Still smiling, they advanced, and Julian started to back away. At precisely the moment when Eugene, having assured him that it was all for his own good, made a grab for his hind legs and Desmond, explaining that they were only trying to help, tried to knock him silly with a chunk of wood, he darted between them, dodged their flailing trotters, and ran for it.

The accountant sat down and stared into the bucket.

He’d taken all the precautions he could to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed (and caution comes as naturally to an accountant as fleas to a rabbit); he could take his time, do the job properly, as it ought to be done. Opportunities like this, he knew, only come once in a professional lifetime, and it would be sheer folly to waste this one by rushing it.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out again, but it didn’t work; he was still tense and jumpy, not at all the right frame of mind for tackling such delicate work. He needed something calming, familiar, soothing, soporific. He opened his eyes again, reached up to a nearby shelf, and pulled down a volume of tax statutes at random.

‘One of the characteristic features of Schedule D case III,’ he read aloud, allowing his tongue to caress each solid syllable, ‘is the provision under sections fifty-two, fifty-three and seventy-four of the Taxes Act 1970 for the deduction and collection of tax at source from the payer. The payee will receive a net sum from which tax has been deducted at source…’ Better; much better. He could feel a sort of benign numbness creeping upwards from the junction of his neck and shoulders, a sort of delightful narcosis; now he’d have to be careful he didn’t drift into that unique kind of half-sleep that anybody who has much to do with tax legislation spends so much of his life in, somewhere in the middle of a triangle formed by boredom, sleep and death. He needed to be relaxed, but not that relaxed.

When he felt the moment was right he closed the book carefully and laid it down slowly on his desk, taking great care to line the edges of its cover square with the desktop; then, with the slow deliberation of an hourly paid sleepwalker, he took another deep breath, exhaled and leaned over the bucket.

‘Mirror,’ he said.

His own face, a Spitting Image caricature of a living prune, blinked back at him, stifled a yawn, twitched its nose and mumbled ‘Running DOS’ in a soft, bleating voice before closing its eyes and sliding forward an inch or so on its neck. For a moment, the accountant felt a deep-seated sense of confusion, as if acknowledging that the face in the water was rather more like him than he was himself. Then, as the reflection began to snore, he tightened the muscles of his throat and produced a tiny dry cough. The reflection opened its eyes again, looked up at him as if to ask why he’d thought it necessary to spoil such a beautiful dream (I know that dream, the accountant thought sympathetically, it’s the one about offsetting the costs of a sale of associated property against gains incurred on a series of linked sales of business assets spanning two consecutive fiscal years) and mumbled, ‘Please wait.’

A tiny spurt of excitement flared inside the accountant’s brain, but he called on a lifetime of professional training and suppressed it, in a way that only an accountant could. The effects of excitement and emotion are about as desirable among members of the profession as a hungry rat in a mortuary, and the majority of their long, gruelling apprenticeship is spent learning how to prevent them. It’s often said that the only way to get an animated reaction out of an accountant is to kill him and attach two electrodes to his feet; what’s less well known is that when accountants say it, they do so with pride.

He waited as he’d been told, and just as he was about to nod off himself, he noticed a minute degree of movement on the surface of the water; tiny ripples, as if a little splinter of gravel had fallen in the bucket, except that these ripples started at the circumference and moved inwards, instead of the other way round. The circles gradually closed up, until the rings dwindled into a dot in the very centre of the meniscus, where they stopped, formed themselves into a minuscule waterspout, hung in the air for about two and a half seconds and then slowly subsided, sending another series of ripples back across the surface, this time proceeding in the conventional manner. When this process had repeated four or five times, the accountant nodded, muttered screen-saver under his breath, put the tips of his fingers together and settled down to wait.

‘Ready.’

The accountant jumped; the words had summoned him back from the place where the good accountants go before they die, and for a moment he couldn’t quite remember where or who he was. Then he caught sight of the reflection and sat up a little straighter in his chair.

‘Mirror,’ he said.

The reflection looked at him, expressionless.

‘Mirror,’ he repeated, ‘compile a database of all financial records relating to the following. One: Ali Baba. Two: Aladdin. Three: Babes in the Wood, The. Four—’

It was a long list; but eventually he reached the end, double-checked and then triple-checked against the handwritten ledger entries, cross-checked the list against another list he kept locked in the top drawer of his desk, checked once again for luck and one last time because he didn’t believe in luck, and then whispered the words ‘Delete files.’ There was another slow outbreak of ripples, a gurgle and a faint plop, and then the reflection sighed, bobbled its head sleepily and murmured ‘Done.’ The accountant asked for confirmation, received it, and allowed himself the luxury of stretching his arms and legs until the joints creaked. Then, with a smile of modest satisfaction at having removed every last trace of his most valued clients’ affairs from the records of the Revenue Service, he leaned forward over his desk, cradled his head on his elbows and went to sleep.

The reflection stayed where it was. It didn’t appear to mind; staring vacantly into space seemed to suit it very well. It was just about to dissolve into the pretty ripples effect when something disturbed the surface of the water. The face changed; it was no longer the reflection of the accountant, but a cute little face, a bright pink, shiny, painted face, with two black dots for eyes, a daubed line for a mouth and a length of wooden dowel radiused at the end for a nose. As the head swivelled from side to side, its movement was awkward and somehow mechanical. It wore an Alpine hat with a feather stuck in it.

‘Help,’ it said.

Nothing happened. The face looked round with that same artificial movement.

‘Help,’ it repeated.

The accountant twitched and grunted in his sleep. In his dream, someone was telling him to do something he’d prefer not to, and when he asked how much whoever it was had in mind for a suitable fee, there was no answer. He grunted again and his lips moved.

‘Help,’ said the face a third time; and the accountant made a snarling noise and sat up, eyes still closed, still fast asleep.

‘Please wait,’ he grumbled.

The wooden face’s range of expressions was necessarily limited, but he was able to register joy by waggling his head from side to side. ‘Oh come on,’ it said. ‘I haven’t got long, and those two loonies could come back any minute. Please hurry. Please.’

But compassion’s a hard enough commodity to get out of an accountant when he’s awake, let alone asleep; in terms of difficulty of extraction, somewhere between his teeth and his money. No dice.

‘You’ve got to help me, really,’ implored the face. ‘My name is Carl Wilson and I don’t belong here, really I don’t. I’m stuck actually inside this wooden puppet thing in this horrible laboratory, like something out of a bad horror flick, they’ve been connecting me up to the mains and electrocuting me, and all I did was try to hack into a computer game for free. Not even Microsoft do that to people. And really it was my sister’s idea, not mine, so if anyone should be in here.’