I gave my chin another stroke. This was brilliant, there was no doubt about that. “We will have to be so careful.”

“I’m going to call myself Macgillicudy Val Der Mar.”

“Eh?” said I.

“My pen name. My nom de plume. Mr Penrose gave it to me. I’ll keep working here until I’ve made a couple of million, then I’ll just vanish. Of course, by then I’ll have about a dozen other ‘biographies’ on the tape. So more millions, but far away from here and the Official Secrets Act. Somewhere that has no extradition treaties with the UK.”

“You’ve got all this worked out very quickly,” I observed.

“It’s all down to Mr Penrose.”

“This is dangerous,” I said. “Very dangerous.”

“You’re not kidding. But we can both get very rich on this. And we can get out of here. Do you want to spend the rest of your life flicking this switch, or do you want riches and out?”

I gave the matter a bit of thought.

“I want riches and out,” I said.

17

Life eh?

What’s it all about, then?

How many times have we heard that question asked? And how many answers are there to that question? Hundreds? Thousands? Of all the questions man has ever asked, that one seems to have the most answers. And the thing about those answers, which in fact unites those answers, no matter how diverse and contradictory those answers might be, is that they all come from people who think they know; are sure they know; but don’t really know at all.

No one knows.

No one living, anyway.

The dead know. But the dead know everything. The dead know so much stuff that if the living were to find it all out from the dead, the living would be scared to death. And then they’d know it all for themselves anyway.

The trouble is, and it is a big trouble, that although the dead know everything, they are not always entirely honest and forthcoming when they pass their knowledge on to the living.

Take the Virgin Mary, for instance. She’s dead and she knows everything. But when she chooses to manifest in front of some peasant boys and girls on some hillside somewhere, does she ever have anything interesting to say? Anything profound and earth-shattering? Not a bit of it. And this woman was the mother of God.

Mind you, I don’t blame her for not having much to say. She must still be a very confused woman. Unless someone has got around to explaining to her exactly what her relationship with her son really is. I mean, as far as I’ve heard it, there is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost inseminated Mary and she gave birth to God the Son. But the Holy Ghost and God the Son are both aspects of God the Father; they are ultimately one and the same. Which means that Jesus was his own father and Mary was inseminated by her own, as yet unborn, son. Which might mean that Jesus sends himself a card on Father’s Day, but can’t send Mary a card on Mother’s Day, because being also God the Father he was around long before Mary was even born.

Christmas dinners must be a laugh at God’s house. And although Jesus, God the Son, has a birthday to celebrate, His dad, who is also Himself, doesn’t, because He was never born.

So, yeah, Mary manifests and she doesn’t have much to say. But the rest of the dead, and there’s a lot of’em, they’ve all got something or other they’d just love to say to the living, but they can’t. They can’t get through because it just doesn’t work like that.

But then, once in a very long while, one of them does manage to get through and, having made this momentous move, do they say something incredible? Do they pass on their profound cosmic wisdom? Do they heck! They all screw up. They do, they really do. They lie, they deceive, they are frankly dishonest. Why? Won’t someone tell me why? Does anybody know?

A century or more of hard grind on the part of the Society of Psychical Research has turned up positively nothing. Nothing that will hold up in court as definite irrefutable contact with the dead. And why? Not because the dead did not contact the living, but because when they did they came out with a lot of old toot and confused the issue further.

My heart truly bleeds for all those mediums sitting at tables trying to contact “the other side”. And those psychic questers like Danbury Collins constantly being led up blind alleys by spirit guides. And the channellers, channelling away and the Spiritualist Church and all those who receive information from “Higher Sources”.

I’m sorry, it’s not my fault, but the dead cannot be trusted.

So, yeah, right. Now I’m asking. Now, at the point in my life that I’ve reached. The point that I’m writing about now. Because at this point I didn’t know. But then at this point I wasn’t aware that the dead did lie to the living. I wasn’t really sure that the dead could talk to the living. Although I had had that brief conversation with my father. Or thought I had. Or believed I had. Because I had a real problem convincing myself that what was going on with the FLATLINE programme was actually real.

I wanted it to be real and I really, really wanted to talk to Mr Penrose. If just to say that I was sorry for reawakening him in his coffin. But I was having difficulties with the concept of the thing.

Because, I suppose, I was having difficulties with the concept of life. My life. Everything that happened to me seemed to happen so fast. It just came out of nowhere and hit me. It woke me up out of my dreams. Or it was my dreams and I didn’t remember the times when I was awake.

Or something.

But I couldn’t seem to keep up. And I certainly couldn’t sleep. If sleeping was sleeping and being awake was being awake.

I remember that I did a lot of late-night pacing. Up and down in the bedroom. All alone in the bedroom.

I was certain that Sandra had said that she was only going away for a week. But it was nearly two weeks now and she still wasn’t back. And I actually missed her. I know that we didn’t have much of a marriage. Well, anything of a marriage, really. We didn’t have sex any more and when she wasn’t laughing at me, or criticizing me, she was away at work and I wasn’t seeing her anyway. And now she was away on holiday with Count Otto and I was missing her like crazy.

Why? Well, I don’t know why. Because I loved her, I suppose. I know that there wasn’t much to love about her any more. But I could think back to our honeymoon in Tenerife, when I loved her and she loved me in return and that was a happy time. We would make love in the banana plantations and she would run around afterwards with her clothes off, impersonating ponies. Those were the days. They were. They really were.

And I felt certain that those days would return. Because I had the power to make them return. Barry and I would become millionaires, and Sandra would like being married to a millionaire. Even if that millionaire had to flee the British Isles. Perhaps we’d move to Tenerife. She would love me again, I knew that she would, and all would be well and happy again.

The matter seemed simple to me. My wife no longer loved me because she no longer respected me. So I would regain her respect and she would love me again.

Sorted. She would respect me if I became a millionaire, I was certain about that. Which left only the matter of the opposition, the fly in the marmalade, the sand in the suntan lotion, the boil on the marital backside, Count Otto Black.

He’d have to go. And go for good.

The count would have to die.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I didn’t come to this decision without a great crisis of conscience. In fact, it was the greatest crisis of conscience that I had experienced in nearly ten years.

The last time I had such a crisis of conscience was at the trial of the Daddy.