‘Dead,’ he said. ‘They’re scraping him off the garage wall. Must have been messing around with one of his nuke devices in the garage. People shouldn’t ought to mess around with nuke devices in their garages.’

I didn’t want to disillusion the Maigret of Ohio by informing him that if Harry Slan had been messing around with nuclear devices in his garage, nobody would be scraping Harry Slan off his garage wall: they would be scraping Adamsville, Ohio, off the map.

Someone had got to Harry Slan before I had. They’d made an awful mess of him, his garage and my plans. My list of helpful contacts was thinning out a damn sight too quickly for my liking. I didn’t have the time to go and rummage in Slan’s drawers, even if anyone had let me, which was doubtful, and I didn’t have the time to start interviewing the five thousand people who worked at American Fossilized. Someone was going to have to break the good news to the CIA and break it quickly, and for that news to carry any weight, it was going to have to be broken by someone who appeared to have a lot more authority than an unshaven white-faced man in a stolen car with no silencer. I turned, and headed as fast as I could for Detroit and a plane for England, stopping en route for an overdue cup of coffee, mouthful of food, and a very long phone call to Fifeshire.

Chapter 25

25

The newspaper vendor put a boiled sweet into his mouth and shuffled it around his toothless gums. He sorted out an itch on his cheek, checked for wax in his ears, and then put a hand up to see if it was raining.

The startling information of today, that appeared behind the mesh grill at the side of his news stand, printed to give the appearance of urgent handwriting was: Volcanoes Kill Hundreds. Thousands Flee Two Eruptions. I had not needed to pay money to this wrinkled purveyor of vegetable-rack liners and fly-swatters in order to slake my curiosity about his two eruptions. A customer, either of his, or of one of his eight thousand look-alikes had kindly left me a Telegraph in the back of the cab. The light changed to green, and with a menacing rattle of the diesel, we forged forward again down Knightsbridge.