The doorbell rang at ten o'clock on the dot. She was punctual, I had to give her that. I went and opened the door.

"Are you sure this is all right?" Pauline asked.

"Karen's very keen," I told her.

She had her camera-bag slung over her shoulder and her hair was freshly-washed. She looked about twelve years old.

"Is that some of her work?" she asked, looking past me.

I turned to look at the paintings hanging in the hall. They'd been there for so long now that I had stopped noticing them. "Yes."

Pauline stepped into the hallway and walked along the wall looking at Karen's paintings of elves and goblins and fairy-folk.

"She did them for Julie Dunmow's books," I explained. "You know, The King of the Elves. The Tale of Ynessil and Awen."

"I know," she said, leaning close to one of the paintings. "My nephew's got all her books. I didn't realise your wife did the illustrations."

"Good little earner," I said. "We're still getting royalties."

"Mm." She pointed to one of the pictures. "This looks like those things we saw yesterday. At the farm."

I went over and stood beside her. She was looking at Karen's painting of the King of the Goblins, carousing with his mates in his castle. Now she mentioned it, the goblins did look a little like the creatures from Derek Wood's farm. "I suppose," I said.

She moved on to the next painting, of a stick-thin, inhumanly-beautiful fairy, its gossamer wings spread as it ascended into a moonlit sky. "This is lovely," she murmured.

"It's the last painting she ever did," I said.

"Oh." She suddenly looked awkward. "I'm sorry, I—"

"It's all right." I walked past her and opened the living room door. "Someone to see you," I told Karen.

General Branch appeared to be an anomaly, but it transpired that he hadn't been a local boy. On his death in battle the Duke of Marlborough had decreed that his General be buried in the little cemetary at St Luke's. Nobody knew why. Even General Branch seemed bemused, and not a little annoyed at being confined within the boundaries of the church grounds.

Seldon was cursed. That was the only explanation that made any sense to me.

Ever since the beginning of July, the village had experienced corn circles, spontaneous combustions, visions of unknown cities floating in the sky, UFOs, falls of frogs and anchovies, alien abductions, metal plaques etched in unknown languages dug up in fields, livestock mutilations, mysterious detonations echoing across the sky, homunculi, succubi and incubi. A Wild Hunt had been observed riding through Hobbes' Wood, and there were so many Green Men that the journalists had stopped reporting them.

And the Dead walked the Earth. Or rather, one of them appeared on Breakfast Television, and the other sat in the corner of my living room watching Can't Cook, Won't Cook.

I carried a bottle of Budweiser to the bottom of the garden and sat on the little rustic bench that looked as if it had been slowly rotting away for the past three hundred years. I drank some beer and looked about me.

It was a nice garden. Not too big, not too cramped. Square lawn in the middle, flower-beds up two sides, a line of horse chestnuts along the bottom with some rhododendrons thrown in for a bit of colour. A couple of yards away, sitting in the shade of one of the rhododendron bushes, was a wood-sprite.

I searched the path around my feet, found a bit of bark amongst the gravel, picked it up and waved it half-heartedly at the sprite.

It came out from under the bush, about a foot tall, a pointy, twiggy little thing with tiny scary black eyes under enormous beetling brows. It approached me with nervous scratching noises on the gravel, watching my face all the time, until it was close enough to reach out and grab the bit of bark and scuttle back to the safety of the bushes, where it squatted gnawing on the titbit. Another one came out of the shadows and they started to squabble over the bit of wood.

Somebody on television had coined the term "discrete phenomena" to describe what was happening in Seldon. They hadn't been here, or they would have realised that some phenomena were a whole lot less discrete than others. The village was infested with wood-sprites; they had crowded the squirrels out of their ecological niche. Springheel Jack was everywhere. Corn circles appeared wherever there was a crop tall enough to take a mark, whether it was a corn field or a neglected grass verge. Every evening, around seven, dozens of lights appeared in the sky and started to zoom about exhibiting nonballistic flight previously unseen outside Close Encounters. The Americans called it the Evening Show, and some of them still went up to Sefton Hill to shoot fresh footage.

On the other hand, there were only two ghosts, and Elvis had limited himself to one manifestation so far, buying an inflatible mattress at Argos. Sonia Gregory, who worked on the checkout, had testified that the King had appeared to date from the later Vegas Years but had been a perfect Southern gentleman.

The sprites stopped fighting and froze, looking past me towards the house. I looked around. Pauline was walking up the path towards me. I heard a sudden scrabbling noise, and when I looked again the sprites had gone.

Pauline sat down next to me on the bench and looked at the flower-beds on the other side of the lawn. She clasped her hands in her lap and sighed.

"Rosemary," I said.

She seemed to wake up all of a sudden. "Pardon?"

"Over there," I said, pointing to the little bush Karen had planted the week we moved in. "Rosemary."

She looked at me as if I was a dog that had started to recite a McGonnagal poem.

"Nothing like a sprig of fresh rosemary on a lamb chop," I told her. "Dried rosemary isn't the same."

She looked at the bush, and for a moment I thought she might have been half-convinced about the lamb chop. Then she said, "How do you cope?"

"Oh." I thought about it. "I get along." I shrugged. "I suppose."

"She wouldn't tell me what happened."

"Well." I scratched my head. "She was allergic to wasp stings, but she didn't know that until she was stung by a wasp." I looked about us. "A little over a year ago. Right here, as it happens."

She was watching my face.

"She managed to get to the phone in the living room, but she passed out before she could dial 999. She still had the phone in her hand when I came home for lunch and found her lying there."

"Oh." She sighed again. Then she said, "That's a really stupid way to die, isn't it."

"I suppose so." I rummaged in my pockets and found the Cafe Creme Harvey had given me the day before. "Do you have a light?"

"I don't smoke."

I put the cigar back in my pocket. "So. Did you get what you wanted?"

She was quiet for a moment, frowning at the rosemary bush. "It's just so … sad." She shook her head. "How did you feel? When she came back?"

"She hasn't come back," I said. I stood up. "Shall we go for a walk?"

"Yes," she said. "Let's."

We turned right at the end of the path and walked away from the village. Over in the distance, I could see the bright lights of a television crew vox-popping yet another villager. Not far from them, a group of figures was moving in what seemed to be a slow purposeful dance: crop-circle people, measuring and recording.

"What did you mean about Karen not coming back?" Pauline asked.

I stood and watched the crop-circle people. "General Branch has come back, even if he can't leave St Luke's churchyard. I've had to settle for a disembodied voice. I don't call that coming back."

"Does that make you angry?"

I looked down at her. "Are you recording this?"

She was quiet for a few moments. Then she put a hand in one of her jacket pockets. I heard the faint click of a tape recorder being switched off. "Has anybody had any ideas why Karen and the General can't leave the place they reappeared in?"

"Everyone has a theory."

"Do you?"

I shrugged. Over in a copse I saw sunlight flash on the banked lenses of dozens of remote-controlled cameras.

"Did you know you're on the Internet?" Pauline asked, seeing me looking at the cameras.

"I prefer to think of the Internet as something that happens to other people," I said in what I thought was a suitably stoic tone of voice.

She waved a hand to encompass the village and its environs and all the lunatics enclosed within. "It all winds up there in the end. Print journalism, still photos, full-motion video, hours of recorded interviews. Thousands and thousands of pages and newsgroups and discussion rooms. There are fifty dedicated WebCams installed in Seldon and the fields, beaming back pictures twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, hoping to catch some phenomenon going on. This place is the Mecca of the X-Files generation. The only reason the Loch Ness Monster hasn't turned up here is that you haven't got a big enough pond."

I stopped and looked down at her. She sounded angry, and I found that interesting. I'd met all kinds of people since Seldon had been cursed. I had met greedy people who wanted to exploit us. I had met wide-eyed idealists. I had met people who wanted to come and see things they had only heard of in old stories. I had never met anyone who was just angry.

"Has something upset you?" I asked.

She looked at me for a few moments. "I've just spent half an hour interviewing your late wife, and you have to ask me if something's upset me?"

"Oh," I said, putting my hands in my pockets and walking off again. "Right."

At one point, we climbed a stile between two fields and were confronted by a young woman dressed as a Druid, standing like a statue in her robes and looking, now we were out of sight of human habitation, a little alarming.

Pauline wasn't alarmed. "Go home!" she yelled at the Druid.

The Druid raised an eyebrow.

"Go away!" Pauline shouted, waving her arms.

The Druid—or more properly Druidess, I suppose—leaned on her staff with a certain dignity I envied, and gazed off into some presumably mystical distance. Pauline shook her head and stomped off in the opposite direction.

It took me a few moments to catch up with her. She wasn't very tall, but she could stomp along at an impressive speed.

"I didn't want this assignment, you know," she said.

"You hide it very well."

"I really begged my editor. Any day now the jury's going to be coming back with a verdict in that big murder trial in Salisbury. I could have been covering that."

I nodded in what I hoped was an understanding manner, though I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. I didn't read the papers much any more, and Karen didn't like to watch the news on the television.

"Oh no," she muttered, kicking at the ground. "Oh no, I had to come here along with the rest of the world's fucking Press and write stories about ghosties and ghoulies." She glanced up at me and her expression changed suddenly. "Oh, Geoff. I'm sorry. I didn't—"

"It's all right," I said. "I keep expecting people to get bored with it all and go away."

She shook her head. "This is the Silly Season, Geoff. Parliament's on holiday, there's no football, Wimbledon's over, the weather's not doing anything much, half the population's in Benidorm. People just lap this stuff up."

A few hundred yards away, some more crop-circle people were wandering about with their tape measures and video cameras and theodolites.

"Out of interest, why did you get those students to make that crop circle?" I asked.

She snorted. "That was another of my editor's bright ideas. She thought I could make a story out of how gullible people are, so she told me to fake up a crop circle and see how many people believed it was genuine."

I thought about it. "I think that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard," I said.

"My editor's not exactly the shiniest tool in the box." She looked out into the distance and shaded her eyes with her hand. "I don't know, maybe she's right. There's no original angle on this thing any more. Nobody knows why it's happening. All they can do is stand and watch."

"One of the scientists says it's being caused by El Niño," I said.

She snorted. "If all else fails, blame the weather. Nobody knows, Geoff. It's the perfect phenomenon for the new millennium. Pointless, senseless and inexplicable, with great photo opportunities."

"You must have some pretty good material now, though," I said. "What with that business at Derek's farm yesterday. And talking to Karen. Doesn't that give you an original angle?"

She lowered her hand and looked at me. "Do you want to hear what she said?"

"No, thank you." I turned and walked away.

"Why not?" she shouted.

A couple of days later, I was sitting in the office looking at the accounts when I heard a Range Rover pulled up outside. Domino was taking his turn at the pumps, so I just scowled at the ledger on the desk in front of me and drank some coffee.

"That has to be the saddest sight in the world," said Harvey.

I looked up from the books. "What's that?"

"A good man trying to rescue his business, that's what."

I looked around the office. "Did a good man come in here?"

Despite the temperature, Harvey was wearing what he called his 'local camouflage': tan cord trousers, green cord waistcoat, woollen shirt, knitted tie, tan cord jacket, green wellies and a flat cap. I never saw a man who looked further from home.

"Pauline says you had a row."

"Did she?" I said.

"She says you shouted at her."

"She shouted at me, as I recall."

"Well." He scratched his head. "I guess we've all done our fair share of shouting at each other in the past couple of days."

I presumed this was a coded reference to last night's meeting of the village council, which had degenerated into a near-riot when the subject of Peter Massey's succubus had been raised. Domino, who had attended the meeting, had given me a blow-by-blow description of the evening. I thought it was a wonder we weren't all completely insane by now.

I said, "Do you want a coffee?"

He looked at my mug on the desk. "You drink instant, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Pass," he said.

I sighed. "I'm not going to apologise for shouting at Pauline," I told him, "because I didn't shout at her."

All of a sudden he looked embarrassed. "I've asked her to marry me."

I blinked at him. "You what?"

"Asked her to marry me."

"Well." I sat back in my chair. "What did she say?"

"She said yes, of course," he said, a little surprised that I'd had to ask.

"You've only known each other a few days, Harvey."

Hey," he said, "haven't you noticed? Magic happens here. Maybe love at first sight happens here too."

I blew a raspberry, just so he knew what I thought of love at first sight and magic and everything that was happening to Seldon.

"Anyway, Menzels hate long engagements," he said.

"Obviously."

"And we want you to be the best man."

I looked at him for a few moments, then I burst out laughing, which was obviously not the reaction he'd been expecting because he took off his flat cap and threw it at me. "I'm serious, you bastard."

"It'll give your tenants the laugh of their lives," I said, subsiding into giggles and tossing his cap back to him.

He pulled up a chair and sat down. "How much is this place worth?" he asked.

"It's not worth anything," I said. "That's why I'll be bankrupt in a few months."

"So why don't you let me buy it from you?"

I stopped laughing.

"See, what I was thinking," he said, examining the inside of his cap, "was that I could buy this place from you, and you could continue to run it for me on a salary."

"You've lost your mind," I said.

He shook his head. "No, sir. I did some telephoning yesterday—"

"After Pauline told you to help me out," I said.

"And it turns out that this place is the only part of Seldon that I don't actually own," he went on as if he hadn't heard me. "According to that cobwebby old guy in Salisbury who pretends he's my attorney, Andy Hayward and the Thirteenth Earl cut some kind of deal. He won't tell me what it was, but it turns out that you own the land this garage stands on, not me."

"I didn't know that," I said, trying to remember the wording of the documents Andy and I had signed when I bought the place.

"So you could do anything with it," he said. "You could open a bowling alley or a fast-food franchise or a Hindu temple, and you'd be well within your rights." He saw the look on my face and smiled. "Forget it, fella. I have the local council in my pocket. You wouldn't get planning permission for anything more ambitious than a washing-line."

"I've always thought that what Seldon really needs is a bowling alley," I said.

Harvey laughed. "What it means is there's a gap in my property portfolio, right on my doorstep, and I'd like to close it."

"This place makes a loss," I told him. "You'd be insane to buy it and carry on running it as a garage."

"Not at all. People like having a garage in the village. It's not as if nobody stops here, is it?"

"No, but the running costs keep going—"

He held up a hand. "It doesn't matter, Geoffrey. This garage has been here ever since internal combustion first reached Wiltshire. It's as much a part of the village as The Black Bull, and I'm happy to run it at a loss because of that."

I was stunned. "Pardon me for saying so, but you're the most unlikely Fairy Godmother I can imagine."

"And it'll be a handy tax write-off as well," he said.

Harvey had arranged for a special delivery from a real-ale brewery in Warminster to celebrate his engagement, and had hired a team of caterers from Andover who had organised the food with paramilitary precision. Seldon hadn't seen anything like it since the legendary Tenth Earl, who had commemorated the end of the First World War with a party that had lasted four days.

Domino shook his head as we fought our way through the mob. "Decadent," he commented. "Depraved." He looked at me. "Drink?"

I nodded. "I'll try and find us something to eat."

He regarded the heaving press of bodies and shook his head. "We'll never find each other again," he said. "Better to stay together."

We began to elbow our way towards the bar. There were so many people in the lounge bar that there was a haze of sweat in the air, and a layer of cigarette and cigar and pipe-smoke so thick that I couldn't see the ceiling, even though all the windows and doors were wide open.

All of Betty's staff were on duty tonight, and she had drafted in anybody who seemed willing and relatively responsible to serve behind the bar. It took us twenty minutes to get an orange juice and a vodka and tonic, and another ten minutes to get across the room to where Harvey and Pauline were sitting.

"Is this not magnificent?" Harvey asked, spreading his arms as much as he could and grinning in welcome. He seemed to have got over his embarrassment about Pauline.

"It's impressive, certainly," I admitted.

"Congratulations, Harvey," Domino said, raising his glass of orange. "Pauline."

"I hear you're good with accounts," Harvey told him.

"I can't work miracles," Domino said.

"Well, my accountant dates back to the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. How'd you like a job?"

Domino looked at me. "I have a job."

"Nah." Harvey waved a hand dismissively. "I mean a real job. A permanent job."

"Harvey," Pauline said quietly, tugging his sleeve.

"How about it?" Harvey boomed.

"Harvey …" Pauline was looking at Domino while she tried to shut her fiancé up.

"Well …" Domino looked at me again. "It's tempting."

"You sod, Menzel," I said, shaking my head. "You buy my garage, then you buy my staff. How'd you like to pay off my mortgage?"

"We'll speak about that tomorrow," he said, suddenly serious. "I got plans for you and me, fella. You, me, Pauline, Domino, Seldon. We're all going places."

"Well, except Seldon," I said. "I'd like to think Seldon would stay in much the same place."

He burst out laughing. "Yeah," he guffawed. "Wouldn't like to see it get lost, would we?"

Harvey was one of those people who can get pretty seriously drunk without showing very many outward signs, and it only occurred to me now that he must have been drinking since this afternoon. He was sprawled in his corner seat, grinning and thoroughly indulging himself as Lord of the Manor, and he was going to have the mother and father of all hangovers tomorrow. I smiled.

Pauline and Domino started to chat quietly to each other, heads close together. I noted a lot of abbreviated hand-waving and a couple of astonished looks on Pauline's behalf, although not quite as astonished as I might have expected. I wondered how she had managed to figure it out.

I became involved in a heated conversation with a couple of Harvey's tenant farmers about the business at Derek Wood's farm. One of the CNN men joined in, then a couple of very drunk CBS cameramen, who claimed to have footage of Merlin doing card tricks over by White Lane Ford. At some point I looked over to the corner. Harvey had passed out and was snoring with a big sloppy grin on his face. Pauline and Domino were still having their conversation. I saw her lift his arm by the wrist and move it up and down, and by the look on her face I knew she was surprised at how light it was.

I went back to the bar a couple of times. The second time, I found myself standing behind the bar watching the Polish newsmen. They were standing in a line in front of me and shouting, "Piwo! Piwo! Piwo! Piwo!" and thumping the bar top in time to their chant.

"They want beer," Betty told me as she went by towards the other end of the bar. "'Piwo' is Polish for beer."

"Is it?"

She nodded. "In the past six weeks I've learned how to say 'beer' in eighteen different languages." She paused. "What are you doing behind the bar?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, while you're here, make yourself useful and serve these lads, would you?"

I shrugged and started to pull pints. The beer, supplied by Harvey, was free, but the Poles insisted on paying anyway. I took their money and put it in the till, and when I turned back to the bar there were more people waiting to be served. I served them.

Pulling pints seemed not too dissimilar to pumping petrol, so I decided to stay there for a while. I smoked the cigar Harvey had given me, and a little while later a harrassed-looking Betty came along the bar, beamed at me, and handed me a packet of slim panatellas.

The racket in the pub reached a crescendo around half past ten, then started to quiet down a little as the locals began to drift unsteadily off into the night. There were long moments when nobody wanted a drink, and I lit a cigar and leaned back and watched all the foreign newsmen and assorted tourists and villagers and caterers drinking and singing and shouting and laughing.

"I reckon this has been good for us," Betty said beside me.

I hugged her and kissed the top of her head. "Bless you, Bets."

"You daft sod," she said, snuggling up against me. Betty was at least twenty years older than me, soft and small and round, an applied mathematics graduate who always seemed a little astonished that she had wound up running a pub in rural Wiltshire. She was the only person I knew who had the balls to tell me she was worried that I drank too much. "I mean it," she said, gesturing at the assembled revelers. "Harvey's done a lot of good for the village tonight. We've all been under a lot of strain for the past six weeks; we needed something like this. Blow off a little steam."

"Harvey doesn't care about that," I told her. "He just wanted to celebrate his engagement."

"It doesn't matter. How's Karen?"

"As tenuous as ever."

She shook her head sadly and gave me a firm hug. "Poor Geoff."

"Yes," I said. "Poor Geoff."

"When are you going?"

I looked at her.

"I haven't been here nearly as long as you have," she said, "but even I know that if you want to keep something secret you don't tell Barry Vickers."

"I only asked Barry to value the house for me," I said. "He hasn't put it on the market yet." And then I wondered how much of my dealings with Vickers & Sons, Estate Agents, had reached Harvey's ears, and how much of it had prompted him to offer to buy the garage. I sighed. "I don't know how much longer I can live there, Bets."

"Most of us are amazed you've stayed there this long," she said.

I thought about it, about all the nights when I hadn't been quite drunk enough to prevent me lying awake staring at the ceiling and thinking of Karen trapped in the front room. I couldn't remember when I'd finally decided I'd had enough. It seemed that I had always been ashamed of wanting to run away.

"I'll never sell it, anyway," I said. "Nobody in their right mind will buy a house with Karen's ghost in the front room." I actually felt myself cringe when I thought about it. "Nobody else would know what television programmes she likes to watch."

Betty handed me a clean bar towel. "Dry your eyes and blow your nose," she said.

"Sorry." I dried my eyes and blew my nose.

"Nobody would blame you for leaving," said Betty. "None of us can imagine what it must have been like for you these past few weeks."

"Are you still serving?" Pauline asked, leaning on the bar.

Betty looked at her watch. She liked to keep to the legal opening hours, even though a loophole in the local licensing laws meant that Harvey could order her to stay open as long as he wanted. "Yes, Miss."

"Pauline," said Pauline.

"Yes, Miss," Betty sniffed, going off to pull another pint.

"She doesn't like me," Pauline told me.

"She doesn't know you yet," I said. "When she does, she'll probably hate you."

She narrowed her eyes. "Have you been crying?"

I shook my head. "Too much smoke in here."

She frowned at me. "I'm going to need some help getting Harvey into the Range Rover in a while."

I looked across the bar, but there were still too many people between the bar and Harvey's favourite corner, and I couldn't see him. "Are you sure about marrying him?"

Pauline smiled. "You were right, you know? He really does have a good heart. He's a nice man, he's just a long long way from home. He's very sweet."

"And very wealthy."

"That comment," she said, accepting her pint of bitter, "doesn't do you credit."

Betty snorted and went out into the bar to collect glasses.

"I told you she didn't like me," Pauline said.

I lit another cigar. "Will you carry on working?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Is this the prelude to another insult?"

"It just occurred to me that you won't have to worry about your editor any more."

"I know." Her face seemed to light up with joy. "You have no idea how that feels."

"I think I can guess."

Domino came up to the bar. "Harvey wants to go home," he told us. He glanced at the clock over the fireplace. "And I have to go soon as well, or I'll turn into a pumpkin."

"That's not a joke you want to make around here," Pauline said. She looked at me. "Come on, Geoff. Let's get His Lordship in the car."

As we were getting him to his feet, Harvey opened his eyes and gazed blearily about the bar. "Where'd everyone go?" he asked.

"Home," I said.

He looked at me. "Hey, fella," he murmured, grinning. "Baxter's Garage."

"That's me," I said, putting my shoulder under his armpit to support his weight. "Baxter's Garage."

"I'm going to buy your house," he said.

"That's very nice," I told him as we got him half-walking, half-stumbling towards the door. The few drinkers who remained raised their glasses to us as we went by.

"My people," Harvey said, waving to them. "Jesus, now I know why King George fought so hard to hang on to the Colonies. He just hated to see all those serfs going off on their own." He frowned. "Is it serfs or serves?"

"Are you going to do this all the time?" Pauline asked him.

He turned his head and looked at her. "Do what? Drink?" He looked thoughtful. "Guess not." He looked at me again. "Yeah. Your house. Going to buy it. You can come stay at the House with me and Pauline. I got plans." He nodded. "Good plans."

"I'm afraid to ask," I said, but I didn't have to because he had half dozed-off again.

Pauline went ahead of us and opened the doors and we followed her out into the car park. Moonlight shone on the roofs and bonnets of all the vehicles crammed in around the pub. Domino looked up at the Moon and scratched his head with his free hand.

There were some moments of low comedy while Pauline searched through Harvey's pockets for his car keys. Then we manhandled Harvey into the back seat of the Range Rover and covered him with a travelling rug. He turned over on his side and started to snore. Pauline closed the door and looked at us.

"Are you going to be all right?" she asked me.

"I expect so," I said.

"Harvey was serious about you coming to live at the House with us," she said.

"I know," I said. "I'll think about it."

"You'll still be able to visit her."

"I said I'll think about it."

"Okay." She hugged me and Domino, got into the Range Rover, and drove off into the night with her fiancé.

"Well," Domino said as we watched the car's rear lights vanish around the bend in the road at the end of the village, "that was an interesting evening."

"What were you two talking about?"

"Oh, this and that. She's very bright, you know."

"She's very bright and she's marrying Harvey?"

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "Let's get you home."

We reached the bottom of my street, turned the corner, and started to walk up towards my house. The lights were still on the Prentice Sisters' houses. I couldn't work out what ninety-seven-year-olds found to do so late at night.

As I opened the front door, I heard the end-title music of Prisoner: Cell Block H from the living room. "We're back," I called.

Domino walked down the hall and put his head round the door. "Hello, Karen."

"Hi, Domino," she said. "How was the evening?"

"Harvey had a lot to drink."

"What about Geoff?"

"Actually, Geoff didn't have that much to drink."

I heard Karen sigh. "He will."

I stepped into the living room. All the lights were off. The only illumination came from the television, and it threw odd shadows across the walls and furniture.

"Hi," I said to one of the shadows.

"Could you change the channel?" she asked. "They Think It's All Over's on BBC1 in a minute."

I picked up the remote control from the coffee table. "It's a repeat, isn't it?"

"I know," she said. "But I missed it the first time around because I was dead."

"Right." I changed the channel for her and put the remote back on the table. "I'll just see Domino out and I'll come back."

"Okay," she said. "Goodnight, Domino."

"See you soon, Karen."

He followed me through the kitchen. I unlocked the back door and we went out into the garden.

"Are you going to sell the garage to Harvey?" Domino asked as we walked along the path.

I sat down on the garden seat. "Do I have a choice?"

"You'll be lucky to get a better offer," he said, taking off his shirt and straightening up.

I looked at him. Standing upright, he was nearly seven feet tall. His breastbone bulged out like the keel of a rowing-boat. He flexed the massive muscular hump of his shoulders and jammed his fists into the small of his back to ease the cramp he was always getting because he went around hunched-over as part of his disguise. I'd told him I thought it was a pretty stupid disguise, but he wouldn't listen.

"What about the house?" he asked.

I took out a panatella and lit it. "I said I'd think about it, Domino."

"There's no need to shout at me."

"I wasn't shouting."

He sucked his teeth. "Well, don't think too long. Harvey might change his mind." He bent down and took off his trainers and socks. He balled up the socks and put them both in one trainer.

"Harvey never changes his mind once he's decided he wants something. You know what he's like."

"Hm." He undid his belt and took off his jeans and walked out into the middle of the lawn. Without clothes, he looked thin and light enough to blow away on a breeze.

"What about his job offer?" I asked.

"It's an interesting idea," he admitted. "But you'll still need help if he wants you to carry on running the garage, won't you?"

Behind me in the rhododenrons, something rattled. Wood sprites, I thought. Or a Green Man, perhaps. Once upon a time it would have been squirrels or a fox; now you just couldn't be sure.

I said, "If you did want to go off and work for Harvey, I wouldn't stop you."

There was a wet smacking sound, and the great hump on Domino's back opened in a pair of fat fleshy leaves. Two huge damp flags of gauzy tissue tumbled out and hung from his shoulders.

"Don't be noble, Geoff," he said, starting to flap his arms up and down to pump fluid into the banners of skin. He looked, it had to be said, completely ridiculous. "It doesn't suit you."

"Thanks."

"Besides, how did you plan to stop me?"

Good point. "Did you tell Pauline about … um …?" I gestured at him.

"She worked quite a lot of it out herself, actually," he said, still flapping his arms. "As I said, she's very bright. I think it's going to be a lot of fun having her around."

I sat quietly smoking my cigar and watching Domino's pantomime. It was a lovely evening. A large lens-shaped object, glowing a soft blue, drifted slowly over the house and out of sight beyond the trees. Out on the High Street, someone on their way home from the pub launched into a loud, spirited and almost entirely off-key rendition of "New York, New York." I sighed.

"Anyway," said Domino, "it's going to take a couple of weeks for Harvey's solicitors to sort out the paperwork on the garage and the house, so we may as well just carry on as normal until then."

"Yes." I got up from the garden seat and picked up his shirt and his trousers and his shoes. "I suppose we can try that."

"So." He spread his great butterfly wings and smiled down at me. "I'll see you at work tomorrow." And he flew off into the moonlit sky.

I stood for a long time watching him fly away, until he was just a tiny speck, and then I looked away for a moment and he was gone. From inside the house, I heard Karen laughing at something someone had said on television.

There didn't seem to be anything else to do, so I went back into the house to have a drink.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, I got up and got dressed and went downstairs. As I walked along the hall, I heard a man's voice say, "To jest poczta."

Karen said, "To jest poczta."

She was following the BBC's early-morning language classes. First it had been Spanish, then Italian, then German, then I had lost track. I was going to wind up with the world's only disembodied voice that spoke eight or nine languages.

"Geoff?" she called as I went past the door of the living room.

"Can't sleep," I said. I opened the front door and stepped outside.

I stood at the garden gate and took big breaths of cool fresh air. The lights were still on in the Prentice Sisters' houses.

I walked down to the corner and onto the High Street. Down by the little Argos car park a small group of people were crouching over something in a pool of bright camera-light. I couldn't see what it was. I walked off in the opposite direction.

At the garage, I unlocked the office and switched on the lights and sat down at my desk. I unlocked the bottom drawer and took out the office vodka and a glass. I put the bottle on the desk and sat back and looked at it. I'd had that bottle for five years and I'd never opened it. I made it a rule never to drink in the office, on the grounds that there had to be somewhere I didn't drink. I opened the bottle, half-filled the glass, and drained it in one go. I poured myself another and sat back in my chair and looked at the light fitting.

I thought about six years of struggle and worry. I thought about Karen. I thought about Harvey riding to the rescue and just suddenly making it all right again. I took a big drink of vodka and shivered. I filled the glass right up to the top. I picked it up carefully and managed to drink most of it in a single swallow without spilling a drop. I wondered if Harvey would make me wear some kind of period costume when I was running his garage.

I got up and went outside into the yard. I unlocked the door to one of the sheds and stood looking at my car, the Peugeot Karen and I had driven down here in six years ago. Apart from routine maintenance and the odd trip back up to London over the years, it had been in the shed ever since, courtesy of Laura Gibbs.

I spent twenty minutes trying to find a length of hose that would fit over the Peugeot's exhaust, and when I did find some it wasn't long enough to go through any of the windows, which seemed to sum up Baxter's Garage quite neatly. I gave up and settled for closing the shed door and stuffing an old tarpaulin into the gap along the bottom.

I sat in the driver's seat and put the key in the ignition. Then I sat for five minutes or so looking at the inside of the shed door. Then I turned the key, reclined the seat, put my head back against the rest, and closed my eyes.

I opened my eyes. Nigel was squatting down on his heels beside the car. I blinked at him.

"Karen throw you out?" he asked, smiling.

I rubbed my face. My neck was stiff and I had a hangover. Just another ordinary morning. "What time is it?"

"Half past seven," he said. "I was driving past, noticed the office door was open. Everything all right?"

"I couldn't sleep," I told him.

He nodded. "Rosie was like that when she was pregnant with our Amy. She'd get up at four in the morning and go out and sleep in the caravan. Only place she could sleep, some nights." He looked gravely at me.

"I'm not pregnant, Nigel," I said. "Promise."

He stood up. "Well. I closed the office door for you. Too many strangers about these days to leave your door open."

"I was hoping Derek Wood would come in and torch the place," I said. I climbed stiffly out of the car and stretched carefully. "Thanks."

"All right." He looked fresh and calm and content. Nothing ever fazed Nigel. Not Springheel Jack, not engineless cars, or goblins, or having to force his way into a garage whose door was blocked with a tarpaulin. "Go home, Geoff."

"I'll have to open up soon."

"Well go home and have a bath and some breakfast first," he said. He looked out through the open door of the shed. "Nice garage, this."

"I'm open to offers."

He laughed. "I heard His Lordship bought it off you."

"We haven't signed anything yet."

Nigel chuckled and shook his head. "I know better than to stand between His Lordship and something he wants."

"I know. I'm starting to discover how that feels."

"He's all right, though, His Lordship."

"He's got a good heart," I agreed. "And he's having the time of his life."

We went out into the sunshine. Everything was very still. The birds were singing. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the air already felt warm. We watched a unicorn trot along the High Street. It rounded the corner and vanished from sight in the direction of the Bull.

"Do you want me to call somebody?" Nigel asked.

"Like who?"

He thought about it. "His Lordship?"

I winced. "No, don't. It'll make his day."

He nodded. "All right."

"Actually, I'd appreciate it if we could keep this between ourselves."

He nodded again. "Suits me. The less paperwork I have to fill out, the happier I am."

I thought he must have hardly any paperwork to fill out, because he was the happiest policeman I had ever met. We shook hands and I watched him ease himself into his little car and drive off. Then I turned and went back into the shed and stood, hands in pockets, looking at the Peugeot and feeling hung-over and vaguely embarrassed. Now I thought about it, I couldn't remember hearing the thing start up when I switched on the ignition.

I reached inside and pulled the bonnet catch. I couldn't remember when I had last run the engine. I shook my head; I'd tried to gas myself in a car with a flat battery.

I went back to the front of the car, lifted the bonnet, and looked down into the engine compartment.