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too. Markov, you might as well leave the invitation…’
    Jippy smiled broadly. Markov smiled broadly.
    ‘In your left pocket, I think you’ll find, Lindy,’ Markov said, opening her front door, exiting fast and shutting it with a smart click.
    Lindsay had forgotten Jippy’s other skills: his sleight of hand, his conjuring tricks, his ability to convey solid matter from that place of concealment to this. She put her hand disbelievingly into the pocket of her jacket. It closed over the pink, mirror-writing invitation to a party. She still had no intention of going, she told herself, and over the next two intervening weeks she constantly reminded herself of this.
    The two weeks were active ones. During them, she discovered something unpleasant: she began to realize just how much she missed her son, and how much she missed the daily tussle of wills provided in the past by the presence of her difficult mother. She missed Gini and her husband Pascal; other friends, and one in particular, were also away from London during this period, and Lindsay, returning to her familiar apartment after work, realized with a sense of panic that these much-loved rooms could feel lonely, not only on Sundays, but on weekday evenings as well.
    So, when it finally came to Hallowe’en, and the last day of her spiritual antibiotic course, Lindsay weakened. Invitations to Lulu’s parties, she had heard, were much in demand. Lulu was famous for her parties. Lindsay, a social cynic, placed little faith in such claims, or in parties. On the evening in question, however, she discovered she had decided to go after all; a mysterious process. In the shower, she was still undecided; wrapped in a towel five minutes later, her mind was made up.
    She threw on a red partyish dress, hated it, pulled it off, kicked it across the room and donned a black one. She screwed into place the prettiest ear-rings she possessed, which had been given to her by Gini as a parting gift: two teardrops of pale jade which seemed to have been imbued with an animation of their own, so that they shimmered or trembled before she made the least gesture or the slightest turn of her head.
    She ran up and down stairs in stockinged feet as darkness fell and her front doorbell kept ringing. She gave a bar of chocolate to a diminutive witch and her brother the hangman. She gave a tube of sweets to a werewolf, and some Turkish delight to a covey of skeletons from next door, escorted by a lugubrious father with an axe through his head. She was forestalled by a gorilla and a ghoul when finally leaving, and lacking sweets or small change, thrust a five pound note into the startled gorilla’s fur-paw. The gorilla and the ghoul she noted, fought a brief battle for possession of this prize in the middle of the street.
    Then, over an hour and a half late, and thoroughly rattled, she set off in her small car eastwards. Lindsay was a bad driver, and her sense of direction was dysfunctional. This fact had often been remarked upon, amiably and laconically, by Rowland McGuire. Even in his absence, Lindsay was determined to prove him wrong. She failed; as she had predicted, she lost herself in the dark streets of Docklands almost at once.

III
    ‘…T HE THAMES,’ LINDSAY SAID , raising her voice and peering upwards at the white, bloodless face of a complete stranger, an exceedingly tall, vampiric and emaciated man, whose features she could only just see through candle smoke, cigarette smoke, and some peculiar foggy density to the air, apparent throughout this vast and crowded room, but especially dense in this area, to which she had been bobbed, tossed and cast like so much flotsam and jetsam.
    ‘What? What did you say?’
    The pale man had backed against a pillar, towards which he too had been tossed some moments before. Jammed against his right elbow, was a shorter, fatter man with a ponytail, who was waving a glass in one hand, and a large prawn in the other. This man was haranguing a satellite