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programme in the series before I decide anything. That is mere good sense, isn’t it? And how was your day?’
    â€˜Admin chores.’
    â€˜Tasker?’
    â€˜Of course, I have people looking at that.’
    â€˜I gave my own mind to it for a while.’
    â€˜Did you, Gerald?’
    â€˜I wonder if you’ve thought about the significance of the playground.’
    â€˜In what sense?’
    â€˜It’s a place for children, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Certainly.’
    â€˜Tasker gets arranged there, like a child. Are they telling the world he was stupidly, childishly naive? Perhaps this is not the kind of insight that would come to police officers. It’s a revelation from a different kind of mind. Not necessarily a better kind of mind. One doesn’t claim that. No, indeed. Different. An artist’s mind. A mind that is used to dealing with the thematic, the intrinsic, rather than the obvious – a mind that can hear the unspoken – the unspoken but very present. Look, I don’t mind if you present this idea as your own to colleagues, Esther.’
    â€˜That’s a true kindness, Gerald.’

Four
    Larry Edgehill thought things could get worse – knew things would get worse, had already started to get worse. On-screen – on-screen! – on-screen Priscilla Sandine, a panellist, say twenty-six or -seven, puts all her big, insistent and vibrant charms towards Rupert Bale, chairman for the night, and, God, does he respond!
    Well, fine in different circumstances and with different people. But . . . But! But Rupert Bale is apparently promised, or something like that, to Dione Pellotte. Here, in view of millions, on Larry’s programme, A Week in Review , Sandine and Bale ferociously sparkle and brilliantly, almost rampantly, interlock. Adrian Pellotte will not care for this, and, of course, he’ll be watching. Isn’t the programme a favourite of his and Dean Feston’s – their staple? And probably even more so now, because of Dione’s link with Rupe. Link? Would tonight’s show make Pellotte wonder how reliable that link was, and how reliable was Rupe? It could be very bad when Pellotte didn’t care for something and when he began to wonder. Think of the journalist, Gervaise Manciple Tasker, who’d probably offended Pellotte by poking into his life – possibly including Dione’s life – now dead in undetermined circumstances. Some of the circumstances. Not the playground slide.
    A Week in Review always went out live. Tom Marland usually directed, with Edgehill in overall charge. In the hospitality suite, pre-programme, Edgehill had noticed Rupert Bale on the other side of the room, alone and with a glass of what might be orange juice. He looked troubled. If difficulties with Adrian Pellotte hovered anyone might look troubled.
    Pellotte had been a frightener for years. Since the death of Tasker his name commandeered even stronger scare elements. True, the death, as far as Edgehill knew, had never been officially connected with Pellotte, although gossip said two of his people – Dean Feston and a woman called Cornish – were hauled in, then released. Official connections were not the only ones. How about un official? How about guesswork? How about wise suspicion?
    So, did Pellotte difficulties hover over Rupe? Perhaps, after all, Pellotte would grow to like the notion of his daughter partnered by a television star, even a television star who looked like Rupe and lived on Temperate. Perhaps, yes. Perhaps. There’d better be no messing with Dione by Rupe, though. And Pellotte and Rupe might take different views on what amounted to messing.
    Would Pellotte and Dean have a ‘note’ on Bale? This would probably be a big priority when a man started something with Pellotte’s daughter: one of Dean’s top-grade fact trawls. Edgehill wondered whether he, himself, looked troubled, following the