“I would say,” he declared, “that it was the single most weird and extraordinary phenomenon I have witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing weird and extraordinary phenomena. Unfortunately,” he added, turning away again, “I wasn’t in the mood for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had indigestion. I’m always bad-tempered when I’ve got indigestion.”

“And just because of that, you . . .”

“It was more than that. I’d lost the piece of paper too.”

“What piece of paper?”

“That I wrote down her appointment on. Turned up under a pile of bank statements.”

“Which you never open or look at.”

Dirk frowned, and opened his notebook again.

“‘Never . . . open . . . bank . . . statements,’ ” he wrote thoughtfully. “So, when she arrived,” he continued, after he’d put the book back in his pocket, “I wasn’t expecting her, so I wasn’t in command of the situation. Which meant that . . .”

He fished out his notebook, and wrote in it again.

“Now what are you putting?” asked Kate.

“Control freak,” said Dirk. “My first instinct was to make her sit down, and then pretend to get on with something while I composed myself.”

“So?”

“I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair. God knows where it had gone. Which meant that she had to stand over me. Which I also hate. That’s when I turned really ratty.” He peered at his notebook again, and flipped through it. “Strange convergence of tiny little events, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, here was a case of the most extraordinary kind. A beautiful, intelligent, and obviously well-off woman arrives and offers to pay me to investigate a phenomenon that challenges the very foundation of everything that we know about physics and biology, and I . . . turn it down. Astonishing. Normally you’d have to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless,” he added thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this well.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Well, I don’t know. The whole sequence of little obstacles would have been completely invisible except for one thing. When I eventually found the piece of paper I’d written her details on, the phone number was missing. The bottom of the sheet of paper had been torn off. So I have no easy way of finding her.”

“Well, you could try calling directory information. What’s her name?”

“Smith. Hopeless. But don’t you think it odd that the number had been torn off?”

“No, not really, if you want an honest answer. People tear off scraps of paper all the time. I can see you’re probably in a mood to construct some massive space/time bending conspiracy theory out of it, but I suspect you just tore off a strip of paper to clean your ears out with.”

“You’d worry about space/time if you’d seen that cat.”