“Have I mentioned that I believe in the fundamental connectedness of all things? I think I have.”

“Yes.”

“Which is why I must now go and investigate some of the other books he was interested in before getting myself ready for tomorrow’s expedition.”

“. . .”

“I can hear you shaking your head in sorrow and bewilderment. Don’t worry. Everything is getting nicely out of control.”

“If you say so, Dirk. Oh, by the way, what does ‘ineffable’ actually mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Dirk tersely, “but I intend to find out.”

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

THE FOLLOWING MORNING the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and Dirk decided to call it Stanley instead.

Stanley wasn’t a good downpour. Nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing the air. Stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the air of. Stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty pressed up against you in a tube train. Stanley didn’t rain, but every so often he dribbled on you.

Dirk stood outside in the Stanley.

The actor had kept him waiting for over an hour now, and Dirk was beginning to wish that he had stuck by his own opinion that actors never got up in the morning. Instead of which he had turned up rather eagerly outside the actor’s flat at about 8:30 and then stood behind a tree for an hour.

Nearly an hour and a half now. There was a brief moment of excitement when a motorcycle messenger arrived and delivered a small package, but that was about it. Dirk lurked about twenty yards from the actor’s door.

The Motorcycle Messenger Arrival Incident had surprised him a bit. The actor didn’t seem to be a particularly prosperous one. He looked as if he were more in the still-knocking-on-people’s-doors bit of his career than in the having-scripts-biked-round-to-him bit.

Time dragged by. Dirk had read through the small collection of newspapers he’d brought with him twice, and checked through the contents of his wallet and pockets several times: the usual collection of business cards for people he had no recollection of meeting, unidentifiable phone numbers on scraps of paper, credit cards, cheque book, his passport (he had suddenly remembered that he had left it in another jacket when his quarry had paused for a longish time at the window of a travel agent yesterday), his toothbrush (he never travelled without his toothbrush, with the result that it was completely unusable), and his notebook.