Secondary recursion

"Dr. Verfuegbar?  Dr. Verfuegbar?  That's not the right patient, Dr. Verfuegbar."
"What are you talking about nurse?  The man is clearly on the operating table."
"Yes, Doctor, but he's not the right patient.  He's male."
"I can see that, thank-you nurse."
"How do you propose to give him a hysterectomy then, Doctor?"
"The surgery plan is on the table over there, nurse.  You can see what I'll be extracting, and how I'll be putting things back in again."

*

Miss Snippet held the struggling woman back from the child on the floor.  She had her arms wrapped around the woman's rib-cage and was squeezing slightly more tightly than was really necessary to try and cut down her breathing and make her easier to control.  The pair of them seemed to be attempting some complicated dance move, as the woman kept trying to rake Miss Snippet's shins with her high-heels, and Miss Snippet kept stepping away.  The headmaster, an indecisive man except where it came to nepotism, looked on vaguely anguished, but made no attempt to help the scalded and bruised child on the floor.  Miss Snippet glared angrily at him.

"Headmaster!" she said, jerking her head back to avoid being reverse-headbutted by the struggling woman.  "Headmaster, can you please help Michael up!"

"I don't think I should be touching the child," said the Headmaster, his voice trembling with nervousness.  Miss Snippet noticed that a tic had started up in the corner of his right eye.  "I think we need a medical professional here now."

"Then call one."  Miss Snippet's tone was as acid as her thoughts, as she stepped back again to avoid another high-heel raking and realised she'd backed up against a wall.

*

The radio's still playing but I've left it in the bedroom.

Bedroom.

Bare doom.

The radio's still praying, and I've left it to it's bare doom.

The radio's still.

What?

*

Dr Verfuegbar lifted the scalpel, and the blade glinted in the bright, cold light of the operating theatre.  On the table, the patient murmered something and tried to roll over.  Dr. Verfuegbar sighed, set the scalpel down again, and tightened the thick leather bands that restrained the patient.  They'd been laid across his throat, chest, wrists and ankles, leaving enough space for him to get into the patient's abdominal cavity and hunt for a womb.

The nurse, stood at a small steel side table, read through Dr. Verfuegbar's operating plan.  Part of her admired the beauty of his handwriting, another part was impressed by the elegance of his grammar.  A third part of her, that she was trying very hard not to listen to, was screaming that the operating plan had nothing to do with humans, and was in fact a wiring schematic for a telephone.

A soft bing sounded in the operating theatre, and she looked up.

*

"What was that?"  The Headmaster looked even more panicky, and Miss Snippet could see that his hands had started shaking now, and little beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead.  The last time she'd seen him like this she'd been killing herself laughing as his nephew nearly immolated himself in front of three hundred parents at the nativity play.

"The doorbell," said Miss Snippet.  "It's how people request entry to the school when we're closed."

She stepped sideways smartly, unexpectedly, and ducked as much as she could.  She buried her nose in the woman's back, just between her shoulder-blades, and the woman's attempt to reverse head-butt her again missed and her head bounced off the wall with a solid thunk.

"Let them in," said Miss Snippet in her best tone of control, the one that calmed wild animals at the zoo and could reduce an entire class of small children to tears.

*

Something goes bing where I can't see it, and I know that there's a wave coming.  There's pressure somewhere around my legs.

Something goes thunk and there's a door opened in the wall.  I think I can see a way out.

What does Verfuegbar mean?

*

"The lip reader has arrived," says the Nurse, answering the intercom.  Dr. Verfuegbar lays down the scalpel again, and looks confused.

"Don't we normally feed them to the landmines?" he asks.

"No Doctor, it's just that the last four hundred have been taken by the landmines," says the Nurse.  "It might just be that all the landmines have been found now.  The lip-reader has arrived."

"Do we still need a lip-reader?"

The nurse thinks about this.  "I think we might have given the patien–"

*

Miss Snippet lays the unconscious woman down on the floor next to her son, and checks the child's pulse.  It's there, but it's not strong.  The Headmaster comes back into the room with a man who reminds her of a cruise-ship and purchasing replacement children from a third-world country.

"She's not allowed in here," he says flatly, pointing at the unconscious woman.  "I have a restraining order."

*

I'm not allowed out of here.  I have a re-training order.

*

"Put the lip-reader on the table," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "I have a maiming order."

Traffic wardens

Miss Flava went back inside the police station to ask for the address, turning the engine off and taking the keys with her.  She was tempted to take DI Playfair with her as well, just to make sure that he didn't try hotwiring the car while she was gone, but finally she decided to try trusting him.  Which left her with a sense of foreboding all the while she was walking away from the car and back into the police station.  Henry looked up as she came back in.
"By yourself?" she asked, sounding polite and disinterested.
"Playfair didn't bother to find out where Beechwood Drive was before we left," said Miss Flava.  "Can you tell me?"
"Neither did you," said Henry quietly.  "Well.  Beechwood Drive is about five minutes drive away, it's in the posher part of Little Haversham.  They film period dramas round about there from time to time, but I don't think we've issued any permits this week, so you shouldn't be seeing anyone wandering around in what looks like their nightie...."  Her instructions were careful and detailed, so much so that Miss Flava was wondering if Henry spent her time memorising road atlases by the time she'd finished.
"By the way," she said, "on the way here we passed a really badly parked car.  Well, I say parked, it was more abandoned than anything else."
"Oh, I'm sure the traffic wardens will be on that in no time then," said Henry, turning the pages of a manilla folder casually, as though trying to suggest that Miss Flava was interrupting valuable police business.
"What traffic wardens?"  Miss Flava's voice was like an icicle in mid-summer, unexpected, sharp, and frosty.
"Little Haversham traffic wardens."  Henry had looked up when Miss Flava spoke, and was looking surprised.
"You don't have any," said Miss Flava.  "I checked before we came here.  You have vacancies for two, after the last two eloped together."
To her surprise, Henry's face suddenly screwed up.  "Tom and Paul," she said, her voice getting higher.  Her shoulders trembled.  "They were... they were my housemates."
"They were both male?"  Miss Flava tried not to sound too interested.
"Yes!  Yes, they were, and they were in love and they wanted to do something romantic.  So they eloped to Gretna Green to get married, only when they got there Tom's ex was there getting married as well, and then, and then Tom tried to stop the wedding because he said he still loved his ex, and then Paul got all upset, and now they're still up in Gretna Green and sulking and won't talk to each other, and whenever that happens they need me to mediate, only I can't take any time off at the moment, and now I think I'll never get any time off because the magician died and no-one knows why."
"Breathe," said Miss Flava, watching Henry get redder and redder and hearing her getting squeakier and squeakier.  "No really, breathe.  Before you pass out."
"Eeeep!" said Henry, finally complying.  She panted a little as she finally started to get some breath back.
"That's a lot to take in," said Miss Flava carefully.  "But I'm sure that now that DI Playfair is here there'll be some kind of resolution fairly quickly.  One way or another he does solve crimes very well, even if he alienates everybody else in the process.  So you'll be able to get up to Gretna Green in no time and bring Paul and Tom back to their senses, the altar, and then Little Haversham.  I'm sure of it."
Henry sniffed, and looked at her through reddened eyes.  Miss Flava wondered for a moment if she'd considered auditioning for vampire movies.
"Are you sure?  DI Playfair seems like he's just going to make things worse."
"He seems like that, yes.  All the damn time.  But somehow, even when the rest of us don't have a clue what he's doing or why, he's finding out who did the crime and getting ready to pounce."
"Is he like Columbo then?"
"I've never seen him in a raincoat," said Miss Flava thoughtfully.  "But no, he wouldn't waste his time pursuing the criminal and tricking him into confessing.  He'd just set Calamity on them and claim that it was her own doing."
"Calamity?"
As if on cue Calamity raced into the police station with a tow-rope tied to her collar.  The other end appeared to have torn off from something else.
"Oh good lord!"  Henry regained her composure quickly and produced a large plastic net from under the counter.  "Don't worry!  I trained with the dog unit for a week, I'm sure I can catch that dog."
Miss Flava eyed the net, and then whistled piercingly.  It seemed to resound throughout the police station, and Alf appeared from the interview room in a cloud of tobacco smoke, just as Calamity bounded back from the canteen clutching an egg-and-cress sandwich in her mouth.  She lay down at Miss Flava's feet and started eating the sandwich.
"Calamity," said Miss Flava, pointing.
"My sandwich!" yelled a moustachioed policeman from the canteen doorway.
"Not any more," said Henry, slightly perplexed that Calamity seemed to have got more of the sandwich around her muzzle than actually in her mouth.
"It's alright," said Miss Flava.  "She doesn't really like egg."

Penelope

The day-squid's tentacles flexed lazily, flickering across the sky, tasting the clouds.  Birds squawked in outrage as they darted around and past them, avoiding their touch, not wanting to surrender their taste in case the day-squid liked it.  Light darted across the landscape below like a kaleidoscope, patches of bright colour racing side by side along a burned road until suddenly they darted off at oblique angles and vanished in the scrub grass.
A charred and oxidised smell rose on a breeze, and there were overnotes of old rubber and rotting fish.  A car with scarlet tyres appeared over the brow of a hill and crawled along the road.  Pieces of ash like sloughed skin launched themselves into the air behind the car and fluttered around like zombie butterflies, meeting and mating briefly here and there before falling back to the road again to return to the dust from whence they came.  The driver of the car was a woman with ice-white hair and sunglasses so dark it was like night was travelling with her wherever she went.
She reached up and tapped the pair of fluffy dice that were hanging from the rear-view mirror, setting them swinging.  They were ice-white with orange numbers embroidered onto them; 7, 11, 15, 132, 288 and 1063.  On the driver's side of the windscreen someone had once stuck letters at the top spelling out the name Jennifer.  The driver was called Penelope.  She was trying to smile, but her teeth weren't agreeing.
Under the driver's seat a gun rolled from side to side.  It thumped against the side of the car, then rolled back and clattered against the central transmission column.  Penelope was hoping that it might break itself apart before she had to reach down and pick it up again.  Being an assassin was getting on her nerves.  Too late though, she could smell the flames in the distance and see the road going from burned to embrous before her.
The car stops and smoke starts to rise from the tyres.  It is etiolated and grey and leaks upwards in thin, twisting columns.  Penelope stands up on the driver's seat and looks out to the horizon, looking all around her.  The world seems empty, deserted.  She sits back down again and pulls the gun out from under the seat.  It is, depressingly, not even scratched.  Then she opens the glove-compartment, which is almost as empty as the world, as her soul, as the words that whisper her new instructions to her when she fails to stay awake.  Inside is just a black blindfold, four inches deep and eighteen inches long.  She ties it round her eyes, rests her finger on the trigger of the gun, and stands back up on the seat.
The day-squid twitches as the thin wisps of smoke reach it now, and it sneezes, a noise like thunder.  It masks the report of the gun, the roar of the bullet leaving the barrel and twisting through the air, miniature fins guiding it, holding true to its path.  Behind it is a scent of ozone as it ionises itself a path; it is but the messenger, and the payload comes later.  It's target stares at it, disbelieving, secure in the knowledge that it is invisible, at least to mortal eyes.
The bullet strikes, and it is nothing; its impact dissipates harmlessly and nothing penetrates.
Electricity races along an ionised way, following the path of least resistance, launched from a secondary source by something else, of which Penelope has no knowledge.  It strikes, and the damage it does is awesome.
Penelope stares as first her bullet disappears and then the air explodes into a messy sphere of red, blue and green.  Something that wibbles as it flies through the air splatters on the windscreen, and she knows that Jennifer will never be the same again.  The wind rises quickly, racing to fill in a vacuum where something dense once waited on a burned road in a desolate world. It tugs at her at it rushes past.  She sits down again, starts the car, and turns it around.
The day-squid sneezes again and writhes its tentacles in annoyance.

Mary Virgin

"You once dated a girl whose surname was Virgin?" Dave sounded incredulous.  "Why would you date anyone with a name like that?  That tells you what you're getting, up front!  Nothing."
"Well, her mum knew my mum," said Vince between mouthfuls of lager.  "And her mum thought that it was a bit odd that no-one was dating her daughter, and my mum–"
"Thought you were a bit odd."
Vince looked a little hurt and put his pint down on the table.  "No, my mum loved me, Dave.  Don't interrupt.  My mum thought that dating me might help her realise there's plenty of opportunity out there–" Vince waited while Dave's explosion of laughter died away.  Dave rested his head on his arm, his shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, and he waved a hand to indicate that Vince should continue his story.  "Yeah, so I dated her.  For nearly a year."
There was a pause while Dave got himself under control and Vince sipped at his lager, looking thoughtful as he remembered the girl from nearly twenty years ago.
"What happened at the end of the year then?" asked Dave carefully, odd little pauses between words indicating where he was trying very hard not to laugh again.
"She told me she was a lesbian," said Vince.  Dave stared at him for a moment, his eyes wide with disbelief, and then he dissolved into giggles.
"Look," said Vince.  "It explained a lot of things, alright?  Like why she'd only let me kiss her breasts, and why she insisted on me shaving right before we had a date and why she owned more suits than me."
"She only let you kiss her breasts?"  Dave's giggles subsided suddenly.  "You spent a year kissing a girl's breasts?  Sweet Jiminy Vince, I don't know how you do it: I spent eighteen months dating Theresa Wilson and took her out to movies every weekend and bought her dinner twice a month and I still never got more than a bit of over-the-sweater action and no-tongue kissing.  You date a frigging lesbian and get more action than me, for a year!"
"Yeah, alright Dave, keep it down a bit," said Vince looking a little bashful.  "I dated a girl called Theresa once too."
"Might have been the same one?"
"Nah doubt it," said Vince.  "Not unless yours is called Terry now and lives in the Midlands with a wife and two kids."
"No...," said Dave.  "No, I think mine died a couple of years ago.  Drug overdose."
"Oh yeah, I hate when that happens.  Especially when the cameras just keep on running."
"...what, Vince?"
Vince drained his lager glass and belched.  "Yeah, it was Carrie, she was working as a porn-star at the time, and she died of a drug overdose at the start of a scene, but they just kept on going without knowing she was dead.  Really put the price of the film up!"
"How did they not notice?  She was dead, right?  A corpse?"
"Yeah, but they said she wasn't doing much active in that scene, it was more about how much they could get in her, if you get my drift.  They said they thought it was odd she wasn't complaining, but that was about it."
"Dear God," said Dave.  "You're a never-ending source of worry, Vince.  I liked it better when you were dating lesbians called Virgin."
"Mary Virgin, Dave.  I think her mother was hoping for a miracle."
"What, like a grandchild?"
"Nah, they've got the kids thing sorted out already.  They got a bunch of sperm donors, mixed all the contributions up together and used that.  That way, no-one knows who the biological father is."
"...sounds disgusting, Vince.  Just what I'd expect from you.  You getting another round in?"
"Yeah right, but not here.  That last one was flat."
"Where do you fancy then?"
"How about the Weeping Nun?"
"Sure thing, Vince.  I wonder why it's called that?"
"Oh, I know this one!  I knew the nun as well, actually...."

Clemethtine

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian, stared at the white powder laid out neatly in lines on her desk.  Her OCD was making her twitch like an underdressed epileptic in a snowstorm and her fingers kept pinching together in a claw-shape.  She badly wanted to clean the table, then clean the cleaning cloth, and finally clean her hands.  She struggled to resist, also wanting to try and get inside the mind of one of her characters.
She had been listening to the radio earlier in the day and a Radio Four documentary about Negro Spirituals had come on, and as she'd half-dozed in her chair, her cup of Ovaltine placed carefully on a placemat on the floor by her feet, she'd started day-dreaming a little about the circumstances which the radio presenter was claiming brought about the songs.  She had a feeling that she might not have woken up until after the first documentary had finished and a second one had started, but she also didn't think that was worth worrying about.  She'd woken up with a new back-story for a minor character in her novel The Waltons.  To her annoyance, her agent was insisting that she add another sister to the brood that had a broader appeal.
"Think sex appeal, but without the sex," said her agent, sounding depressingly chirpy on the phone-call.  "Or possibly without the appeal."
"Wouldn't that be unsexy and unappealing?" asked Janet, aware that her agent had only a passing acquaintance with sarcasm.
"Yes, but you've already got two sisters like that," said her agent breezily.  "The butch lesbian and the one that becomes a prostitute."
"How can an unsexy woman become a prostitute?" asked Janet, astonished by the very thought of it.  "Surely there has to be some attraction there for her cust–, her cli–, whatever you call the men who visit prostitutes."
"Sex on demand, if you've got the cash," said the agent.  "That's got sex appeal.  Your whore can have one leg and birthmarks all over her body so long as she's cheap enough.  In fact, didn't you already write about that?"
"There's no lesbian in The Waltons," said Janet, not wanting to get side-tracked.  She had made her main character's mother essentially a cheap whore in Bride of Prejudice and she was still sensitive about the reviews that book had received.
"Well ok, make the lesbian the new character," said her agent, and the call drifted aimlessly on a little longer before Janet gave in.
So when she'd awoken, she did so with the knowledge that the new sister was supposed to be called Clementine and was named for her mother's favourite Negro Spiritual.  There was a nagging thought in the back of her mind that since the mother had grown up in rural Bath she might never have encountered such songs, but she was trying not to think about that until she had the character right.  The vicar, at the girl's baptism, had had a bad cold and a lisp and so the child was actually named Clemethtine, and in a fit of nominative determinism when she turned fourteen, as she would at the start of the novel, she would run away from home and shack up in a meth lab with a young man who had abandoned his dreams of becoming a groom (second class) to peddle drugs to the local landed gentry.  Between them they would mix up a patent cough mixture that contained the active ingredient methamphetamine, which, though not fixing the cough at all did at least give the user the energy to get things done even when their cough turned out to be consumption.
The lines of white powder on her table were castor sugar, but she was trying to get a feel for how Clemethtine would react when Philbros, her ex-groom, showed her that he'd crystallised the cough mixture and intended to press it into tablets.
"Look, Clemmy!" he said, forgetting that she hated any diminuation of her name.  "The calexis worked!  All those bottles for the cough-mixture – we don't need them any more!  You don't have to lug hundredweights of glass around on your back now!  We'll just press the crystals into tablets and people can eat them like sweets."
Clemethtine, whose back ached abominably every night and every morning, actually sighed with relief at the thought of not having to work like a donkey any more.  "Is it safe?" she asked. "How much cough-sryup do you have to evaporate to make one tablet?"
"Of course it's safe!  It's just energy in a more convenient form!  We'll be rich!"
Clemethtine, being more practical than Philbros picked a tablet up and handed it to him.  "Show me," she suggested.
Philbros would die in a couple more pages, and then Clemethtine could discover her lesbian tendencies with Philbros's mother, thought Janet.  Then she needed to find a way to getting the story back to Janet and the family living in Bath still, some way that seemed natural.  Although their departure now to the city could be in part because they were fleeing the heavily addicted clients that Clemethtine was no longer supplying.
The white lines were too much for her now.  She swept them quickly off the table and went to start the cleaning process.

Recursion

The song is playing on the radio again and I'm half-listening to it, half trying to fall asleep.  The bed is comfortable, my wife is lying next to me, and someone's left the microwave on.  I can hear it humming away to itself.
I recognise the song now, it's called Intervention.  The singer is nearing the end, and he sings words that resonate oddly with me.  The microwave pings, something's done, and the singer sings:
"Been working for the church/While your wife falls apart...."
I puzzle over that for a moment, then I roll over and lift the covers to check.  Sure enough, he's right: my wife has fallen apart and there is a jumble of limbs and jigsaw-pieces of torso in the bed with me.  Her head is missing.




*
"Do you see?  He responds to stimulus."  Dr. Verfuegbar points to the patient who is strapped to a table.  He is trying to turn over, and his lips are moving as he mouths words.  "Did you find the lip-reader yet?"
"All our lip-readers are dead," says the nurse, straightening surgical steel instruments on a movable trolley.  She tsks as she realises that she cannot get the forceps parallel to both the left and right hand sides of the tray.  "The war is proving costly."
"That's a lot of lip-readers," says Dr. Verfuegbar sounding a little shocked.  "Are we getting more?"
"We've put in a requisition," says the nurse.  Dr. Verfuegbar nods, his white coif bobbing up and down and he does so, and he pops the collar on his white coat.  He has an orange fake-tan.  "Form 7C," says the nurse.
"Oh no," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "I've told you before, form 7C is for the naughty children."




*
"Do you see? He responds to stimulus," says Miss Snippet, pointing at the twitching child on the square of carpet in the nursery's naughty corner.  The headmaster looks worried and scans the room hastily, wondering if Miss Snippet has been tasering the children again, but he can't see anything incriminating.
"What stimulus?" asks the headmaster, his face ashen.  After the fiasco at the Christmas play he can't afford for any more children to be hurt at the school, or they might take away his right to select students by competitive entrance exam.
"Coffee, in this case," says Miss Snippet.  "His mother spilled some on him.  She's in the cloakroom now, trying to sober up where she can't inflict third-degree burns on her child."
"We can blame the mother?"  The headmaster's face lights up.
"Possibly," says Miss Snippet.  "I still don't understand what set him off in the first place."
"Isn't he epileptic?"
"Not that I was aware of, and anyway, we didn't have the strobe lights on."
The headmaster pauses, aware that he should ask Miss Snippet what possible educational use strobe lights could have, why she should have any in the classroom, and where she's hidden them, but he decides that any answers to those questions would only mean more work for him.
"So what were you doing?" he asks.
"Listening to the radio," she says.




*
Working for the church/While your family dies...." I don't really want to get out of bed, but the lyrics of the song are explicit, and besides, the microwave is humming again.  Do I have any family any more?  I'm sure I just found the remains of my wife, but the more I think about it, the less I can remember anything about her.  I don't even remember getting married.
Every spark of friendship and love/Will die without a home....
Well, isn't that obvious?




*
"Dr. Verfuegbar? Dr. Verfuegbar? The lip-reader has arrived, only... well, he was caught by a landmine. Well, actually, he kind of caught a landmine. I suppose, if you want to be pedantic, a landmine caught him. Well, he's in a few more pieces than we were expecting. Dr. Verfuegbar?  Dr. Verfuegbar?"




*
"Do you see? He responds to stimulus!"
"Yes, Miss Snippet already said that." The headmaster is feeling worried, because the boy won't stop twitching. Miss Snippet looks altogether all too innocent. "Stop kicking him will you?"
"I'm his mother! I'll do as I please!"




*
The song is playing on the radio again, and I'm half-listening to it, half trying to fall asleep....

Conversations

"You're being obstreperous," said Miss Flava to Playfair as they walked past the front desk.  Manning the front desk was a young woman in a very smart uniform, standing rigidly upright and organising files while she waited to be of assistance.
"Henry?" said Playfair, stopping in mid-stride and causing Miss Flava to stumble as she tried not to collide with him.
"And who might you be, Sir?" asked the woman behind the counter.
"DI Playfair," said Playfair.  "You're Henry?"
"Short for Henrietta, Sir, it was my Aunt's name."
"You should be careful she doesn't decide to take it back then," said Playfair.  "Come along, Miss Flava, we have a house to look at, possibly before it burns down!"
"You stopped!" Miss Flava stared after him as he walked out of the station and turned towards the car-park round the back.  "That man...." she said, partly to herself, but partly also to Henry, who didn't even crack a smile.
By the time she reached the car Playfair was stood expectantly by the driver's door, and so she raised an eyebrow and sighed loudly.
"Oh come on," he said, holding his hand out.  "It can't be far, and there's no traffic on the roads, and no-one will ever know."
"Yes they will, because you'll find a way of stripping all the teeth off the gearbox," said Miss Flava.  "Or you'll drive into something, probably livestock, or someone will drive into you.  These accidents are why you're not allowed to drive the car any more, boss."
"I am your boss, aren't I?"  Playfair still had his hand out.
"Which you won't be if anyone finds out I let you drive."
They stared at each other, eyes locked and a silent battle of the wills playing out.  Miss Flava blinked first, but Playfair let his hand drop fractionally later, and walked round to the passenger side of the car.
"I can think better when you're driving," he said, as though nothing had happened.  "Fewer people seem to do stupid things in front of you."
Calamity barked her enthusiasm at seeing them again as Miss Flava unlocked the doors, and she attempted to bound over into the front seats and get out of the car.  Playfair pushed her back, and Miss Flava had to wait till he'd finished wrestling her on to the back seat before she could get in.
"Should we take her for a walk first?"
"No," said Playfair.  "I'll need her up at this house to sniff around.  She'll get her exercise then."
"Don't let her widdle on things," said Miss Flava, starting the engine.  "Forensics didn't stop complaining about you for weeks last time."
"Last time?"
"You gave Calamity one of the bones from the scene of the crime to play with.  It took three of them half-an-hour to get it back off her!"
"Yes, but it wasn't one of the human bones, it was just some old bone that had gotten mixed in with the rest.  It didn't matter."
"Maybe, but no-one else knew that, Playfair.  And since you won't explain how you knew, there's still no-one else who knows how you knew."
"It's obvious, really, you know.  If any of you would just sit down and think about it properly for half-an-hour you'd know too.  Really."
Miss Flava pulled out of the car-park and turned left.  "Which way is this house then?"
"I don't know," said Playfair.  "I didn't ask.  Beechwood Drive, I think."
"Yes, I remember that, but where is Beechwood Drive?  I can't go there if I don't know where it is!"
"Oh," said Playfair.  "It looks like you're lost then!"