Dirk Gently, hired by someone he never meets, to do a job that is never specified, starts following people at random. His investigations lead him to Los Angeles, through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos. Jokes, lightly poached fish, and the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to Dirk Gently’s most baffling and incomprehensible case.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

EARLY MOST MORNINGS Dave climbed up to this isolated spot on the hill and brought small offerings to leave in the shrine of St. Clive, the patron saint of real-estate agents. Today what he’d brought was, so far as he could make out, part of a swimming-pool cleaning device, a sort of large, plastic, sucking lobsterish thing.

He laid the thing down carefully and stood back to admire the effect.

The shrine was just a small heap of rocks, really, with a little array of things that had got dug up from time to time. There was a remote-control garage opener, something that was probably part of a juice extractor, and a small, illuminated Kermit the Frog. The pool-cleaning lobsterish thing was a pretty good addition, and he arranged it so that its two feet of broken ribbed plastic tubing hung down like an elephant’s trunk over Kermit.

His morning trips up to the shrine were partly just to amuse himself, but also a chance to be alone and reflect on things. This whole place had started just as somewhere to fool around by himself, but it had rapidly turned into something kind of bigger than he meant, and he needed somewhere to get away from it all and think about things. Sometimes he’d even worry. When he was worried he would start to giggle slightly, and when he was really worried he would start to hum old Carpenters tunes till the worry went away.

But today he wasn’t going to worry. Today he was going to have fun. He unslung the canvas bag he’d brought up with him and dropped it on the ground for a moment.

From up here, the view was stupendous. Lush forest surrounded DaveLand in every direction, forest of extraordinary richness and diversity, teeming with life and colour. Through it wound the river Dave, which then meandered on through the hills till it met, five hundred miles away, the immense ocean, which, until recently, he had called the Dave Ocean, but which in a fit of modest embarrassment he had now renamed the Karen Ocean. He had always thought that Pacific was a really dumb name. He had been on it. It wasn’t Pacific at all. He’d fixed that.

DaveLand itself was now a pretty impressive affair. Astonishing, really, when he thought about it. He brushed his hand through his lank hair and stared out at it, suppressing a very, very small giggle.