This commit. It made me laugh at the time though not now of course, not after what has happened since and being where I am. There’s the faintest light of dawn behind the woods across the river. Soon there’ll be the dawn chorus though I shan’t hear it over the clatter of this wretched machine. I ought to get a silent one and have left silent machines here and there, it was always simpler to get a new machine wherever I was than lug one round with me.

Well. Again, this commit. I came to the conclusion that the deed most in step with my newly discovered nature would be to kill Johnny’s dog. Well. My dog, if you like. (Yes, I know you’ll have forgotten Johnny’s dog. Look it up.)

I went on thinking. I saw that a straightforward murder was childish stuff and unworthy of us both, unworthy of image and original. What was needed was something philosophically, or rather theologically, witty. Believe me, I thought so long and hard that at times I might well have really been on the verge of catatonia! Moreover, the conclusion wasn’t a dull, elaborate deduction like a scientific discovery so called that is the result of statistical compilation, it was a revelation. It opened out in sheer vistas that had me breathless with adoration like a nun. Wordsworth, q.v.

It was very difficult to find Rick. I was in some country or other, Portugal I think or perhaps not, and I did it all by telephone. I got hold of my agent and my publishers. Of course, Rick had been on at them both but even so they didn’t know where he was currently as they all said, only where he had been. For a time we must have kept the satellites buzzing. This surprised me because I thought he would be shackled by one leg to his university but not so. According to my agent he was loose, having been staked to do his research on yours truly and I didn’t need telling to know that Halliday must have staked him. I gave my agent a poste restante in Rome and went there, no longer wanting to avoid Rick but rather having a definite need of him to complete things. They must have rung round in England too because at the poste restante I got a ton of stuff from my publishers, from my agent, from Liz and rubbish from God knows where. I got a taxi and took it back to the sleazy hotel by La Rotonda in sacks.

It was far too much to examine in detail so I left it strewn round the place, rang my agent and actually gave him my telephone number and the name of the hotel I was staying at! I’d got beyond any bother about blowing my cover. He came back within the hour with a message from my publishers who did now know where Rick was. He was lecturing on guess who or what in Hamburg University. I already had my plans laid so I drove straight off, heading north for Switzerland. When I had got far enough away from Rome I stopped and rang him from one of those mini markets attached to gas stations and I got him in ten seconds flat, which is remarkable even in these days of instant everything. He hadn’t caught up with me in years, despite all those near misses. When I thought of the number of times I’d seen him or remembered seeing him nosing about on my trail I laughed aloud at the thought of my voice coming to him out of the blue.