The next thing that really happened was my meeting with Liz. I’d wanted to arrange to meet on neutral territory, but failed. I didn’t want to ask her round to Stephen’s old flat and I haven’t really got an office at the moment, so I suggested lunch at the Escargot but she said she was too busy for lunch and could I come round to her place at six for a drink. I didn’t really want to get sucked into her orbit, but didn’t see how to get out of it, so I said I would. She’s moved house. I remember going to a huge party of hers in Harley Street in the days when Charles Headleand was making documentaries, donkeys’ years ago, but they’ve sold that house (they must have been mad!) and now she lives in this very nice but rather suburban Edwardian maisonette in St John’s Wood. Actually I shouldn’t be rude about it, it’s very nice really, ‘tis only envy that speaks, and I must say she poured me a very satisfactory slug of Scotch, none of that half-a-finger drowned-in-water ladylike nonsense you sometimes get from people old enough to know better. We had a bit of polite chit-chat about this and that and then she got down to business. She keeps the package in a large rectangular cardboard box (I think it had had a video machine in it, I don’t know why I mention that, just to be circumstantial I suppose) and she took off the lid with a sort of abracadabra look on her face, and there was this tatty jiffy-bag and these little plastic folders of stuff. I must say my first thought was that it didn’t look very publishable in its present condition, and I think I said as much. I thought she wasn’t going to let me get my fingerprints on it, but, after making it quite clear that it was still in her custody, she did let me have a look. It was at this point that she produced the finger bone, which she hadn’t mentioned on the telephone. She keeps it in a special little plastic money bag, the sort people produce in the bank, full of coppers on Monday mornings, while the queue gets longer and longer. She didn’t know what to make of it, but it seemed to me quite obvious that it was a joke. I mean, knowing Stephen, of course, it was a joke. I still think it was a joke, actually, though I agree I can’t explain how it got there, or why the package was sent without any instructions. Perhaps he was ill? Delirious? Dead? Or gone away? I suggested all these possibilities, and she said she’d thought of them all, but thinking of them hadn’t got her anywhere. I saw her point.