Anyway, he had better things to think about. The trickle of Bright Young Clients continued, thanks to Miss Barbara Wilson’s enthusiasm, or Mr. Paul Napier-Fox’s overactive prick, depending how you looked at it. Joel had added three quid to his savings this week alone, and his balance was looking positively healthy.

He did feel the occasional twinge of conscience. Fowler was quite right that he had no qualifications and no proof that he could do what he claimed. Joel’s only defence was the fact that he could do it.

He didn’t know where it had come from. He’d been an outlier all his life: red-haired, obdurately left-handed, a flamboyant show-off at least by the dour standards of his family, but he’d never considered himself psychic or any such damn fool thing. Heaven knew how badly his brother and father would have taken that, since they had been quite sufficiently embarrassed and enraged by him as it was. They’d demanded conformity and obedience; his mother and sister had supported those demands in order to keep the peace. Unfortunately, Joel was not one of Nature’s peace-keepers. It had become necessary to leave home at sixteen; he had found a job in a newspaper office, sorting through letters from members of the public; and that was where it began.

So many letters, in so many hands. Rambling and ranting, fury about trauma and trivia, endless pedantry, cries for help, long screeds into the void. All of them ended up on Joel’s desk, and after a while he’d realised that he was sinking into them, ignoring the text in favour of the personality behind it.

He’d actively tried to do it at first. It added interest to the day, and felt like a challenge, trying to pick out the whispers of character that underlay the droning or jabbering on the page. He even read a couple of graphology books but found them meaningless. It wasn’t the angle at which you crossed a t, it was the motivating spirit in the way it was dashed or forced or drawn.

He’d pursued it as a diversion, nothing more. Looking at hands, dreaming himself into other people. Only, as he practiced, the whispers of character when he read rose to a murmur, and then to a call, a cry, a shout, a shriek.

He’d left after three years: he simply couldn’t stand the barrage any more. He was looking for work in an office where everyone used typewriters when the war broke out.