“Mycroft, instead of wandering around wasting your time, why don’t you waste Thursday’s and show her what you’ve been up to in your workshop?”

Mycroft looked at us both with a vacant expression. He shrugged and beckoned me toward the back door, changing his slippers for a pair of gumboots and his cardigan for a truly dreadful plaid jacket.

“C’mon then, m’girl,” he muttered, shooing the dodos from around the back door where they had been mustering in hope of a snack, and strode toward his workshop.

“You might repair that garden gate, Uncle—it’s worse than ever!”

“Not at all,” he replied with a wink. “Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour. I haven’t seen you about recently. Have you been away?”

“Well, yes; ten years.”

He looked over his spectacles at me with some surprise.

“Really?”

“Yes. Is Owens still with you?”

Owens was Mycroft’s assistant. He was an old boy who had been with Rutherford when he split the atom; Mycroft and he had been at school together.

“A bit tragic, Thursday. We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired. Polly helps me now.”

We had arrived at his workshop. A log with an ax stuck in it was all that was keeping the door shut. Mycroft fumbled for the switch and the striplights flickered on, filling the workshop with a harsh fluorescent glow. The laboratory looked similar to the last time I had seen it in terms of untidiness and the general bric-à-brac, but the contraptions were different. I had learned from my mother’s many letters that Mycroft had invented a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker, but what he was currently working on, I had no idea.

“Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?”

“The what?”

“The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, dear girl. What do you make of this?”

A large white Rolls-Royce was sitting in the center of the room. I walked over to the vehicle as Mycroft tapped a fluorescent tube to stop it flickering.

“New car, Uncle?”

“No, no,” said Mycroft hurriedly. “I don’t drive. A friend of mine who hires these out was lamenting about the cost of keeping two, one black for funerals and the other white for weddings—so I came up with this.”

He reached in and turned a large knob on the dashboard. There was a low hum and the car turned slowly off-white, gray, dark gray and then finally to black.

“That’s very impressive, Uncle.”

“Do you think so? It uses liquid crystal technology. But I took the idea one step farther. Watch.”

He turned the dial several more notches to the right and the car changed to blue, then mauve, and finally green with yellow dots.