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is, perhaps if you were to put in a good word, reassure the owners that I’m not the sort of person to go dropping rubbish in their home?’
    ‘Well . . .’ She frowned, considering. ‘The castle is a joy to behold, and there’s no one as proud of her perch as Miss Percy . . . Publishing, you say?’
    It had been an inadvertent stroke of brilliance: Mrs Bird belonged to a generation for whom those words held a sort of Fleet Street glamour; never mind my poky, paper-strewn cubicle and rather sobering balance sheets. I seized upon this opportunity as a drowning person might a raft: ‘Billing & Brown Book Publishers, Notting Hill.’ I remembered then the business cards Herbert had presented at my little promotion party. I never think to carry them with me, not in an official way, but they come in very handy as bookmarks and I was thus able to whip one out from the copy of Jane Eyre I keep in my tote in case I need to queue unexpectedly. I tendered it like the winning lottery ticket.
    ‘Vice Chairman,’ read Mrs Bird, eyeing me over her glasses. ‘Well, indeed.’ I don’t think I imagined the new note of veneration in her voice. She thumbed the corner of the business card, tightened her lips, and gave a short nod of decision. ‘All right. Give me a minute and I’ll telephone the old dears. See if I can’t convince them to let me show you round this afternoon.’
    While Mrs Bird spoke hushed words into an old-fashioned phone receiver, I sat in a chintz-upholstered chair and opened the brown paper package containing my new books. I slipped out the shiny copy of the Mud Man and turned it over. It was true what I’d said: in one way or another my encounter with Raymond Blythe’s story had determined my entire life. Just holding it in my hands was enough to fill me with an all-encompassing sense of knowing precisely who I was.
    The cover design of the new edition was the same as that on the West Barnes library’s copy Mum had borrowed almost twenty years before, and I smiled to myself, vowing to buy a Jiffy bag and post it to them just as soon as I got home. Finally, a twenty-year debt would be repaid. For when my mumps subsided and it was time to return the Mud Man to Miss Perry the book, it seemed, had vanished. No amount of furious searching on Mum’s part and impassioned declarations of mystification on mine, managed to turn it up, not even in the wasteland of missing things beneath my bed. When all avenues of search had been exhausted, I was marched up to the library to make my barefaced confession. Poor Mum earned one of Miss Perry’s withering stares and almost died of shame, but I was too emboldened by the delicious glory of possession to suffer guilt. It was the first and only time I’ve ever stolen, but there was no help for it; quite simply, that book and I belonged to one another.
    Mrs Bird’s phone receiver met the cradle with a plastic clunk and I jumped a little. By the tug of her features I gathered instantly that the news was bad. I stood and limped to the counter, my left foot numb with pins and needles.
    ‘I’m afraid one of the Blythe sisters isn’t well today,’ said Mrs Bird.
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘The youngest has had a turn and the doctor’s on his way out to see her.’
    I worked to conceal my disappointment. There was something very unseemly about a show of personal frustration when an old lady had been taken ill. ‘That’s terrible. I hope she’s all right.’
    Mrs Bird waved my concern away like a harmless but pesky fly. ‘I’m sure she will be. It’s not the first time. She’s suffered episodes since she was a girl.’
    ‘Episodes?’
    ‘Lost time, is what they used to call it. Time she couldn’t account for, usually after she became over-excited. Something to do with an unusual heart rate – too fast or too slow, I can’t remember which, but she used to black out and wake up with no memory of what she’d done.’ Her mouth tightened around some further sentiment she’d