They both looked at me, then at the corpse, which was starting to ooze an unnatural yellowish liquid from the top of its spine.

“What in hell’s name is that?” said Finisterre.

“It’s a kind of temporary satellite consciousness,” I said in a soft voice as I felt a tingling return to my leg. “Let me explain.”

I told them what a Day Player was and how Jack Schitt would be back in his suite at the Piper-Astoria right now. Phoebe apologized for disbelieving me, and after we had discussed it at length, I called Stig to alert him that we had another nonevolved life-form for collection. And while the colonel secured the scene, Finisterre and I cleaned ourselves as best as we could with a box of wet wipes.

“So why did he lose interest once he knew that Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day had been copied?” asked Phoebe when we’d explained to her what had happened.

“No idea.”

Finisterre was busy looking through the small volume. “What palimpsest was he after?” I asked.

“We can find out,” said James, “by using multispectral filming, and by superimposing the images we should be able to view each palimpsest and identify the source of every single reused page in the book. Some recycled pages will have been well washed and scraped, others less so. And the comparing of the palimpsests with known works that Zvlkx bought in bulk will take some time. I suggest dismembering the book and having several teams working on it until we find something.”

“Like what?”

“Something we don’t expect to find. I’m thinking that perhaps a book of peculiar rarity and importance made it into Zvlkx’s rebinding factory—and that those pages made their way into random copies of his books.”

“Then we should get started right now,” murmured Phoebe, who seemed relieved that she wasn’t going to be arrested for murder after all.

I told them to call me when they had anything and left them to it.

John Duffy was waiting for me back up in my office. I borrowed some spare clothes from the lost-property bin and went to have a shower and emerged refreshed twenty minutes later wearing a tweed skirt, mismatched socks and a large Swindon Mallets sweatshirt, something that Conrad Spoons found unaccountably funny when I returned to the office.

They were busy inventorying what the Wessex Library Service actually owned and had found about 2.4 million pounds’ worth of cars, vans, two tiltrotors and forty thousand date stamps that had been ordered in error.

“How much time will two point four million buy us?” I asked.

“About a week.”

“It’s a start. Anything to give us some breathing space. Duffy?”

I beckoned him over, and he asked me what I needed.

“Keep this quiet, but did Geraldine score any more of those patches?”