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Marina and I were still sitting in bed in our robes, surrounded by the newspapers.
    ‘Thought you were meant to be a private detective.’ He emphasised the word private. ‘Not very private to be splashed across the front pages.’
    The Sundays had taken up where the Saturdays had left off, with hundreds of column inches bemoaning the death of Oven Cleaner. One red-top rag even called for a national day of mourning and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.
    However, I assumed Archie was referring to the front-page banner headline in
The Pump
that read ‘Sid Halley in Cheltenham Murder Mystery’ above a three-column photograph of me looking extremely furtive. At first glance, anyone would have thought that it was me who had been murdered.
The Pump
and I had crossed swords in the past and maybe the headline was just wishful thinking by the editor.
    Someone in their newsroom clearly had a source in the Cheltenham police who had reported that ‘Sid Halley, ex-champion steeplechase jockey, has been interviewed by senior officers andis helping the police with their enquiries into the murder of jockey Huw Walker at Cheltenham races on Friday. No arrest has been made at this time.’
    Clearly
The Pump
expected me to be hung, drawn and quartered by lunchtime. The piece went on to imply that all of the world’s ills could be placed at my door. ‘Sid Halley, crippled ex-jockey, is now searching the gutters for rats as a minor private dick. He should feel nicely at home amongst the low-life…’
    ‘Ridiculous,’ I said. ‘They’re fishing.’
    ‘Nevertheless,’ said Archie, ‘enough people will believe it.’
    Archie was always concerned for my welfare and now, it appeared, he wanted to protect my reputation as well.
    He was some sort of civil servant but he didn’t belong to any specific department. Nominally, he answered to the Cabinet Office, but he appeared to work in his own way with little contact or regard for his superiors. He was the chairman of a small group who were tasked with attempting to foretell the future. Their remit was to try and work out the consequences of proposed legislation, to try and ensure that it would actually do what it was intended without any unpleasant side effects that had been overlooked. Officially they were called the Standing Cabinet Sub-Committee on Legislative Outcomes but they were referred to by the few who knew of their existence as the Crystal Ball Club. Archie tended to label them the Cassandra Committee after the Greek mythological heroine who was both blessed and cursed by the god Apollo with the ability to correctly predict the future whilst no one believed her.
    ‘Any publicity is good publicity,’ I quipped.
    ‘Tell that to Gerald Ratner.’
    I respected Archie and had grown to like him more and moreas, over the past four years, I had become his very private ears and eyes.
    Legislation in a democracy is, by its very nature, a compromise, a negotiated settlement somewhere in the middle ground. Whether it be a government-backed initiative or a private member’s bill, there is usually some horse-trading to be done. Some amendments may be accepted, others declined, paragraphs may be removed, word orders may be changed. Laws passed by Parliament are often substantially different from those drafted.
    Archie and his Crystal Ball Club tried to look at legislation from the perspective of the end user, the members of the general public who would be affected. History is littered with examples where law makers had grossly misjudged the reaction that their well-intentioned deeds would produce.
    After World War I, no less than forty-five of the then forty-eight states of the US voted to amend the American Constitution to prohibit the importation, manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the hope and expectation of reducing crime and corruption. Only the state of Rhode Island voted against. Fourteen murderous years later, during which time the federal prison inmate