Dirk looked up curtly. He had taken against this woman as soon as she walked in. Not only had she caught him completely off guard, but she was also irritatingly beautiful. He didn’t like beautiful women. They upset him, with their grace, their charm, their utter loveliness, and their complete refusal to go out to dinner with him. He could tell, the very instant this Melinda woman walked into the room, that she wouldn’t go out to dinner with him if he was the last man on earth and had a pink Cadillac convertible, so he decided to take preemptive action. If she was going to not go out to dinner with him, then she would not go out to dinner with him on his terms.

“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.

She raised her other eyebrow as well.

“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?”

“Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow. What was normally a trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing. Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. And so on.

He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.

He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I . . .”

“Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”

“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was going mad.