Twenty minutes later I joined Boz and Zeb in the same cafe Zeb and I had retreated to a day earlier.  They both appeared unharmed and in good spirits.

'All right, chaps?'

'Yeah.  Fine.  Cool.  You?'

'We're okay, I-sis.'

I sat down between them, getting Brother Zebediah to move over. 'I had tea,' I told them, 'with a very nice lady called Cimmeria whose real name is Gladys; she told me that Mr Leopold is indeed Morag's - Fusillada's - agent and manager, and that he was here just yesterday, but that he has had problems with… Vat?' I said, looking inquiringly from one to the other.

'VAT.' Boz nodded slowly, then sipped carefully at his coffee. 'Value Added Tax, I-sis.' He tutted and shook his head, seemingly unimpressed with the concept.

'Indeed,' I said. 'Well, apparently Mr Leopold has been experiencing difficulties with this VAT for some time now and is currently helping Customs and Excise with their inquiries.'

'Huh.  Well.  So,' Zeb said.

'So,' I said, 'Cimmeria - Gladys - told me that she thought Mr Leopold lives in the county of Essex, in a village called Gittering, near Badleigh, and thinks that that was where he took a number of the papers and files he previously kept in the office.  She suggests we try there.  What do you say?'

'Essex!' Zeb said, with an expression on his face which, given we were sitting in a cafe in central London, might have been better suited to accompanying the word 'Mongolia?' delivered in the same tone of voice.

'I-sis; you think your cousin might be there?'

'Well,' I said, 'apparently some of the scenes for certain of Fusillada's videotape productions were shot in Mr Leopold's home there, which is called La Mancha.  Cimmeria - Gladys - knows this because some of her friends have been there to take part in them.  So, as Morag is no longer living at the flat in Finchley, I suppose it is not impossible she is there, though we have no guarantee, of course.'

Boz thought about this.  He looked very big and bulky in baggy black trousers and an expensive-looking black leather jacket.  He wore a black peaked cap; it was back to front so that people behind him could read the white letter X. 'What the hell,' he said. 'I wasn't doin' nuthin' much today anyway.  And I heard about Essex girls, eh?' He delivered what looked like the gentlest of pulled punches past me to Brother Zebediah's arm; Zeb rocked in his stool and looked pained.  He forced a smile while he rubbed his arm.

'Suppose.  Yeah.  Shit.  Essex.  Shit.'

'Let's make tracks!' I said, jumping off my stool and unable to resist nudging Zeb in the elbow.  He looked startled and stared concernedly at his elbow.  Boz slurped on his coffee.

We took a bus to Liverpool Street station and a train from there to Badleigh.  Not having anticipated a journey outside the capital, I had not brought my Sitting Board, so Zeb and I stood in the aisle by Boz's seat.  Boz read a paper called the Mirror.  I whiled away the time for Zeb by reading him parts of passages from the Orthography and asking him to recall what words came next.  He was shockingly poor at this, though that may have been because completing the pieces of text would have required talking in sentences of more than one word and he had obviously quite got out of that particular habit.

At one point, when Boz had gone to the toilet for 'a quick toke' (which I took to be Jamaican slang for a bowel movement, given the amount of time he was away), I asked Zeb, 'Why does Boz wear his cap back to front?'

Zeb looked at me as though I had asked him why Boz wore his shoes on his feet. 'It's.  Like.  Baseball cap,' he said scornfully.

I thought about this. 'Ah,' I said, really none the wiser.

The city went on and on; every time I thought we had finally left the metropolis behind, the patch of greenery I'd based this assumption on would turn out to be a park or an area of waste ground.  Eventually, however, while I was engrossed in the Orthography (Zeb had gone off to the toilet some time earlier) the city gave way to countryside, and when I next looked up we were sliding through a level landscape of fields and narrow lanes, dotted with buildings, villages and towns, all sliding quickly past under a sky of small clouds.  I felt some relief at having left the vast busyness of the city behind, as though my clutter-smothered soul was finally drawing something like a clear and unobstructed breath again.

Badleigh proved to be a flat town with a split personality: a village-like old town with low, erratically streeted buildings to one side of the railway line, and a cubical landscape of medium-rise brick and concrete on the other.  One building I thought at first must still be under construction proved on closer inspection - as the train slowed and we got ready to get off- to be a multi-layered car park.

'He says it's three miles, I-sis,' Boz told us, after talking to the man in the ticket office.

'Good!' I said. 'A stroll.'

'No way, man,' Boz said, grinning from behind dark sunglasses. 'I call us a taxi.' He loped off to the exit.

'For a mere three miles?' I said, aghast, to Zeb.

'City,' Zeb said, shrugging, then appeared to think.  His face brightened briefly. 'Lanes,' he said, with a hint of pride, I thought.  He nodded happily. 'Lanes,' he said again, and sounded pleased with himself.

'Lanes?' I asked.

'Lanes.  Narrow.  No pavements.  Cars.  Speeding.  Walking.  Dangerous.' He shrugged. 'Lanes.' He turned and walked to the doors, beyond which Boz could be seen getting into a car.

'Lanes,' I muttered to myself, feeling obliged to join my two comrades.

'Well, I'm sorry, dear, but you can't kneel on the seats.'

'But I could put the belt round me!' I said, struggling to pull the restraining seat-belt out far enough.

'That's not the point though, love, is it?  The regulations say that my fares have to be seated.  If you're kneeling you're not seated, are you?'

'Could I sit on the floor?' I asked.

'No, I don't think so.'

'But I'd be seated!'

'Yeah, but not on a seat; you wouldn't be seated on a seat, know what I mean?  There something wrong with her, mate?'

'The child's eccentric, man; she's from Scot-lan'.  I'm sorry.  Hey, I-sis; you got the man here thinkin' he got some sort of lunatic in the back of his car here-'

'Well, I meant like piles or sumfing, actually…'

'-he goin' to be askin' us to get out an' walk if you don't settle down.  Sorry, man; you just start the meter rollin' now; we get this sorted.'

'Look,' I said, 'haven't you got some sort of board or something hard I could sit on?'

The taxi driver looked round at me.  He was a hunched little chap with alarmingly thick glasses. 'Sumfing hard to sit on?' he said, then glanced at Boz. 'See; told you.'

He reached down the side of his seat and handed me a large book. 'Here we go; the A to Z; will that do?'

I tested it; the battered hardback flexed a little. 'It will suffice.  Thank you, sir.'

'All part of the service,' he said, turning back. 'Nuffink to be embarrassed about.  Had the same problem myself once, 'cept you don't usually see people young as you wif it, do you?'

'No,' I agreed as we started off and I belted myself in, too flustered to follow what he was talking about.

The car smelled powerfully of a cheap, sharp perfume.  We passed the three miles to Gittering being regaled with graphic tales of our driver's multiple hospitalisations and various operations.

'Attractive.  Ranch style,' Zeb said, staring with admiration at the large house beyond the gate separating road from driveway.  At the far end of the drive, La Mancha was a white bungalow complex with roofs at various angles and large windows backed by closed curtains.  The gardens looked well tended, although somebody had abandoned a gaily painted horsecart in the centre of the lawn, there was a new-looking plough standing on a strip of grass across the drive from the lawn, and a brightly decorated cartwheel lay against the side of the house.  It looked terribly clean and tidy to be a working farm.