He was old, his face a mottled wrinlded thing. But beneath two snowy brows a pair of icy blue eyes were all a-twinkle.

His hands seemed crooked wizened claws. In one he held my manuscript. And in the other, a pistol.

He smiled when he saw me.

And I smiled in return.

‘Hello, Edwin,’ he said.

‘Hello, Doveston,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

28

'You’ve had the gardens redone,’ he said, as casual as casual could be.

‘I’ve moved all the trees. I could never be having with that Gaia logo of yours. I uprooted the trees, one by one, and repositioned them. It took me nearly eight years. You can’t really appreciate the new pattern from ground level. Did you see it as you flew in?’

‘No.’ The Doveston shook his old head. ‘I was sleeping. I sleep a lot nowadays. But not in comfort. I have dreams.’

‘I’ll just bet you do.’

‘So,’ the Doveston said. ‘Here we are again. I must say that you look well. The country life evidently suits you.

‘Huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’,’ I said.

‘And you’ve been expecting me?’

‘Oh yes.’ I perched my bum on the edge of the table. ‘I knew you’d be along pretty smartish, as soon as you’d read my manuscript.’

‘This?’ The Doveston held the wad of papers in his trembling hand. ‘This rubbish? This load of old bollocks?’

‘Now, I did consider calling it that,’ I said. ‘A Load of Old Bollocks. But I settled for Snuff Fiction. I felt that Snuff Fiction said it all.’

The Doveston hurled the manuscript down. It was an excellent hurl. If I’d been awarding points for hurling, I would have given him at least nine out of ten.

‘Well hurled, sir,’ I said.

His body rocked. ‘It’s rubbish.’ His voice cracked and quavered. ‘It’s rubbish. It’s bollocks.’

‘You don’t like it, then?’

‘I hate it.’

‘And might I ask why?’

The hand that held the pistol twitched. ‘That book isn’t about me. That isn’t my biography. I come out of it as little more than a peripheral figure. That book is all about you. What you thought. What you felt. How you reacted to everything that happened.’

‘So you really really hate it?’

‘I loathe and detest it.’

‘I felt pretty confident you would.’ I pulled from my pocket a packet of cigarettes. Doveston’s Extra Specials. Mr Cradbury had got them for me. I took one out and I lit it. ‘Care for a smoke?’ I asked the Doveston.

‘No.’ The old man’s head rocked to and fro. ‘I don’t any more.’

‘Too bad. But tell me this. What did you really expect me to write?’

‘The truth. My life story. The truth.’

‘The truth?’ I shook my head, blew out smoke and spoke through it. ‘What you wanted from me was a whitewash. A snow-job. That’s why you left all your money to me. So I would be forever in your debt. So I would think what a wonderful fellow you were. And when the time came for me to write your life story, I would write a hagiography. And to do what? To make you a role model for the young. The shuffler who made it big.’

‘And why not?’ The Doveston waggled his pistol. ‘I am the man, you know. I am the man.

‘The man who runs it all?’

‘All,’ said the Doveston.

I puffed upon my Extra Special. ‘I thought that was probably the case. There’s one thing I can’t figure out though. How did you fake your own death? The head and the hand looked so real. I would have sworn they were real.’

‘Of course they were real. They were my head and my hand. It was me, lying there in the coffin. I was worried for a moment, when Norman wanted to show you the way my head had been stitched back on. I’m glad you stopped him. You see, I just couldn’t resist it. Attending my own funeral in person, hearing all the nice things people had to say. I was somewhat miffed that you didn’t get up to say anything. And I didn’t think it was funny when that twat from the Dave Clark Five sang ‘Bits and Pieces’. Nor the fact that you put someone else’s brand of cigarettes in my pocket. Or the way Norman knocked the vicar into the lake.’

‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘That was funny.’

‘Well, perhaps a wee bit.’

‘And so everyone, including me, thought you were dead. And I would probably have gone on thinking it, if it hadn’t been for what happened here on that final night of the last century. When I discovered that all those people were members of the Secret Government. And when you blew them all to buggeration. I knew then. That wasn’t a revenge killing. That was a coup d’état. You wiped them all out so you could take over.’

‘I’m very impressed,’ said the Doveston. ‘I really didn’t think you’d work that out.’

‘Sit down,’ I told him. ‘Please sit down.’

He sank into the single chair. The pistol on his knees. His eyes now rolling wildly.

‘But please tell me this,’ I said. ‘Because I really have to know. What was it all about? Why did you do all the things you did? Was it just to have power? Surely you had enough. You were so wealthy. So successful. Why did you do it all? Why?’

‘You never understood and why should you have?’ He stroked the barrel of his pistol. ‘It was all so wild, you see. So off the world. It was all down to Uncle Jon Peru Joans. He was my mentor, you see. Oh yes, I had a mentor too. And all those things he told us about. All that wacky stuff. The talking to the trees. The revelation. Armageddon. The mad mutant army marching over the land.

It was all true. Every bit of it. Especially the drug.’

‘I can vouch for the drug,’ I said, ‘it helped to fuck up my life.’

‘It was only in its first stages of preparation then. It was raw. When it was accidentally administered to the crowd at Brentstock, it was still crude, but I realized then what I had. Something incredible, once it was refined and refined.’

‘So all of this is about a drug?’

‘Not a drug. The drug.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘No.’ The Doveston rocked in his chair. ‘You don’t. A lifetime’s work has gone into the refinement of this drug. My lifetime. But why not? After all, what is a lifetime anyway? A drop of water in the ocean of eternity? A fleck of dandruff on the head of time? A nasty brown dingleberry on the arsehole of—’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I get the picture.’

‘Oh no you don’t. As I say, you only experienced the drug in its crude and unrefined form. It gave you flashes of the past and the present and the future. But they weren’t all altogether accurate, were they?’

‘Well—’

‘But now it is perfected. After a lifetime of work and a fortune spent in research and development, it is perfected.’

‘So the world can soon expect Doveston’s Wonder Pills, can it?’

‘Oh no. You fail to understand. These pills cannot be mass produced. It has been the work of a single lifetime to perfect one single pill.’

‘Just the one?’

‘I only need the one.

I shook my head and sighed and I dropped my cigarette butt and ground it out with my heel. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Everything you did, you did to get your hands on one single pill. What does this pill do?’

‘It bestows immortality.’

‘Does it bollocks. And even if it did, look at the state of you. You’re an old man. Do you want to live for ever in your condition?’

‘No no no. You still fail to grasp it. When the pill is placed in the mouth, its effect is instantaneous. It allows you to experience the past, the present and the future simultaneously. All of it. Can you imagine that? Can you possibly imagine that? In the space of a single second, which is all the time the effect of the drug lasts for, you experience everything.