The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 2)

H. R. F. Keating And We in Dreams

H. R. F. Keating is the creator of Inspector Ghote of Bombay. His first Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder (1964), received the Gold Dagger of the British Crime Writers Association and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America; and The Murder of the Maharajah (1980) won his second Gold Dagger. He also received a special Edgar for his nonfiction work Sherlock Holmes, The Man and His World. “And We in Dreams” first appeared in Winter’s Crimes 15; this is the first publication in America. Mr. Keating, who reviewed crime fiction for the Times (London) for 15 years, lives in London.

Thomas Henniker nearly told his wife about the first dream as soon as he woke up. But then he didn’t.

Yet it had been so extraordinarily vivid that it had been only a last-second decision that had stopped him turning to his Mousie, Mousie lying on her back beside him as always, stiff and tall as a soldier, and, breaking the constraints of a lifetime, tapping her on the shoulder and telling her in full detail everything that had happened to him in the sleep world.

Thank goodness, he thought as he lay waiting for the alarm to go off. Thank goodness, I didn’t.

What would Mousie have thought, have said, if he had told her that, even in dream, he had coolly and deliberately begun to rob the firm? Thomas Henniker, with thirty-five years’ unswerving service to Maggesson’s Mail Order, systematically robbing them? Thomas, who as a boy had never so much as taken a sweet from the tin without permission, to have begun abstracting a huge sum from the firm that had been his employer all his working days.

Even now, he realised, he still had a small urge to say out loud the dreadful thing he had been doing. It was all so clear. Every detail was still vividly with him. Perhaps only speaking of it, thrusting it all into the clear light of day, would get rid of it, would make it vanish like a twist of fog as the rare dreams he ever had did at the shrill sound of the alarm on the table beside him.

The clock, rattling off as it always did at the exact stroke of 7:30, removed this last temptation.

Thomas swung back the bedclothes and set his little feet on the chilly floor.

But the regular bustle of his morning routine did not chase away the awful thing he had been doing in the secret hours of the night, the thing that the real Thomas Henniker, carefully shaving his red, round, chubby cheeks in front of the bathroom mirror, would never have done. Could never have done. Could never, never, never do. Still, as he brought the safety-razor smoothly down towards his chin, he could see himself sitting operating the very computer which it was his duty from time to time to work at and obeying that extraordinary voice that had seemed to come out of the console itself. Obeying the wicked instructions of that awful, wheezy, rhythmical voice, like a mouth-organ articulating, as it told him how to put money into the Zygo account.

Zygo. That name. That extraordinary name. How could he, even in sleep, have come to think it? The name that was bound to come at the very end of the series of sales-commission accounts so that, by a process he was unable to understand, it was easy to direct sums into it from hundreds of other accounts scattered up and down the country. To direct into this convenient, accessible slot all those tiny, unregarded decimal points of cash that no one was going to query. How could he have invented all that? And then the diabolical final twist. He could remember it as clearly as all the rest. The way in which you instructed the machine to take all the decimal pence that followed the memorable pounds, except for those numbering less than lo. Then no one would eventually be alerted by the fact that their account always seemed to come to an exact figure.

It was really extraordinarily clever.

Thomas Henniker nicked himself with the razor. It was something he had not done for five years at least. Probably ten.

“Thomas,” Mousie said the moment he presented himself for breakfast. “You’ve given yourself a cut. There, just at the point of your chin. How could you be so careless? Today of all days.”

What was today? Why was it “of all days”? For a moment his mind, where usually all the facts of his existence stood neatly tabulated, topsy-turvied in uncertainty. Then he remembered. This was the day that Mousie had fixed on for him to issue the dinner invitation to Mr. Watson, Mr. Watson, a good ten years his junior, who had swept effortlessly to a seat on the board and the managership of the department in which he himself had year by year climbed at last to the assistant managership. To Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson, Mrs. Watson who was rumoured among the junior staff to be an Honourable.

It had been a task he had tried to wriggle out of. But Mousie had been adamant.

“It’s no use your just being good at your work, Thomas. If you’re going to get promotion before it’s too late, you’ve got to show you’re made of the right stuff. You’ve got to show you possess savoir-faire.”

The brimming rs of her Aberdeen voice, granity like the pale grey, glittering stone of the far Northern city itself, had made a great deal of that last, scarifying French term.

And Thomas, deep within convinced he had not got savoir-faire and never could acquire it, had answered, firmly as he could, “Yes, dear.”

So today he must make himself give the invitation, despite the unsightly little dab of cottonwool on his chin. Because if he did not, somehow, get that seat on the board he would never be able to provide his Mousie at the closing of her days with the house in the Dee Valley on which she had set her heart, a house standing in its own grounds somewhere in that infinitely desirable area presided over by Balmoral Castle itself, Scottish home of Her Majesty.

And now, seated opposite him at the little table, teapot in its embroidered cosy in front of her, Mousie began to let forth a curious keening sound.

He had half-known it was bound to come at this moment, and had inwardly dreaded it. She was embarking on her favourite poem, the only poem either of them had ever spoken aloud in all the thirty years of their life together, the Canadian Boat Song.

The first time she had voiced this yearning, in the same dirgelike tones she used now, Thomas had been foolhardy enough to point out that, though Deeside did indeed fall just within the Highlands, the Hebrides were in fact on the very other side of Scotland. He had not come top in geography at school for nothing.

But he had long ago learnt that when his Mousie keened out these words in this manner they merited only the tribute of silence.

And now that tribute earned him an unexpected reward.

“Perhaps, Thomas,” his wife said, lifting the teapot, “you had better leave asking the Watsons till tomorrow. I don’t know what he might think of you, going up to him looking like that.”

“Yes, Mousie,” Thomas said.

And off he went to work, not a minute late, not a minute early. He never was. But when in the course of his duties he had to enter some information on the computer a tiny sweat broke out all along the top of his chubby shoulders as he sat down at the console. He could remember exactly what that wheezing, rhythmical, mouth-organ voice had instructed him to do.

Later, over his solitary lunch, he thought about it. Somehow, he reasoned, he must have acquired the information necessary to carry out that appalling scheme without having realised it. When he had first been shown how to use the computer he had not bothered himself with anything more than he would need to know to give it such new instructions as might from time to time be required. If he had been told any of the theory behind the practicalities he had ignored it. Or so he had thought. But perhaps some of it had stuck. And then, too, he had always been good at figures. He could remember his father, when he was no more than eight or nine, saying, after they had been playing some arithmetic game as the three of them had sat at Sunday dinner, “Mother, that boy’s got a real head for figures. He’s going to go far one of these days.” It had been one of the proudest moments of his life.

But he had never thought it would lead him to this. To this terrible knowledge that he seemed to have acquired from nowhere.

For all the rest of that day he forced himself to concentrate ferociously on his work. And at home in the evening there was luckily a good documentary on television which helped keep his mind off the awful thought and when that was over they watched the news as usual and then set about their customary evening chores getting to bed exactly at eleven as they always did.

But no sooner had he put out the bedside light and settled down on his pillow than the voice that had wheezed and commanded in his sleep the night before came back into his mind exactly as he had heard it. It was like a belch recalling the flavour of a meal eaten hours earlier. And it left an equally sour feeling in his stomach.

Surely he was not going to dream that dream again? It took him a great deal longer than usual to get to sleep. Each time he had felt himself dropping off the voice he had thrust out of his mind began sounding there again and he had had to force himself into wakefulness to dispel it.

Yet at last he did get off. Only to be woken by the clatter of the alarm with all that sequence of events doubly clear in his head. In sleep the voice had led him along the same path again, in every appalling detail.

He did not cut himself shaving. But at breakfast he found himself putting a strange proposition to his Mousie.

“Dear, I’ve been thinking,” he said.

He had not. He had not had the faintest notion of what he was about to say until he had begun to speak.

“Dear, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps when it comes to our holiday we ought to give Bournemouth a miss this year and instead...”

He paused. It was a monstrous idea that had come to him.

“Well, what about us taking a trip up to Scotland? To Deeside? We could look at some properties. Spy out the lie of the land.”

Mousie’s granite face broke into one of its rare smiles. It was as if the sun had glinted out in her native Aberdeen and the grey old buildings had suddenly sparkled with a hundred thousand little points of light.

“Oh, Thomas,” she said.

The rest of breakfast passed without her mentioning that, undabbed by cottonwool now, he ought to invite the Watsons. And she did not even telephone during the course of the day, though she was always a great one for ringing with little reminders. It was something that deeply embarrassed him, though he had never spoken of it.

But his day was not happy. Every time he had occasion to use the computer the thought of that twice repeated dream came crowding back to him. And with it came the sombre realization that he had actually begun, as if he were delicately dipping a toe into cold water, to consider the possibility of carrying out the plan. Why else, he asked himself, had he made that suggestion to Mousie? At his present salary and with his actual prospects he would never be able to afford the sort of house Mousie wanted in the area he had proposed going to. What had entered into him? What was happening?

That night as he dropped his head on to his pillow he was not in the least surprised to find himself recalling the voice of the tempter. He almost welcomed it, and fell asleep as quickly as ever he had.

And dreamt the dream once more, heard once again that curious name Zygo, was instructed in the way this last place in the computer’s series could be used for his gain.

Buffeted to and fro in the crowded tube train on his way to the office next morning, he somehow found that he had decided that he was going to set up the Zygo operation. Of course, he told himself, there was no question of opening a bank account in the name of a non-existent commission agent called Zygo so as to draw out any actual cash. He was just going to see if the whole complex routine he now knew so well worked.

Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it was “all a dream.” And, even if he did succeed in transferring all those few, scarcely wanted pennies into the Zygo slot, well, without a bank to put the money into he would not truly have stolen anything.

It worked all right. Just before the end of the day he requested from the computer, to which he had devoted a quiet half-hour almost as soon as he had got in, the figure for the balance in the last place in the sales-commission series. And up it came. A hundred and fifty-seven pounds, forty pence. It was no fortune. But it had shown that the scheme worked. And, unless at the first opportunity he undid that careful half-hour’s work of the morning, with each day that passed a similar sum would accrue to the Zygo account.

On his way home, walking from the station, Thomas Henniker found he was calculating how many working-days would be needed to put into the Zygo account an amount large enough to acquire for his Mousie her dream house. He worked out that, as it so happened, the period would take him neatly to the date at the end of the following year when he could take an early retirement.

It was a very different situation from wondering, as he had been accustomed to do, whether the firm would allow him to soldier on past the usual retirement age in the hope, probably vain, that in that way he might accumulate enough at last to buy some sort of a house just outside Aberdeen.

He gave himself a little shake. Of course, there could be no question of an early retirement.

But, when he reached home and Mousie began at once to talk about their Deeside holiday, he came out, chirpy as a parrot, with a broad hint that his investments, in reality pitifully small and painfully cautious, had been doing surprisingly well and that an early retirement was something they might well be thinking about.

Mousie made no further reference to entertaining the Watsons either that evening or in the days that followed. And at night Thomas did not in his sleep hear again the wheezing, insistent voice.

He did not need to. He had begun to accumulate his retirement fund. Somehow he had crossed his Rubicon while he was, so to speak, looking over his shoulder at the distant view. Only occasionally, as the weeks went by, did he find it necessary to comfort himself with the thought that he had not yet opened a bank account in the name of Zygo and that theoretically Maggesson’s Mail Order had not yet been robbed.

September came, and with it his holiday. (He always took this late since he felt it only fair to let members of the staff with children, though junior to him, have July and August.) Up and down the length of Deeside he and Mousie roamed, looking at every house on the market.

In the end they found a place that seemed ideal. It had been empty for a good while and they were told there was no hurry to put down the fairly large deposit required.

That night in bed Mousie recited her verse of the Canadian Boat Song, but with a triumphant rather than a keening note in her voice. First thing next morning Thomas slipped away “for a walk” and drew out a good sum from his own bank account and in a different bank opened an account in the name of John Zygo. He thought, as he signed the necessary forms, that John sounded a good honest forename.

Back at work, at the very first opportunity he requested from the computer the balance in the last in the series of sales-commission accounts. He had not made such a request after his first confirmatory one, but now he wanted to know just how much there was in the Zygo account that by writing one single cheque he could get into his hands. He imagined that, in fact, it would be about a quarter of the total needed for the house, quite enough to cover the deposit.

In moments the figure he wanted appeared.

He looked at it in astonishment, blinked, looked again, felt an overwhelming sense of puzzlement blossom in his head like a cloud of exploding dust.

The figure was only three hundred and twenty-four pounds, twenty pence.

It could not be right. Feverishly, with sweat-slippery fingers, he requested the information again. And got the same answer. Had the computer made a mistake? But computers never make mistakes. There is only human error.

He found it so difficult to concentrate when he got back to his desk that, after two more vain visits to the computer console, he went to Mr. Watson and said he felt indisposed and wanted to go home.

Walking slowly to the tube and on the train and walking slowly from the station, Thomas battered at his brain to seek some explanation of what had gone wrong. He could think of nothing. He had faithfully carried out the directions the mouth-organ voice had given him in those three successive dreams. He could not have forgotten a single detail. He was not accustomed to making mistakes. Never in all the years he had been with the firm, even when he had just been a youngster, had anyone ever found an error in his work.

But now something had gone wrong, wildly wrong. And he could not, could not, think what it was.

He sat miserably all that evening, puzzling and puzzling. But he had so little knowledge of computer theory, beyond that which he had so mysteriously acquired, that he could think of no conceivable explanation. Mousie, who had been astonished at his early return, and disappointed, began at last to express concern. She talked of telephoning the doctor, but he dissuaded her. At last he agreed to take a small hot toddy and go early to bed.

On the way upstairs, still puzzling, still acutely miserable, an idea came to him. Perhaps already the heated fumes of his little tot of whisky had penetrated his brain.

Could he possibly get in contact again with that voice inside the computer console? Could he dream that dream once more? Then, surely, the answer to this terrible snag would be given him. Then he could resume operations, take out of the Zygo account the sum necessary for the deposit on Mousie’s dream house and be back on the rosy path once more.

Hastily he got into his pyjamas, turned down the bedspread and slid beneath the covers. He flung his chubby head on to the pillow passionately as any lover and sought to bring back to his memory the exact tones of that wonderful, wheezy, commanding voice.

He felt he had got it straight away. On those three miraculous nights months earlier it had made such an impression on him that he could not forget it.

But, though he was sure he was recalling the voice perfectly correctly, sleep did not come. His mind tossed and jumbled excitedly and he stayed blindingly awake. An hour later when Mousie came up he was still wide-eyed. She advised aspirin and he swallowed down two tablets gratefully. Surely they would make him go to sleep.

They did, eventually. But he did not dream. Or if he did, the shrilling of the alarm clock in the morning dispersed his visions as completely as it had done in the days before he had dreamt the Dreams.

He went into work, and by taking a firm hold of himself managed to get through the day. He made no further attempts to ascertain the balance in the last in the series of sales-commission accounts. He knew that he would only get the answer he had got each time the day before, that ridiculous three hundred and twenty-four pounds, twenty pence.

Back at home, he began to put into operation a carefully thought-out programme designed to make himself sleep like a log. He went out into the garden and did some vigorous, but quite unnecessary, digging. He ate more than he usually did, but took the greatest care to chew everything even more thoroughly than was his custom so as to avoid the least possibility of indigestion. He asked Mousie to make him a hot drink last thing.

When he got to bed he fell asleep almost before he had brought to his conscious mind once more the authoritative, mouth-organ tones. But in dream-land he never got anywhere near his familiar computer console.

Night after night now he tried the same routine. The vegetable beds at the bottom of the garden became so well tilled they resembled a row of little sandy beaches. Mousie expressed anxiety about him getting fat as he chewed his way through heavy meal after heavy meal. And she had to buy a new tin of Ovaltine a whole fortnight earlier than usual. But night after night Thomas was unable to persuade the voice he so easily conjured up while still awake to stay with him in sleep.

Soon from constant worry, despite his hearty evening meals, he began to lose weight and at last Mousie ordered him off to the doctor. There, with a cunning he had not known he possessed, he told a tale about sleeplessness and was rewarded with a supply of pills. But even their narcotic effect could not get him back to that distant, tantalising place where the answer to his problem lay.

Each single night that haven, once visited on three successive occasions with such ease, defied his best efforts to reach it. And after a little Mousie began to take his new haggard look for granted. She ceased plaguing him about his health and began instead to plague him about her future.

Why had he not put down the deposit on the house on Deeside, she asked. It was bound to be snapped up. It was such a desirable property. He managed to produce excuses. Wrapping things up as much as he could in financial jargon, he made out that this was a particularly bad time to realise investments. If they waited just a little longer they would have a great deal more for the eventual purchase price.

But he was not able to put her off for long, and when she returned to the subject she had remembered in detail all his arguments and questioned him sharply about whether the situation had got better. He had a hard time proving to her that it had not.

Next day on the way back from the office a desperate expedient occurred to him. He stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of whisky. He sneaked it into the house under his raincoat and in the privacy of the lavatory at odd moments took swigs from it in an effort to get drunk, a state he had never been in before during the whole of his life.

By bedtime the bottle was still more than half full and, though he felt swimmy, he knew himself not to be as removed into another state as he believed he needed to be. He made one final visit to the lavatory, ignoring Mousie’s asking whether he was “upset,” and there manfully swallowed down a whole third of the bottle of stinging stuff. He sat there for a little afterwards and when he got to his feet realised that at last he was well and truly affected. Holding hard to the bannister he made his way upstairs. But he had hardly got half way when sudden nausea overwhelmed him and he had to go helter-skelter down again to be comprehensively sick.

Wan and washed out, he toiled his way to bed. But it was all he could do once his head was safely on the pillow to recite inwardly the briefest of wheezed-out litanies.

He woke next morning with a sharp headache and not the least recollection of any instructions received in the sleep-sodden hours.

Next weekend, when Mousie again asked him about his investments and keened out once more, as she did most days now, that her heart was Highland, he quarrelled with her.

He was unable to get to sleep till past 2 A.M. that night, and lay cursing himself for the dream-hours being uselessly wasted.

When he did get off, he dreamt that he was in the office. But he was nowhere near the computer. Instead Mr. Watson was inviting him to meet his wife but telling him he could not possibly do so in the clothes he was wearing. He looked down at himself. He was naked.

He woke before the alarm clanged out. He was sweating. And he felt more tantalised than ever.

Three days afterwards he told Mousie he did not think the purchase of a house as old as the one in the Dee Valley was wise. He brought out a whole string of facts, and some fancies, about dry rot, drainage, roof repairs and landslip. She listened to him in grim silence.

Without another word being spoken that night they retired to bed and Thomas forgot, for the first time since his trouble had begun, to bring to his conscious mind the rhythmic sound of the mouth-organ voice.

And in the night it told him what had gone wrong. The dream came back, and with it the answer. It was laughably simple. Almost as soon as he had invented the Zygo slot a new agent had been taken on somewhere by the firm with a name that happened to begin with letters further on in the alphabet than Zygo.

The voice had gone on to wheeze out at him the necessary instructions for overcoming this absurd hold-up. All that he had to do was to open another account under a name with letters yet later than the newcomer’s and then transfer the sum in the Zygo account to this fresh one.

He woke with everything once more magically clear in his head.

For a little while the problem of finding what letters would be sufficiently late to make sure of obtaining that last place in the computer series worried him. Until now he would have bet, only he had never been a betting man, that Zygo was as far along as anyone could get. But in the jostle of the tube a solution occurred to him. He felt a little jounce of pride. Here was something he had worked out entirely by himself, without the least prompting from the wheezy, commanding voice. And it was ingenious, most ingenious.

As soon as he got to his desk he took an internal memorandum form and boldly addressed it to the Chairman of the company. In it he suggested that a good advertising campaign might be run on the lines of We cater for everybody from A to Z and that the names of the agents who at present headed and ended their whole roll might be quoted.

He waited, patiently as he could, for a reply. That night he did not dream again that he was at the computer console. But he took this as a good sign. He had been told all that he needed to know and he was doing what he had been instructed to do. All was well.

It was, too. Next day he received an internal memorandum initialled by the Chairman himself. It warmly welcomed his suggestion. Thomas felt that, if he had still been concerned about a seat on the board, he would have taken a big step forward. Of course, the Chairman said, it would be necessary to obtain the permission of Mrs. Veronica Absolam and of Mr. Joseph Zzaman, “a new recruit, I find,” to use their names, but this doubtless would be a formality.

So delighted was Thomas with this neat confirmation of how in the race to the end of the alphabet he had been, as it were, pipped at the post that immediately another bright idea came to him. One that could be put to the test at once.

He marched over to the corner of the main office where the London telephone directories were kept and turned to their very last page. And, yes, there was a name even later than Zzaman. It was Zzitz.

Well, Mr. Zzitz was going to acquire a brother. Who would open a sales-commission account with Maggesson’s Mail Order this very day, and a bank account too. Mr. John Zzitz, was he that? No. No, he would be Mr. Adam Zzitz. The old Adam would rise up, and bring him luck.

He left the directories, put Mr. Adam Zzitz into the computer and then went to Mr. Watson’s office and told him that he feared another of his “attacks” was coming on and he thought he had better go home. At the tube station he bought a ticket for the first remote suburb that came into his head and there opened the Zzitz bank account.

To avoid awkward questions from Mousie he spent the rest of the day in a cinema near the bank, seeing the film nearly twice over and not taking in a word of it. When he got back he gave Mousie his customary peck on her somewhat leathery cheek and told her without much preliminary that he had been talking on the phone to one of their Scottish agents and had managed to turn the conversation to the subject of house purchase. He had heard, he said, some rather good news.

“Places in Scotland in the days when our house was put up were built to last, you know. They’re solid. Good foundations. Won’t fall down like a house of cards.”

He was rewarded with one of Mousie’s granite-gleaming smiles.

At the office next morning he told Mr. Watson that he was quite recovered. “Never felt fitter really,” he said cheerfully. “Never fitter in my life. And, you know, I think that’s a good reason to take my retirement early. While I can still enjoy things. So I shall be going, not perhaps at the end of next year, but by the following midsummer. Yes, certainly by then.”

Mr. Watson raised his eyebrows.

“Indeed? And — ahem — your pension, will it be adequate for all your needs, somewhat reduced as it will be?”

“I have some investments. In fact, I’ve been rather lucky with them, if I may say so.”

Mr. Watson sighed.

Thomas, ending the conversation, went straight to the computer console. He sat down at it and began tapping the keys, if anything more businesslike and deliberate than usual.

Tap, tap, tap... The small balance in the new third-from-last Zygo account was transferred to the very end slot in the series and duly showed up there on request, three hundred and twenty-four pounds, twenty pence. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap... And the Zzitz account was ready to receive all the little unnoticed tail-ends from the accounts of every Maggesson agent and customer, sums that would amount to more or less a hundred and fifty pounds a day. By perhaps the following April they would total enough to cover the deposit on the Deeside house, a sum he had told Mousie, lying to her directly for almost the first time in all the years of their marriage, that had been paid already, but which the accommodating estate agent in Aberdeen had told him could be safely delayed for several months more. Then, quietly gobbling its little daily bites, the Adam Zzitz account would by the time his slightly postponed early retirement date came round have accumulated the whole purchase price of the place where Mousie’s Highland heart could find rest at last.

His ten minutes’ work at the console over, Thomas went back to his duties. He performed them with all his customary quiet efficiency.

And so he continued to do, past Christmas, noisily celebrated in the office, quietly celebrated at home, past the New Year — he first-footed the house carrying in his traditional Scots piece of shining black coal at two minutes past midnight, as he had always done — and into the Spring.

He decided towards the end of March that April the first would be a suitable day on which to complete the preliminary stage of the business. All Fools Day. He experienced at that moment a flowing jet of contempt for the whole hierarchy of Maggesson’s Mail Order which simultaneously shocked and exhilarated him.

And on April the first just before noon, he went to the computer console and requested the total in the Zzitz account. He was not in the least surprised when this time, it amounted to a sum quite large enough to cover the deposit on the house. He tapped out certain further instructions, hardly having to think about what he was doing so embedded in his mind were the necessary sequences. Then, glancing round to make sure no other member of staff was within easy sight of his desk, he took from his briefcase his so far unused Adam Zzitz cheque book and made out a cheque payable to Thomas Henniker for the exact amount of the deposit on the house, safe in the checked and re-checked knowledge that already, thanks to the swiftness of electronic instruction, the credit would have gone from Maggesson’s Mail Order to the imaginary Mr. Zzitz. Next from the briefcase he extracted two already stamped and addressed envelopes, one first-class directed to his bank, one second-class directed to the Aberdeen estate agents. He put the cheque for himself in the former, a cheque from himself in the latter and carefully sealed each one.

Then, although his lunch-hour was not for another fifty minutes, he got up from his desk and walked out of the building and round the corner to a post-box. He slipped the letters one by one into the appropriate slots.

It was done.

He turned and walked back towards the office, his steps a little slower now than their usual brisk trot.

Yes, he thought, finally I have gone past the place where there was any turning back. Yes, I am a criminal now. A criminal.

But he felt no shame.

Instead a feeling of high pride possessed him.

I am Man the hunter, he thought. I have provided for my mate. I have gone out and seized my prey. Yes.

At the entrance to the office young Mr. Francis, the firm’s newest employee, was waiting for him. Hair appallingly long, of course, but nowadays what else could you expect?

“Telephone for you, Mr. Henniker. I believe it’s Mrs. Henniker.”

The boy wore a hint of an impudent smile. No doubt they had been gossiping to him already about Mousie’s habit of phoning with little reminders.

“Very well. I’ll take it directly.”

He went to his desk and picked up the receiver.

“Yes, dear? It’s me.”

“Thomas, Thomas.”

She sounded odd. Very odd. Shaken far out of her usual granite composure. Was she ill? She had, now he came to think of it, hardly uttered a single word at breakfast.

“Mousie, are you well?” he asked, totally forgetting to drop his voice as he said her name, a practice he had learned to adopt ever since he had once heard a giggle behind him.

“Yes, I’m well, Thomas. Perfectly well. But...”

“Yes? Yes? What is it? You don’t sound at all—”

“Thomas, I had a dream last night.”

“A dream? Did you say a dream? But you never dream.”

“Thomas, I am telling you. I had a dream. A singular and horribly vivid dream. I dreamt I was warned by my poor dead mother in Aberdeen, solemnly warned, that if I ever set foot in Scotland again I should die. Thomas, I know that was a message. From beyond the grave. Thomas, we must not complete the purchase of the house. We must not, Thomas. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, dear,” said Thomas Henniker.