My car was parked outside my house. Ten minutes to collect my things; an hour to drive to the airport. Could I make it? Probably. Straitley was quite right, I knew. A change of sky isn’t everything. But it’s something. Isn’t it?

I picked up the sports bag and made for the road, where Dr. Devine was still covering me. Now that I was close to him, I could see that the object under the scarf was a brightly painted garden gnome, tucked under his elbow.

I should have known it was a bluff. But isn’t that what being a teacher’s about? A weird kind of voodoo to make kids believe that you’re not entirely powerless? He raised the gnome as I approached, but I walked past him without a word, then turned around to face them both. They already looked very far away, lost in the mists of memory.

And now I could see them clearly at last; Mr. Straitley and Dr. Devine. They’d moved closer together, as if for reassurance. Dr. Devine was holding the gnome; Straitley was holding the letter. And suddenly I realized that the giants I’d feared as a boy looked like Ratty and Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows; just two old men on an autumn night, messing about on the river.

Chapter 7

7

November 4, 2005

Perhaps we should have stopped him, I thought. A citizen’s arrest, or some kind of a rugby tackle. But I was never a rugby man, and Devine, in spite of having proved himself unexpectedly resourceful in the matter of the gnome, was hardly a man of action.

“Why the gnome?” I said to him now. “Any blunt instrument would have sufficed.”

“It was the first thing I saw,” said Devine, rather crossly. “You’d run off to God knows where. The door was wide open. I went in to look for a walking stick—”

“You left my door wide open?”

“Of course not,” said Devine. High emotion, combined with the cold, had turned his nose a tremulous shade of coral pink. “But I could hardly let you go running off into the night without providing backup.”

I was moved. “Why, Sourgrape—I had no idea you cared.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Straitley.”

“Mr. Straitley? Are you all right?” That was Winter, looking concerned. I suppose that both of us were looking less than wholesome. Devine looked as if he’d given blood, and I was breathing heavily. The invisible finger had ceased to dance its cakewalk on my lower ribs, but I’d lost my hat somewhere by the canal, and my hair (which needs cutting) was in my eyes and stuck to my damp forehead.

“Never better, thank you,” I said.

Devine gave a derisive sniff.