Mr. X – a Mayfair playboy well-known in Café Society and the International Set – will pinpoint the area where shapely brunette ‘Mrs. Undies’ says her wonder hubby sent her to Coventry.

Police with tracker dogs and firemen with breathing apparatus fought to bring the mini-miracle under control.

Thirty-two-year-old hole-in-the-head secrets man ‘Mr. Showbiz’ collapsed after a Dolce-Vita-type milk stout orgy. In a plush night-club doctors struggled desperately to save his life.

But it overpowered them and escaped.

Top scientists threw a cordon round the doomed area. The trapped men retaliated by throwing a dragnet round the scientists, and going through them with a fine-tooth comb to locate the missing super-horror in a twelve-minute mini-marathon.

Later a mini-man assisted the police in their inquiries.

After a certain initial prejudice against this sort of language had dissolved, Goldwasser began to enjoy the stories his programme wrote. They seemed to him to be the real modern fairy stories, and the cloudy, ambiguous world they revealed of miracle hubby horrors he came to see as the true fairyland lurking just round the corner of every Englishman’s consciousness. To a remarkable degree, moreover, the stories survived his compulsion to read them backwards with their sense unimpaired.

21

Nunn’s work was being seriously affected. His raw squash production was down by twenty per cent. His rugby watching had fallen by twenty-five. His output of crude sporting conversation had slumped by nearly a third. If things got any worse, it occurred to him, he might have to get Miss Fram to take some of his sporting obligations off his shoulders in her spare time. If she had any spare time. He wondered anxiously whether she did, or whether she remained in the outer office all night as well as all day, faffling away at what ever it was she faffled away at. How little, reflected Nunn sadly, do we know about our fellow creatures when one comes down to it!

The trouble was Goldwasser. Nunn had got on to one or two of his old friends in security and told them about the Goldwasser case. They had been interested – ‘Very interested, Naismith’ (as they called Nunn for security reasons) – and they had put a man on to watch Goldwasser.

The man had found out some rather interesting things about Goldwasser (‘Very interesting things, Naismith!’ as the men whom Nunn for security reasons called Jurgensen and Bissel had remarked, puffing at their pipes and wrinkling their foreheads significantly.) The difficulty was to make sense of it all, to fit all the pieces of the jig-saw together.

In the privacy of his office Nunn sorted through the reports yet again. At 1630 hours on Plumday, as Monday was called for security reasons, Goldwasser had consumed two cups of tea and a chocolate-coated wafer bar in the Tea Room. On Spoonday he had twice come out of his laboratory, scratched his head and gone back inside again. At 1143 hours on Troutday he had left the Institute and gone to J. Groombridge, Ironmonger, where he had stayed four minutes and purchased a dozen half-inch screws, brass, round-headed, which he had told the assistant he wanted in order to put up a mirror.