‘So,’ I said, ‘he’s Richard. And who are you talking about?’

‘The Doveston, of course. Don’t tell me it’s slipped by you that the man’s a raving loon.’

‘He does have some eccentricities.’

‘So did Richard Dadd. Here, let me show you this.’ Norman rummaged about in his shopcoat pockets and drew out a crumpled set of plans. ‘Move your woosie address book off the table and let me spread this out.’

I elbowed my Fiofax onto the floor. ‘What have you got there?’ I asked.

‘Plans for the gardens of Castle Doveston.’ Norman smoothed out creases and fficked away cake crumbs. ‘Highly top secret and confidential, of course.’

‘Of course.

‘Now, you see all this?’ Norman pointed. ‘That is the estate surrounding the house. About a mile square. A lot of land. All these are the existing gardens, the Victorian maze, the ornamental ponds, the tree-lined walks.’

‘It’s all very nice,’ I said. ‘I’ve walked around most of it.’

‘Well, it’s all coming up, the lot of it. The diggers are moving in next week.’

‘But that’s criminal.’

‘They’re his gardens. He can do what he likes with them.’

‘You mean he can behave as badly as he likes with them.’

‘Whatever. Now see this.’ Norman fished a crumpled sheet of transparent acetate from another pocket and held it up. ‘Recognize this?’

Printed in black upon the acetate was the distinctive Doveston logo, the logo that had so upset the late Vicar Berry. The three tadpoles chasing each other’s tails.

‘The Mark of the Beast,’ I said with a grin.

‘Don’t be a prat,’ said Norman. ‘It’s the alchemical symbol for Gaia.’

‘Who?’

‘Gaia, Goddess of the Earth. She bore Uranus and by him Cronus and Oceanus and the Titans. In alchemy she is often represented by the three serpents. These symbolize sulphur, salt and mercury. The union of these three elements within the cosmic furnace symbolize the conjunction of the male and female principles, which create the philosopher’s stone.’

‘There’s no need to take the piss,’ I said.

‘I’m not. The symbol ultimately represents the union between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. Man and nature, that kind of thing. I should bloody know, I designed the logo for him.’

‘Oh,’ said I. ‘Then pardon me.’

Norman placed the sheet of acetate over the map. ‘Now what do you see?’ he asked.

‘A bloody big logo superimposed over the gardens of the estate.

‘And that’s what you’ll see from an aeroplane, once the ground has been levelled and the trees planted. The logo picked out in green trees upon brown earth.’

‘He’s Richard, you know,’ said I.

‘He worries me,’ said Norman. ‘And he keeps on about this invisible ink thing. I wish I’d never mentioned it to him.’

‘I don’t think you’ve mentioned it to me.

‘Top secret,’ said Norman, tapping his nose.

‘So?’

‘So it’s like this. He was talking to me about the colour he wanted for the package of his new brand of cigarettes. Said he wanted something really eye-catching, that would stand out from all the rest. And I said that you can’t go wrong with red. All the most successful products have red packaging. It’s something to do with blood and sex, I believe. But then I made the mistake of telling him about this new paint I was working on. It’s ultraviolet.’

‘But you can’t see ultraviolet.’ I sipped at my pint. ‘It’s invisible to the human eye.

‘That’s the whole point. If you could create an opaque ultraviolet paint, then whatever you painted with it would become invisible.’

‘That’s bollocks,’ I said. ‘That can’t be true.’

‘Why not? If you paint anything with opaque paint, you can’t see the thing itself, only the layer of paint.’

‘Yes, but you can’t see ultraviolet.’

‘Exactly. So if you can’t see through the paint, you can’t see the thing underneath it, can you?’

‘There has to be a flaw in this logic,’ I said. ‘If the paint is invisible to the human eye, then you must be able to see the object you’ve painted with it.’

‘Not if you can’t see through the paint.’

‘So, have you actually made any of this paint?’

Norman shrugged. ‘I might have.’

‘Well, have you?’

‘Dunno. I thought I had, but now I can’t seem to find the jam jar I poured it into.’

I made the face that says ‘you’re winding me up’. ‘And the Doveston would like to buy a pot or two of your miracle paint, I suppose?’

‘As much as I can produce. For aesthetic reasons, he says. He wants to paint all the razor wire on the perimeter fences with it.’

I got up to get in the pints. At the bar the landlord kindly drew my attention to the fact that I had dropped my woosie address book. ‘You still working up at the big house?’ he asked.

‘Would I still be drinking in this dump if I wasn’t?’

He topped up my newly drawn pint from the drips tray. ‘I suppose not. Is it true what they say about the new laird?’

‘Probably.’

The landlord whistled. ‘I tried that once. Had to soak my pecker in iodine for a week to wash the smell off.’

I paid for my pints and returned to my table.

‘And another thing,’ said Norman. ‘He has become utterly convinced that the world as we know it will come to an end at the stroke of midnight on the final day of this century. Says he’s known it for years and years and that he’s going to be prepared.’

‘Tomorrow belongs to those who can see it coming.’

‘I thought up that phrase,’ said Norman. ‘He nicked it off me.’

‘Don’t you ever get fed up with him nicking your ideas?’

‘Not really. After all, he is my bestest friend.’

‘But he’s Richard.’

‘Oh yeah, he’s Richard all right. But I don’t let that interfere with our friendship.’

We drank down our pints and then Norman got a couple in. ‘The landlord said to tell you not to forget your woosie address book, it’s still on the floor.’ Norman placed the pints upon the table.

‘We’d better drink these up quickly,’ I said, ‘and get back to work.’

‘Not today. The Doveston said we are to take the afternoon off. Another of his secret meetings.’

‘Bugger. I want to get finished.’

‘Me too, but we’re not allowed back this afternoon.’

I swallowed Death-by-Cider. ‘I’d love to know what he gets up to at those secret meetings, wouldn’t you?’

Norman shrugged. ‘We could always sneak back and watch him on the closed-circuit TV.’

‘What closed—circuit TV?’

‘The one I fitted last month. There’re secret cameras in every room.

‘What? Even in my bedroom?’

‘Of course.

‘Then he’s been watching me having sex.

‘Well, if he has, then he hasn’t shown me the tapes. The only footage I’ve seen of you involved a mucky mag and a box of Kleenex.’

I made gagging croaking sounds.

‘Oh yeah, those were the noises you were making too.’

‘The bastard,’ I said. ‘The bastard!’

‘You think that’s bad. You should see the tapes of me.’

‘Of you?’

‘Oh yeah. In my bedroom. The landlord has recommended iodine.’

‘You mean there’s a hidden camera in your bedroom too?’

‘Of course there is. I installed it there myself.’

‘But..., I said. ‘If you...I mean...Why...I mean...’

‘Precisely,’ said Norman. ‘It’s a right liberty, isn’t it?’

We finished our pints and sneaked back to Castle Doveston.

Norman let us into the grounds through a hole he’d made in the perimeter fence. ‘I can’t be having with all that fuss at the main gates,’ he said. ‘So I always come in this way.’

We skirted the great big horrible house and Norman unlocked a cellar door. ‘I got this key cut for myself,’ he said. ‘Just for convenience.

Once inside, Norman led me along numerous corridors, opening numerous locked doors with numerous keys he’d had cut for convenience. At last we found ourselves in an underground room, low-ceilinged and whitely painted, one wall lined with TV screens, before which stood a pair of comfy chairs. We settled into them and Norman took up a remote controller.