‘It was a sort of feeling I had. He said things that made me think he might be another cop after all, but he denied that.’

‘He is a cop,’ I said. ‘A Dearth cop. Did he deny anything else?’

‘He said he didn’t want to hurt you.’

Three days after Spoder’s call I heard on the news that the money missing from the accounts of RabaHome.com had been discovered. Officials from Raba Home Supplies, embarrassed and apologetic, blamed the omission on an accountancy error. There was no explanation for this, but it was important news that the company was no longer in danger, and that the jobs of more than four thousand five hundred employees were safe. The head of the accounts department had been fired, and an enquiry was being set up.

The financial gurus were now certain that the unified computer system used in the Raba financial district had been targeted by a hacker, or by hackers. The hacker was believed to be based somewhere on Raba, or on another near island, but even the top software experts, who had flown in from all parts of the Archipelago, could not yet be sure.

That was unlikely to be the end of it, because the catastrophic collapse in the company’s share price led to quick profits of millions of thalers for market speculators, who had taken out put options. Had these unknown, silent operators, gambling on a sudden price collapse, been given advance warning of what was about to happen?

Nor was it the end of the matter in other ways. The bank that went bankrupt remained bankrupt. Two more major financial houses had fallen deeply into the red – one that day, one the day before. Jobs were being lost, small companies as well as large ones were sliding into insolvency.

Meanwhile, credit was unavailable to citizen serfs like me. We paid in cash, but inflationary pressures were making cash worth less and less. The banks where cash could be withdrawn were harder to find every day.

I was for the time being relaxed about the state of the financial woes suddenly paralysing my island. Over the years I have discovered, by experience, that writers like me are relatively untroubled by the ups and downs of the wider economy. Of course we are victims of inflation. Sometimes, as now, we have to pay cash when cash is hard to come by. We suffer if interest rates are set too high or they sink too low. We see our pension savings devalued. Mortgage rates are too steep, and when they are not a mortgage is harder to obtain. In all of these we suffer the same as anyone else.