“None of those rumors is true,” said Rowland with feeling. “People spread these wicked lies about me. I’m a man who’s much misunderstood.”

“Are you trying to be charming?”

“Certainly not. Have you had a chance to look at that file yet?”

The question, for some reason Rowland could not fathom, was a mistake.

“No, I damn well haven’t,” Lindsay replied, and stalked off without a backward look.

Women, Rowland thought. He added a few adjectives to that noun, which cheered him up. Then, since Charlotte had left the room, and Max was deep in conversation, he seized his opportunity and escaped.

Passing Max’s study off the hall, he heard Gini, arguing with a telephone operator by the sound of it, and repeating a string of numbers in a weary voice. Charlotte bumped into him at the foot of the stairs; from the top came the sound of ray guns and whoops. She gave him an exhausted look.

“Would you, Rowland? Just for five minutes? It’s because they know you’re here. They want one of your gory stories. Could you frighten them to sleep?”

Rowland was a traditionalist when it came to stories. “Once upon a time,” he began.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the boys’ large attic bedroom. Teddy bears flanked his tall frame; above his head, model airplanes were strung from the rafters; a procession of plastic dinosaurs was arranged at his feet.

Max and Charlotte, orderly in unexpected ways, had named their children alphabetically. Alex, at eight the eldest, was in the top bunk to Rowland’s left, with Ben, the next son, beneath him. Colin, who was just six, and Danny, were on his right. All the boys had laid their ray guns reverently on the ends of their bunks, and Colin, who had the most nervous temperament of the four, was clutching a stuffed penguin very tight.

“Once upon a time,” Rowland continued, “on the far west coast of Ireland, where I grew up, lived a leprechaun called Leaf. He had bright green skin, orange eyes, and a tail—”

“Leprechauns don’t have tails,” Alex interrupted.

“This leprechaun did,” Rowland said. “He had a tail one millimeter long, and he lived with his mother in a mousehole in the wall of my grandfather’s farm. They were both as happy as the day is long, but unfortunately—” Here Rowland, who had lowered his voice to a chilly whisper, paused.

“Did he have an enemy, Rowland?” Ben asked with a shiver of delight. “Was he horrible?”

“He most certainly was,” Rowland confirmed. “His name was Groilach. He was a black-hearted hobgoblin, and he lived in the peat bogs by the loch. He drank frogs’ blood for breakfast, he had scaly skin, and he was covered in slime.”

“Yuck.” Ben screwed up his nose. “I bet he smelled really foul. I fell in a peat bog once, in Scotland—d’you remember, Alex? I stank. I stank for days.”

“He smelled appalling,” Rowland agreed, improvising obligingly. “Think of all the nastiest smells in the world. Boiled cabbage, for instance, and—”