“I always keep one in the glove compartment of my motorcar,” Frobisher booms. “I would not enter a damaged building without a source of light. I must say, it’s lucky you were behaving like such a ninny. Had you been a little more enthusiastic about your egress, less inclined to tell me to push off, we’d have both been flattened out there. Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out!” He pauses, a huge thick-lipped grin on his face. “Now. Ambulance and fire brigade will take some time, I’m afraid. Explosion at the refinery. So we must work. We have some resources, including . . .” He shuffles away, taking the light with him. “This iron bed.” A prolonged episode of clanking ensues, over which he has to raise his voice. “The fall from your bedroom has broken it apart but the pieces may serve very well. Yes, indeed.”

The fall from my bedroom? What does he mean? The torchlight spins around the room again, this time revealing—what? They look like stalagmites. Whitish, ghostly, some up to waist height, others squatter. More like pillars, in fact, than stalagmites. Squared-off pillars. My eyes strain to interpret them. They’re newspapers. I’m lying on bales of newspapers, and tall stacks of newspapers are surrounding me, tied up with string, dating from the 1950s to the present day.

I’m in Blakemore’s study.

My head swims. In the flickering of the torch I can now see a long rent down the middle of the ceiling, an extruded stuffing of broken rafters, floorboards, plaster. I, along with my bed, must have come down through this gap.

“Good God,” I croak.

“Indeed He is.” Frobisher has rolled up his sleeves now the better to haul some mighty object across the floor.

Haltingly I explain how I started my journey in the attic. “I’ve come down two floors. Why aren’t I bashed to pieces?”

“You are fairly bashed, if I may say so.”

It drifts into my mind that it must be the next day. “What’s the time?”

“About ten in the morning.”

“I’ve been here for . . . sixteen hours.”