Mum opened the side door to the large workshop and we entered. This was where my Uncle Mycroft did all his inventing. It was here that he had demonstrated, among many other things, translating carbon paper, a sarcasm early warning device, Nextian geometry and, most important to me, the Prose Portal – the method by which I first entered fiction. Mother was always nervous in Mycroft's lab. Many years ago he had developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different over-printings in marginally different time zones that could be read by the use of temporal spectacles. By going to the nanosecond level, a million sheets of text or pictures could be stored on one sheet of paper in a single second. Brilliant – but the paper looked identical to a standard sheet of A4, and it had been a long, contentious family argument that my mother used the irreplaceable prototype to line the compost bucket. It was no wonder she was careful near his inventions.

'What did you want to show me?'

She smiled and led me to the end of the workshop. There, next to my stuff, which she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dustsheet.

'I've run the engine every month and kept it MOTed for you. I even took it for a spin a couple of times.'

She pulled the sheet off with a flourish. The car still looked slightly shabby after our various encounters, but just the way I liked it. I gently touched the bullet holes that had been made by Hades all those years ago, and the bent front wing where I had slid it into the River Severn. I opened the garage doors.

'Thanks, Mum. Sure you're all right with the boy Friday?'

'Until four this afternoon. But you have to promise me something.'

'What's that?'

'That you'll come to my Eradications Anonymous group this evening.'

'Mum—!'

'It will do you good. You might enjoy it. Might meet someone. Might make you forget Linden.'

'Landen. His name's Landen. And I don't need or want to forget him.'

'Then the group will support you. Besides, you might learn something. Oh, and would you take Hamlet with you? Mr Bismarck has a bee in his bonnet about Danes because of that whole silly Schleswig-Holstein thingummy.'

I narrowed my eyes. Could Joffy be right?

'What about Emma? Do you want me to take her, too?'

'No. Why?'

'Er, no reason.'

I picked up Friday and gave him a kiss.

'Be good, Friday. You're staying with Nana for the day.'

Friday looked at me, looked at Mum, stuck his finger up his nose and said: 'Sunt in culpa qui officia id est laborum?'

I ruffled his hair and he showed me a bogey he had found. I declined the present, wiped his hand with a hanky, then went to look for Hamlet. I found him in the front garden demonstrating a thrust-and-parry sword fight to Emma and Pickwick. Even Alan had left off bullying the other dodos and was watching in silence. I called out to Hamlet and he came running.