The first depicted Harry Slan and a very attractive dark-haired girl, lying on a bed side by side, naked, and apparently joined together at the naval. The second depicted Slan, again completely naked, bent double in the middle of a room, whilst the same dark-haired girl, wearing nothing but yellow wellingtons, administered the lash of a rope across his backside. Slan winced at the memory, not of the whipping, but of how he had had to avoid letting his wife see his backside for three weeks afterwards. The third showed Slan and this same girl sitting side by side in a large swing chair on what appeared to be the deck of a yacht; behind them was an expanse of flat blue sea, and a long way back towards the horizon was the unmistakable outline of the French port of St Tropez. Closer inspection of the photograph revealed that Harry Slan’s bathing trunks were hanging around his ankles, and the girl, who was topless, was holding his very erect penis firmly between her forefinger and her thumb. The fourth photograph showed them making love in a cabin, doggy-style.

Slan had turned very white, and his hands were shaking. For two months, he had been convinced that the reason Deke Sleder had invited him for that weekend was because Sleder was going to buy American Fossilized, and he wanted to meet his future works manager. He had thought it odd that there should have been so many people from the nuclear energy industry on that yacht together, but, with Eva there, he really hadn’t been too interested in wasting time conversing with other men. Since he had returned home, he had begun taking the Wall Street Journal. He scoured its pages, and whenever he saw mention of one of Sleder’s companies, or of Sleder himself, he positively beamed with smugness at knowing this great man personally.

He wasn’t beaming any more. ‘Sorry to send these to you at work, but not sure of your home address’ – was whoever sent this crazy? ‘Thought you’d enjoy a little souvenir!’ Had Deke Sleder, if it was he who had sent this, gone stark raving mad? His wife, Myrtle, opened all the mail that came to their house, regardless of whether it was marked Private, Confidential, or Danger, do not open – contains nuclear bomb. Ever since a colleague, for a joke, had bought him a subscription to a monthly pornographic magazine which arrived in a plain brown wrapper. Myrtle had taken command of the mail. She was a violently jealous woman, convinced that every woman in Adamsville was after her husband’s body, and she had informed him, more times than he could count, and in great detail, of the very many unpleasant things she would do to him if she ever found out he had been unfaithful to her.