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this. Was there a special set of code words? Was he going to have to bribe someone?
    The clerk was a puffy, spotty youth, no good advertisement for the health-giving properties of the spa and pool advertised on the wall above him. He looked like a pig who had just been told that he should put an apple in his mouth, lie down on a baking tray, and not make any long-range plans or start any long books.
    Daniel walked up to the desk and said, ‘Hi, Nige,’ to the clerk and the clerk said, ‘Hi, Daniel,’ and his whole face lit up. Who would have thought that sullen porcine face could smile like that? He didn’t look any less like a pig, but he looked like a very happy pig, a piggy to whom endless carrots and mash have been vouchsafed. I have always had a soft spot for pigs. Daniel laid down the photograph.
    ‘Seen him?’
    ‘You know,’ said the boy, ‘I reckon I have. I reckon so.’
    ‘Staying here?’
    ‘You know I can’t tell you that,’ whined Nige. He shot a glance at a woman with a thick blonde plait who was peacefully entering a column of figures into a database. She was not looking at the desk. Supervisor, I thought. I moved so that I was blocking her view of the good little piggy at the desk.
    ‘Name of Chapman,’ said Daniel persuasively. ‘I know he was here, Nige, I just want to know when.’
    ‘You’ll get me into trouble,’ warned Nige, flicking fingers over the computer terminal at the desk. What happened to the good old days of a nice big leather-bound book which anyone could read if they distracted the clerk?
    ‘No, Nige, I get you out of trouble,’ said Daniel jovially. That was an interesting comment. Nige flushed as red as a sunburnt Blandings White and found the entry. ‘In on the second, out again the next night,’ said Nige. ‘Says here, asked to leave. Paid cash.’
    ‘Who asked him to leave?’ Daniel enquired. Nige nodded towards the woman with the plait and I moved over to converse with her.
    She was as thin as a lath, as Grandma Chapman would have said. Certainly, I’d seen fatter laths. This might be a problem. Some thin women react to me as I once reacted to standing on a slug with a bare foot — a sort of revolted, retching, amazed disgust. It’s very hurtful. I once had to have an X-ray in a clinic, and the attendant who dragged me around on the glass plate handled me as if I was half a ton of decayed elephant flesh. The blonde woman’s hair was the only rounded thing about her. Her fingers were like claws, her collarbones contained not just salt cellars but coal buckets, and her cheeks were hollow, as though she had no teeth. On her bony wrist was a green rubber band. This she snapped incessantly, the elastic slapping against her reddened skin.
    I took a breath. ‘Hello,’ I said as pleasantly as I could, holding up the picture. ‘This is my father, who has … psychiatric problems. He’s gone missing and I’m worried about him. I know he stayed here on the second, and someone threw him out the next day. Can you tell me why, perhaps?’
    Bethany — according to the name tag on her nonexistent bosom — was a brave person. Although I stood there representing everything of which she was most afraid, she answered politely, though she never looked directly at me.
    ‘Have you some ID?’ she asked.
    I handed over my driver’s licence. She winced a bit at the picture on it. Then she twiddled a few keys on her computer.
    ‘It just says “inappropriate behaviour”,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what sort. Sorry.’
    ‘Maybe someone made a complaint?’ I suggested. Inappropriate behaviour was all too likely from someone who had spent the last thirty years in a mud-brick slum.
    Bethany tapped again. ‘Yes,’ she said. She paused, trying to spare my feelings, which was nice of her but not helpful. My feelings weren’t involved. ‘She wasn’t hurt, you understand, just a bit shocked, and really I think the only reason she reported it was in case he did it again