“Roger says that now you’ll count up all those words you copied and graph them or something,” brightly to head off any comment on the dart incident, which she’d rather avoid. “Do you do it only for séances?”

“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes, yes yes… we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves—certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes you see—”

“I’m not sure that I—”

“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word P sub n against its rank-order n on logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, “we should of course get something like a straight line… however we’ve data that suggest the curves for certain—conditions, well they’re actually quite different—schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper—a sort of bow shape… I think with this chap, this Roland, that we’re on to a classical paranoiac—”

“Ha.” That’s a word she knows. “Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said ‘turned against.’”

“‘Against,’ ‘opposite,’ yes you’d be amazed at the frequency with this one.”

“What’s the most frequent word?” asks Jessica. “Your number one.”

“The same as it’s always been at these affairs,” replies the statistician, as if everyone knew: “death.”

An elderly air-raid warden, starchy and frail as organdy, stands on tiptoe to relight the sensitive flame.

“Incidentally, ah, where’s your mad young gentleman gone off to?”

“Roger’s with Captain Prentice.” Waving vaguely. “The usual Mysterious Microfilm Drill.” Being transacted in some distant room, across a crown-and-anchor game with which chance has very little to do, billows of smoke and chatter, Falkman and His Apache Band subdued over the BBC, chunky pints and slender sherry glasses, winter rain at the windows. Time for closeting, gas logs, shawls against the cold night, snug with your young lady or old dutch or, as here at Snoxall’s, in good company. Here’s a shelter—perhaps a real node of tranquillity among several scattered throughout this long wartime, where they’re gathering for purposes not entirely in the martial interest.

Pirate Prentice feels something of this, obliquely, by way of class nervousness really: he bears his grin among these people here like a phalanx. He learned it at the films—it is the exact mischievous Irish grin your Dennis Morgan chap goes about cocking down at the black smoke vomiting from each and every little bucktooth yellow rat he shoots down.

It’s as useful to him as he is to the Firm—who, it is well known, will use anyone, traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get what They want. They may not’ve been that sure of Pirate’s usefulness at first, but later, as it developed, They were to grow very sure, indeed.

“Major-General, you can’t actually give your support to this.”

“We’re watching him around the clock. He certainly isn’t leaving the premises physically.”

“Then he has a confederate. Somehow—hypnosis, drugs, I don’t know—they’re getting to his man and tranquilizing him. For God’s sake, next you’ll be consulting horoscopes.”