“Sssh,” said I.

“What?” said Dave.

“I hear people,” I said. And we crept forward. We emerged from the tiled corridor onto a kind of gantry at the top of an iron staircase. And we found ourselves looking down onto something that was altogether big.

“What the Holy big Jackus is that?” whispered Dave as he and I and Sandra stared down together.

It was big, and when I say it was big I mean what I say. It was like some vast aircraft-hangar sort of arrangement and there were …

“Flying saucers,” whispered Dave. “Tell me that those aren’t flying saucers.”

“I can’t,” I said. “They are.”

And they were. There was an entire squadron of them. Polished chromium craft. The classic Adamski shape. Discs with a raised central area, ringed around with little portholes.

“Well, I don’t know what I was expecting,” said Dave, “but I don’t think it was this.”

“I thought you said that it was the Germans who had the alien technology in the war.”

“Yeah, but the Germans lost the war. Oh shug! Look at them.”

I looked and I saw. Little grey men with big egg heads moving around the flying saucers.

“Aliens,” I said. “Well, I suppose that where you get UFOs you’re bound to get aliens.”

“Sandra no want to see aliens,” said Sandra. “Sandra scared of aliens.”

“Why do they scare you?” I asked her.

“We leave,” said Sandra. “Leave now. Go back. Take Sandra back, Masser Gary.”

“We’re staying,” I said. “I want to find out what’s going on here.”

“Sandra go. Sandra cannot stay.”

“Face the wall,” I told Sandra. “Stand still. Dave and I will go and have a look around. Don’t move until we come back.”

Sandra turned slowly and faced the wall.

Dave looked at me and I didn’t like the way that he did it.

“Problem?” I asked.

“No,” said Dave. “Nothing. What do you want to do?”

“You’re the criminal mastermind; you tell me.”

“Creep down, have a shifty around, see what we can see, hear what we can hear, nick what we can nick.”

“Good plan,” I said. “Sandra, stay.”

“Sandra stay,” said Sandra.

“Good girl,” I said. “We won’t be long. We hope.”

Dave and I crept down the iron staircase. It was a very long staircase and there were a lot of stairs, but presently we found ourselves at the bottom of them.

Dave looked back up the way we had come. “We have a problem here,” he said. “I can’t see us being able to carry too much booty up all those steps.”

“There’ll be another way out. Now, let me see, there’s something we need if we’re not going to be noticed.”

“Cloaks of invisibility?” Dave suggested. “You are strong with spells today?”

“No, Dave. White coats and light bulbs, that’s all we need.”

“Okey pokey,” said Dave and we set out in search of them.

Now, if there was one thing that I was certain of it was that, in places such as this, there is always a locker room where you can slip into a white coat or a radiation suit or something. At least there always is in James Bond films.

“Ah,” said Dave, pointing to a door. “This will be the kiddie.”

I perused the sign upon the door, WHITE COAT AND LIGHT BULB STORE, it read.

“After you,” said Dave.

“No, after you.”

“No, after you.”

“Oh, please yourself, then.” And I pushed open the door and went inside.

And suddenly, for there was no warning at all, I found myself falling and falling into a bottomless pit of whirling oblivion.

Which is what Lazlo Woodbine used to fall into at the end of the second chapter of each of his thrillers, when the dame that done him wrong bopped him over the head.

Which might have been all right for Laz, but it certainly wasn’t for me.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!” I went.

And then things went very black indeed and that was that for me.

23

I awoke with undoubtedly the worst hangover I have ever had in my life. There is no mistaking a hangover. You can’t pass it off as a migraine. It hurts like the very bejabers and there’s no one to blame but yourself.

I made dismal groaning sounds of the “I must have had a really, really good time last night” variety and felt about for that elusive something-or-other that folk with hangovers always feel about for when they awaken in this terrible state.

But then I became aware that I couldn’t seem to feel about for anything, as my hands wouldn’t move at all. I opened a bleary eye and viewed my immediate surroundings. At first glance they didn’t look too good. On second glance they looked worse.

It appeared as if I was strapped into some kind of large chair. I tried to move my head, but found that I couldn’t. I tried to move my feet, but this was not, as they say, “a happening thing”.

I did some more glancing, just to make sure that the conclusions I had drawn from my previous glancings were not mistaken. No, it seemed that they were not.

I was in a small, rather surgical-looking room, with, walls to either side of me and a glass screen in front. And beyond the glass screen I could see another room, larger than mine and all decked out with rows of chairs. Upon these chairs I could make out a number of people, some of them strange to my eyes, but others most familiar.

Amongst the familiar persuasion, I spied out my mother, weeping into a handkerchief. And beside her my brother, whom I hadn’t seen for nearly ten years. And there were several of my mother’s friends. And there was a long thin man in Boleskine tweed: Chief Inspectre Hovis, he was. And there was Dave and sitting beside Dave, being comforted by Dave with an arm about the shoulder, was Sandra. She was dressed rather smartly in black and her face was well made up.

I began to struggle, as one would, and I did, but sadly to no avail whatsoever. So I decided that shouting would be the thing to do. But I couldn’t shout because my mouth was gagged by what felt to be a strip of adhesive tape.

So I made ferocious grunting noises and struggled and struggled. And then a rather brutal-looking individual in the shape of a large prison officer appeared in my line of vision and menaced me with a truncheon.

“Shut it, loony boy,” said this fellow. “Or you’ll get one in the ’nads with this stick.”

I quietened myself, but with difficulty. I felt truly panicked. How had I ended up here? Wherever here was, it looked awfully like an execution chamber. And how come I had a hangover? I hadn’t been drinking. I’d been falling. Oh yes, I remembered that – falling into a dark whirling pit of oblivion.

I confess that I was confused.

“All rise,” came a voice. And I tried but failed. “All rise for the Honourable Mr Justice Doveston.”

And a chap in full judge’s rigout mooched past me and moved beyond my line of vision. And now all the folk who’d risen on his arrival sat down again.

“Remove the prisoner’s gag,” came a voice, which I assumed to be that of the Honourable Mr Justice Doveston. Great-grandson of the wonder-bed’s creator?

The prison officer tore the tape from my mouth.

“Oooow!” I went.

“Silence in court,” said someone or other that I couldn’t see.

“Let me loose,” I demanded. “Set me free. I’ve done nothing.”

Now this, I know, was not exactly true. But these were the words that came out of my mouth. I couldn’t seem to stop them at the time.

“Silence,” said the voice once again. “Or you will be sedated.”

“What’s going on here? Where am I? What are you doing?”

“Silence, for the last time. Officer, prepare the truncheon.”

The prison officer raised his truncheon.

“I’m cool,” I said. “I won’t say anything else.”

The voice said, “Gary Charlton Cheese, you stand, or, rather, sit, accused of arson – to whit, the wanton destruction of the Brentford Telephone Exchange. And of multiple homicide – to whit, the murders of …”