’s in jail.’

‘Don’t be daft, ma. You know he came out in May. And I know he’s staying here because you’ve got the sofa bed out. Who’s sleeping on that if it’s not Ronnie?’

She looked for a costive moment at the sofa – thought did not come easily to her. The sofa was pulled out into a bed, taking up most of the space in the tiny room, and ‘made’ with a muddle of blankets and dirty sheets. Finally she said with an air of triumph, ‘I am. I’m sleeping on it.’

She looked pleased with herself for precisely the few seconds that elapsed before Hollis said, ‘Because Ronnie’s got your bed, right? He’s not in, is he, ma? Mind if I have a look?’

A door to the right led to the rest of the maisonette: a tiny hall, too small to swing a cat without killing it, with two doors, one leading to the tiny windowless bathroom – the smell in there was indescribable, and the bath was full of several years’ worth of old newspapers – and the bedroom, dominated by a double bed and an upturned plastic beer crate which served as a bedside table. Hollis only glanced into each to be sure Ronnie wasn’t there before returning to the living room.

‘So where was your Ronnie on Sunday, then, ma? This Sunday just gone.’

‘Out. He was out,’ she said quickly. ‘He weren’t here.’

‘Oh, so you can’t vouch for him, then?’ Hollis said innocently. ‘Can’t give him an alibi?’

She looked dumbfounded, but recovered to say, ‘No, that’s right, he was here all day. I ’member now. He never went out at all. He was watching telly all day, and – and – I give him fish and chips for his tea.’

Hollis was impressed with this piece of invention from a woman who was so dense that light bent round her. He needed to disarm her and get her to talk. He wished he could sit down, but he was afraid for his sanity. Instead he moved a little way from her and leaned against the wall, folding his arms, and said benignly, ‘Come on, ma, you can tell me. If he’s in trouble again, I can help you. You don’t want this to get out of hand, do you?’

She stared at him anxiously. ‘He’s a good boy, really,’ she said. ‘He never meant to hurt nobody. It was them girls that led him on. They was bad girls. Especially that last one, that Wanda. She was the one got him into trouble that last time. He’d never have thought of a thing like that. It was her what told him to do it. My Ronnie’s a good boy. It wasn’t true what they said about him in the papers.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ he said soothingly.

‘I kept ’em all,’ she said proudly, short-circuiting herself. ‘Every one what had his name in. Pages and pages there was about him. Pictures, too.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘The pictures wasn’t good of him, though. Not one good one in the ’ole lot. Wouldn’t you think newspapers could take a better picture ’n that?’

‘It’s a shame,’ Hollis said. ‘So he went out Sunday lunchtime, did he?’ It was just a guess, but it primed her all right.

‘Went down the pub for his lunch,’ she agreed, ‘but he come back after and we watched telly, and then he went off out again.’

‘Went to the fair, did he?’

‘I dunno. I dunno where he went.’

‘I heard he likes fairs.’

‘Yeah, he does. Likes the lights and the noise and all that. Waste o’ money, I call ’em. But Ronnie likes ’em. I spec he did go to the fair. Never come in till late, any ’ow, that I do know.’ In her confusion, she seemed now to think it was a good thing for him to have been out, the longer the better.

‘What time did he come home, then?’

‘I ain’t got a clock,’ she said simply. Then, ‘I was in bed.’

‘Right,’ Hollis said. From memory, she stayed up watching the television until all hours, so this wasn’t much help, except that it suggested it was well after midnight. Mind you, the old bat was so wonky she wasn’t to be trusted on anything, and it could just as well have been Monday night he was out, or a fortnight-last-Whitsun. You could never use her in court. Still, she might be right on this occasion. And if Ronnie was out Sunday night, it led to a promising area of speculation, especially as a strange-looking man had been seen wandering around the area.

He was working out his next question when there was the sound of a key in the lock and the hair stood up on the back of his neck. Ronnie had been too dopey to be dangerous the last time Hollis had seen him, but that was before he had done a stretch as a sex-offender among the high-powered criminals in Wormwood Scrubs. There was no knowing what he might have learned in there.

The door opened and he slouched in, flinging a newspaper down on the nearest surface before he registered that there was a strange man in the room with his mother. His jaw dropped, and he stared, trying to work it out.

‘Hello, Ronnie, remember me? I just dropped in to have a little chat,’ Hollis said as unalarmingly as possible.

Ronnie Oates, the Acton Strangler, was undersized and thin – though he had put on a bit more flesh with good prison feeding – and his head looked slightly too big for him. He had large, pale-blue eyes etched about with a mass of fine lines, while the rest of his face was quite smooth, which gave him the curiously old-young look which was the hint to the wary that he was of limited mental acuity. In fact, his record gave his age as thirty-four. His hair was straight, limp, and fair, but thinning on the top. His hands, like his head, seemed over-large, and hung rather uselessly at the end of his arms. He was wearing the jacket of a dark-blue suit with trousers of buff cotton, a blue T-shirt and plastic sandals. Just a glance at his clothes would tell you he wasn’t dealing from the full deck; but in fact, since he combined the IQ of a glass of water with strong sexual urges and – according to the various female victims he’d exposed himself to over the years – a johnson the size of a Lyon’s family Swiss roll, he was not quite as harmless as he looked.

‘Sergeant Hollis, Shepherd’s Bush,’ Hollis helped him out, smiling comfortably. ‘Just popped in to see how you’re getting on.’

You could almost hear the gears grinding inside Ronnie’s skull; faint wisps of blue smoke from the burning oil drifted from his ears. ‘I never done nothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me this time.’

‘Not you this time?’ Hollis said encouragingly.

‘It weren’t my fault. She wanted me to do it.’

‘Who did?’

‘That Wanda. She wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept asking me and asking me. She made me do it, Mum,’ he flung at his mother, who was watching the exchanges with her mouth partly open, like someone at a ping-pong tournament.

‘You gave her money to let you do it, Ronnie,’ Hollis reminded him.

‘She asked me for it. She asked me for money.’

Wanda Lempowski had been a prostitute, so Hollis didn’t doubt that. ‘But you shouldn’t have strangled her,’ he pointed out.

‘She said I could. She liked it. I asked her and she said I could squeeze her neck.’

‘Not as hard as that, though.’

‘I never meant to. She said she wanted it, then she started screaming, so I pressed a bit harder to stop her, and then she hit me. She hit me hard. It really hurt,’ he complained.

‘She was scared, that’s all,’ Hollis said soothingly.

‘Anyway,’ Oates said sulkily, ‘my mum said I wasn’t to do that no more.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Oates, ‘and he won’t. He promised. You won’t, will you, Ronnie? I told him he wasn’t to get it out no more, never again.’

‘That’s right, Ronnie,’ Hollis said. ‘Not unless you’re on your own in the bathroom.’

He stuck his lip out. ‘It don’t hurt ’em just showing it to ’em.’

‘But the probation man said you’re not to, Ron, never no more,’ Mrs Oates said anxiously.

‘All right, mum,’ he said irritably, and turned to Hollis. ‘Anyway, I never hurt her.’

‘Who’s that, Ron?’ Hollis asked, catching the change of tone with a quiver of interest.

‘The other night.’ He lowered his voice to keep it from his mother. ‘I was going to show her my porker. She was lying down. Maybe she was asleep, so it wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t have minded if she was asleep. I wanted to show it her. But then I never.’

‘Why not?’

‘I thought someone might come. And I’m not supposed to get it out no more.’

‘That’s right,’ Hollis said. ‘So was that on the Scrubs? By the railway embankment?’

‘Yeah, in the bushes. People go there to do it, y’know. All sorts. I like watching. I bet that’s why she was there. Like that Wanda. They’re all scrubbers, all them girls. Teasing and asking for it and making you, and then screaming.’

‘But if you squeeze their necks hard enough they can’t scream, can they?’

‘She never screamed,’ Ronnie admitted. ‘She never made a sound.’

‘I’m going to have to ask you to come with me, Ronnie,’ Hollis said gently. ‘Just to have a little chat and write down what you’ve told me.’

He looked alarmed. ‘I never done nothing! I never hurt that girl.’

‘No, of course not. I just want to have a chat where it’s comfortable, and write down what you’ve told me. Tell you what, I’ll ring the station and they can send a proper police car. You’d like a ride in a police car, wouldn’t you? With the lights and the siren going? You like the lights, don’t you?’

‘Can I ride in the front?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘We’ll see. And when we get there, you can have a nice cup of tea and some biscuits.’

‘Cake,’ he stipulated, playing hard ball.

‘All right, cake.’

‘A lot.’

‘As much as you want.’

‘Fruit cake,’ Ronnie said firmly.

You said it, Hollis thought.

When Oates had been removed, Hollis was free to search his room, loath as he was to disturb any layers in there. Apart from the signature dirty clothes, crockery, food waste and general rubbish, Ronnie’s interior decorating style was eclectic, gathering souvenirs from wherever he went. Anything he came across in the street during his wanderings was grist to his mill. Bits of wood, half a broken nameplate from someone’s front gate, several hubcaps, a washing-up bowl with a hole in the bottom, a garden gnome with a chipped nose, a cracked tea plate decorated with violets, a set of pram wheels, an umbrella whose fabric had parted from half its spokes, a wire supermarket basket, a split cricket bat. In a cardboard box in one corner there was a whole collection of bits of broken glass that had once been part of headlights and tail lights of cars that had been in collision – he must have picked them up out of the road, along with the hubcaps, from the scenes of accidents. In another box was an amazing assortment of plastic cutlery of various sizes and styles. Perhaps more sinister was a box full of Barbie dolls, every one of them damaged, some with missing arms or legs, some with missing heads, some bald, all of them battered, dirty and naked. He must have gleaned them from dustbins or perhaps rubbish tips. They lay tumbled together staring up from their box in a way that, Hollis decided in the end, was more pathetic than sinister after all.

Overall it was a weird and far from wonderful collection but there was nothing helpful there, except insofar as it confirmed that the lad had the intellect of someone who bungee jumps off low bridges. Hollis left the bed until last, from an unwillingness to discover what it was like. When finally he turned over the sheets, he found they were not only dirty but suspiciously stiff. Ronnie had evidently used a generous interpretation of the word ‘bathroom’. But reward was there for the dedicated archaeologist, for underneath the pillow he discovered a female’s handbag, pink fabric with shiny threads woven through it, small and oblong, with a thin shoulder-strap.

‘Oh, Ronnie,’ he said aloud, shaking his head in disappointment. ‘You daft pillock. It’s just no fun at all if you make it too easy.’