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she'd locked the door while she cleaned up around us. Anyway, after I'd finished I looked up to see Stinx and Jaz regarding me with glittering, storm-holed eyes. I'd either impressed or bored them into silence.

    Stinx, slobbering slightly, dug an eagle's claw into my shoulder and one into Jaz's shoulder and gripped both hard. "It's all right, boys," he snarled, mashing his words. "Because we're falling togiver ."

     

    And fall together we had. Over the last two years or more, meeting up once a fortnight pretty much without fail. There's fidelity for you. We were what those eighties feminists kitted out in humorous dungarees used to term a support group , except we never used to call it that. It was a drinking club, an eating club, and some evenings it was a laugh-until-the snot-comes-down-your-nose club. Say what you like, we were a spiritual salve for each other.

    When Lucy came back to Stinx, Diamond Jaz and I waited with trepidation and then with relief as we attended their "re-marriage" ceremony and knees-up. Meanwhile Stinx and I watched, with the kind of horrified fascination that you might have for someone juggling two or three buzzing chainsaws, as Jaz passed through one relationship after another. And they attended, like a pair of anxious parents, to my utter failure to recover from Fay; even setting up from time to time—God help me and the poor women involved—dates of a romantic nature.

    But here he was, reduced or returned to the state in which I'd found him that first evening in The Pineapple. His resort to drugs—I don't even know what crystal meth is, but it doesn't sound like something anyone with a moderate interest in mental stability would want to grapple with—was desperate, because Stinx had a historical affiliation with pharmaceuticals. It was a serious threat to our forgery project. Though I was more concerned with Stinx's state of mind than the project, except of course where it might cause problems for Antonia and GoPoint.

    "She left you? Lucy left you? When?"

    "Night afore last. No, the one before that. I've sorta lost one night."

    "You could have called me."

    "I tried. No answer. Tried to call Diamond, too, but he's in fucking New York modelling cashmere scarves with Ground Zero as a backdrop, I ask you."

    "Get your coat." I said. "Come and stay at my place."

    "No, mate, I've got this job to finish."

    "It can wait."

    "No, it can't. I've already put you behind. I can't let you down William. I can't. Nor can I let down those boys and girls."

    "Is it going to work out? The two copies, I mean. Six vols in total, isn't it?"

    "It's not like it's twice the work. I'll have to finesse a few differences between the two. Spine and edges. Joints and stuff. But I'll 'ave it for you. Work through the night. And the next night."

    Stinx made it sound easy but I knew he proceeded sheet by sheet. He was a master forger. Originally an accomplished bookbinder, Stinx had been called to make restorative work on some old books that had suffered water damage after a cellar flood. He'd quickly grasped that between restoration and reproduction there are several grey areas. This work was child's play compared with some of the things he'd done in his colourful life.

    "Want me to stay over? Do the coffee? Marmite on toast?"

    "You sling your hook, mate. You got work in the morning."

    He was already turning away from me, digging his hand under the back of his collar, surveying his workshop. I decided to leave him to it. But before I left I saw something skitter under a workshop bench. I thought I saw tiny black eyes watching me. I decided to say nothing to Stinx.

    The door to his workshop faced one of those steel industrial cage elevators still working from the days when the building was a warehouse. He followed me out and opened the cage for me.

    "Call me," I said, "if crystal meth comes knocking."

    He pointed a gnarled, golden finger at me as the cage began to descend. "Be lucky,