Secrets of the Moon

By Stephen Hunt

Agatha Witchley used to be a spy in the Cold War, but now she's locked up in the UK's premier maximum-security mental institution. She believes that the ghosts of the celebrity dead visit her padded cell and whisper the world's secrets in her ears. Which is a big problem for the British government, because she's the only one who can help them when an American billionaire is murdered in London in one of the strangest killings yet.

The Home Secretary needs the case locked down and solved before the entrepreneur’s death becomes public knowledge and economic chaos ensures.

The woman he has in mind for the job might be paranoid, she might be lethal, she might half-insane and drawing a pension, but it's amazing how you can forgive that in a genius when it's a genius's help you need.

Yes, the security forces need Agatha Witchley again. It's just the ghosts of Churchill, Elvis and Groucho Marx they could do without.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Hunt
• Release date: May 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781005868000

Stephen Hunt

Stephen Hunt is the author of several fantasy titles set in the Victorian-style world of the Kingdom of Jackals and is also the founder of www.SFcrowsnest.com, one of the oldest and most popular fan-run science fiction and fantasy websites, with nearly three quarters of a million readers each month. Born in Canada, the author presently lives in London, as well as spending part of the year with his family in Spain

Book preview

Secrets of the Moon

An Agatha Witchley Mystery

Stephen Hunt

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Green Nebula

SECRETS OF THE MOON

The Season One Omnibus for the Agatha Witchley Mysteries series.

Comprising the novellas: In the Company of Ghosts, The Plato Club, The Moon Man’s Tale.

First published in 2015 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2015 by Stephen A. Hunt

Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

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If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the Parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

- Little Dorrit. 1856. Charles Dickens.

Praise for Stephen

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’

- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Hunt’s imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

- TOM HOLT

‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

- DAILY MAIL

‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

- GUARDIAN

‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

- THE TIMES

‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

- TIME OUT

‘Studded with invention.’

-THE INDEPENDENT

‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

- INTERZONE

‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

‘A curious part-future blend.’

- KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

- SFX MAGAZINE

‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’

- SF REVU

Contents

1. A Delicate Noose

2. Dancing With Niven

3. Mrs Witchley’s Other Prison

4. The Firehall

5. The Mirror Man

6. Suspicious Minds

7. The Dead Billionaire’s Club

8. Brunel’s Toy Box

9. Bobby Kennedy Could Be Your Lawyer

10. Do I Taste of Smart?

11. Pensions for Spies

12. The Stealth Villa

13. Just Like Milford Haven

14. Paradise Lost

15. Meet Monsieur Lunar

16. You Don’t Get Airmiles in Hell

17. Our Grandfathers Didn’t Have Flags

18. Genghis Wasn’t Here

19. Annus Mirabilis

Chapter 1

A Delicate Noose

Gary Doyle was impressed. It was only a toilet, but he had to admit, it was one sodding impressive toilet. If Doyle had succumbed to the persistent stabbing pain in his side he suspected might be bowel cancer and woken up in heaven itself this morning, Saint Peter’s lavatorial facilities at the pearly gates would hardly have seemed less impressive. Taps sculpted like liquid metal. A wall-hung basin with gold inserts, a serpentine heating rail coiled with towels as soft as kitten fur. Everything discreetly stamped with unfamiliar designer names. VitrA ? Hansgrohe? Is that a bad cough or the apology a German makes after he steps on your toes?

Doyle was torn between serious bog envy and investigating the contents of the toilet bowl lurking below his posterior. Gary Doyle had become the Nostradamus of irregular bowel movements. He was the Astrologer Royal of his toilet’s contents, examining the celestial mechanics of what swirled in and out of the porcelain throne. Tea leaves to a flipping fortune-teller. And through such random spattering of fate, he divined the level of pressure he suffered on his current case. The state of my illness. The progress of the suspected cancer that no sodding doctor in the health service seemed able to track down and diagnose. His wife, Emily, would be able to sue one day soon. She’ll assemble all the useless quacks who prodded and probed me, but who can never find the illness eating away my insides, collect them all on the steps of a courthouse. Yes, she’ll be able to take the medical establishment to the cleaners for gross negligence one day soon. Pity that I’ll be dead. But you can’t have everything. He reached out and touched the silky smooth toilet paper hanging from the platinum roller. Doyle was looking forward to emptying half the roll after he stopped doing an impression of a Shetland pony emptying its bowels over a paddock. Like wiping my arse with velvet. It was the kind of toilet paper only one of the richest people in the world could afford. I wonder where it comes from? Not Tesco, that much is sure. Not even the John Lewis Partnership. Maybe there was a craftsman somewhere, an artisan lovingly tending a paper-mill capable of this level of sorcery; producing such softness in paper. Wrapping the rolls in wax paper, hand delivering them to his client list of hedge fund managers, online tycoons and energy barons.

A hand knocked discreetly on the outside of the bathroom door, reminding Doyle that this was still work, potty break or no. Part of the dark orbit of his career, propelling the knives that slipped and stabbed his guts at inconvenient moments. The intrusion was enough to break Doyle’s reverie and make him gaze down at the yellow puddle of urine lapped at his shoes. Not his waters, not this time. It was the dead man’s urine, seeping under the toilet door. Doyle took the toilet paper, unfurling great sails of it. And why not? Forensics had already been through here, collecting every fingerprint and scrap of DNA they could Hoover up. Strutting around as though they were the stars of this particular soap opera. CSI West London. He stopped to admire the toilet’s flush. Smooth, powerful, almost noiseless. What feats of plumbing technology had been developed to accomplish something so minimalist yet cleanly efficient?

There was another knock, helping Doyle make up his mind. I won’t be availing myself of the bidet, not this time. Lord love a bidet. The blessing for everyone around the world with stress-shattered plumbing. Doyle unlocked the bathroom, pushing open the door. He stepped back into the class of office you could expect from the luxurious en-suite.

The room’s usual occupant, Simon Werks, slowly twisted around in front of the toilet door, remade into an ornament dangling from an undoubtedly priceless chandelier. His monitor had been left glowing in the office’s half-light. The flat screen on his desk was still displaying some quite dazzling filth on the screen, an HD bondage film dancing with animated adverts for correlated perversions. The lights were off in the room and wouldn’t come back on. An accidental side effect of the security lockdown the building’s guards had put in place after discovering Simon Werks’ corpse.

Helen Thorson stood on the other side of the desk, as neat and as immaculate as always, looking up at the twisting corpse as though the body was a piece of modern art she was considering buying. Thorson had the same near-quizzical look on her face that she always wore. Not quite disapproval, not quite surprise, not quite expectation. It was a look that seemed to challenge men. As if to say. I know I’m flawlessly exquisite . . . what are you going to do for me? What you got? Oh, is that it? You could put Thorson in an interrogation room with a warm-blooded male suspect and she never had to say a word. She could just shift her head and let her dark mane of hair fall down to one side of her face and stare at the man until he was possessed by an excruciating need to fill the silence.

Spads stood behind the woman, his laptop set up on a small folding metal table, cables connected underneath the desk to the dead man’s PC. You’re old school, like that, aren’t you, Spads. Paranoid enough to never trust a wireless connection when a hard line will do. Spads looked every bit the hacker, the geek’s geek. He was still enjoying his freedom. Up to a couple of weeks ago, he had fully been expecting to be extradited to the USA for his over-familiarity with the Pentagon’s firewalls. Spads wore a brown woolly hat – indoors, outdoors, hot or cold – which, he clearly believed, made him appear quite the rock star. Except that any musician’s dresser would have advised against growing a scratchy beard so weak a cat could have licked it off. And a rock star might have been able to afford a service wash for the coffee-stained green sweatshirt proudly emblazoned with the slogan, U.S.S. Sulaco. There was a strange ugliness to Spads . . . an out-of-proportion face where none of his planes or bony symmetry seemed in balance. It wasn’t quite the way a normal face should have appeared. Spads might have passed for Steve Buscemi’s brother if you squinted at him.

‘Well then,’ Doyle announced to the office. ‘I know what we’re meant to think. Captain Perv Pants here was beating his bishop to Big Jubblies Dot Com, having a gasper with a dog collar around his neck when the desk he was standing on gave way.’

Spads spoke without looking up from his laptop. Doyle had to strain to hear him. The hacker’s utterances frequently bordered on whispers. It’s like working with Marlon sodding Brando.

‘It was 4chanMovies.com.’ The hacker often interpreted his colleagues’ statements literally. Where he was positioned on the autistic spectrum, maybe that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

‘What, you’re a connoisseur? You going to tell me what MILF stands for, I always wanted to know?’

Spads muttered to himself and kept on working.

Doyle bent down by the desk. One of the desk’s four legs had snapped away. He wore white Nitrile scene-of-crime gloves. He picked up the piece of broken wood and examined it. Not sawn or cut. Snapped, with a ridge of splinters where the leg had come away from the desk. Enough to unbalance the man having a five-finger shuffle on the desk, his neck in a noose attached to the chandelier above.

Standing up, Doyle tapped the desk’s worn service. ‘This desk looks out of place? Too small. His secretary next door has a bigger one for starters. You’re telling me a man as rich as Simon didn’t have an ego?’

‘It’s a mechanical desk,’ said Thorson. ‘Antique. Drawers rise out of its surface when you activate its gears. This piece once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte.’

‘Is it expensive?’ asked Spads, looking up from his screen.

‘Even with its broken leg, you could swap a piece of furniture like this for a Dassault jet.’

Their tame hacker looked impressed. ‘Cool.’ Spads didn’t have a whole lot of empathy for the rest of humanity. Hanging is a bad death, something to be feared. A deterrent. Not for nothing had it been the state’s preferred method of dispatching criminals across so many centuries. Less than a month on the job with Doyle, and Spads wasn’t phased in the slightest by Simon Werks’ contorted features, the purple lips and the bulging eyes. Not like Doyle when he had joined the police force. Normal people always remember their first real corpse. His had been in the Tsim Sha Tsui district on the Kowloon Peninsula, a small bloodstained bundle abandoned in an alleyway, abandoned like a pile of old clothes. The victim stabbed to death over an argument with a local Triad boss. It felt an age since Doyle had experienced anything approaching revulsion at a lost life. That was what this job did to people. When it comes to death, we’re all autistic now.

Thorson glanced up at Simon Werks’ corpse, still twisting slowly in the noose. Even in death, his face had piercing eyes, as empty as the sky. The dead billionaire’s face put Doyle in mind of the lead actor from 28 Days Later, but he struggled to bring up the performer’s name. At Doyle’s age, memory squirmed and protested as though he was performing an act of vivisection on his mind every time he tried to recall useless details.

‘He owned two of these desks,’ said Thorson. ‘Napoleon, I mean, not Werks. A Brazilian industrialist picked up the piece’s twin at auction a few years ago.’

Thorson knew a lot more about priceless antiques than her pay packet could justify. Perhaps the rumours about her are true? There hadn’t been anything written down in Helen’s personnel file. The scuttlebutt seemed unlikely, and Doyle wasn’t going to ask first. Working for the Office was a little like signing up with the French Foreign Legion. When it comes to your past, don’t ask, don’t tell is the order of the day.

‘So then, it looks like Werks’ desk splintered under his weight, gave way. And then Master Bates here walks the wank to his doom.’ Doyle tutted. His gaze settled on a security camera in the corner. One of three watching the palatial executive office. State-of-the-art digital security: high-resolution varifocal lens, motion detection; automatic day/night switch over; audio channel pick-up and enhanced infrared night vision. Doyle had already watched the camera footage. Simon Werks literally swinging from the chandelier, his bare legs folded under his bottom as he swung back and forth, his feet touching down on the desk’s surface every few seconds. The rich man’s grunting intermingling with the groans and slaps coming from the glowing flatscreen’s built-in speakers. A bizarre pornographic circus act, Werks’ naked feet hitting the desk more and infrequently as he attempted to starve his brain of oxygen while he built up to climax. Then there was the disastrous moment . . . Simon Werks’ feet touching down, a terrible crunching sound as the desk collapsed. A surprised whoosh of air as the billionaire slipped, his hairy legs falling away without purchase. Werks’ legs flailing at the air, the noose around his neck – available only from a very exclusive boutique in Lugano – suddenly transformed from sex toy to a deadly eighteenth century Tyburn gallows rope as he choked to death.

‘All that money,’ said Doyle, indicating the vast, expensive office, ‘was Saucy Simon really into nonsense like this?’

‘His secretary’s already admitted buying the noose for him. She paid cash for it two years ago,’ said Thorson.

‘With what he was worth, the dirty sod could’ve paid every Hollywood tart nominated for Best Actress to cover him in chocolate sauce and beat it off his Hairy Harry with million pound bearer bonds. Any corporate money problems that we know about?’

‘No, Werks was solid,’ said Thorson. ‘He’s on his third fortune, and he never even spent the first two. Initial money came from the online world: his film aggregation and encryption systems helped pull the legacy movie business back from the brink. His second windfall was made from green energy technologies – backing a substantial chunk of the North African supergrid. Third pile came from aerospace, satellites and near-orbit tourism. Not a penny squandered or lost to bad investments. He still owns a majority interest in his company, ControlWerks. All its businesses are thriving and low geared. First mover advantage.’

‘I love it when you do that bullshit business lingo. Saucy Simon owned the firm with his twin brother, though, right?’

‘Correct. Curtis Werks is flying back from Durban where he was meant to be opening a desalination plant. The brother’s as eager as the minister to keep this out of the media for the moment. Family business, now down to a single engine. The markets will spook. Werks stock is going to be slaughtered when the news of this gets out.’

Doyle thumped his chest and released a loud burp. ‘Consider that my message of concern for the fund managers who’re going to have to trade down their Bugattis for Lamborghinis after their next bonus. Spads, today would be good. I need to see what the building’s security manager saw.’

‘Werks’ private camera files went into lockdown after the security manager viewed the footage,’ said Spads. ‘And they’re sealed properly. You do know that Werks practically invented TSA-quality post-quantum zero-knowledge proof encryption, don’t you?’

‘Spads, the reason why you’re standing here in a state of glorious freedom rather than wearing an orange boiler suit in a five-foot room-share with some serial-killing Texan cracker saving his soap rations just for you, is that Star Trek bollocks sounds like real words to you, rather than nyap-nyap-nyap. It means something in the mighty Spads-mind. So let’s be about it, eh?’

There was a fierce knocking on the other side of the office door, too loud to be the last of the forensics team they had chased out. Thorson crossed over to unlock it. A tall bear of a man wearing a white, red and green rugby shirt bulldozed his way past Thorson. His receding black hairline running to silver looked like the follicly challenged equivalent of Doyle’s irregular bowel movements. He doesn’t seem happy to be here. Doyle wondered who had tipped him off. One of the security guards on the lobby downstairs, probably. Most of them were ex-job and liked to stay in with their Yard chums in case they ever needed police favours.

‘What is Werks still doing up there?’ demanded the trespasser. ‘His body should’ve been moved to the secure pathology freezer.’

Doyle shrugged. ‘I reckon it will be, officer . . .’ He glanced quizzically at Thorson who was still holding the case notes folder.

‘Chief Inspector Dourdan,’ Thorson said.

‘In charge of this investigation!’ The man’s words came out as a bellow.

‘This morning you were,’ said Doyle. ‘This afternoon, I am. And it’s not an investigation. It’s a big radioactive puddle of piss water that needs clearing up.’ He pulled out a little black leather wallet and passed it over to the officer.

‘You’re here for this, for a gasper, for a David-bloody-Carradine, for death by misadventure?’ The policeman opened up Doyle’s wallet, staring at its interior with incredulity. ‘CO7? I’ve never even heard of any CO7. And what does it mean under the crown . . . diplomatic immunity? Is that a joke? What, you cut this out of the back of a packet of cornflakes and glue your photo on top of it? This warrant card doesn’t give me word one. You’re not Met, who’re you with?’

‘It stands for the Crap Orifice,’ said Doyle, lifting the wallet back out of the furious policeman’s hand. ‘And this afternoon, we’re crapping all over you. Check your voicemail back at the station. CTC’s removed you from this case and transferred it to our jurisdiction. Goodbye, chief inspector.’

‘Special Branch’s yanked me out, is it? What, you spooks, or politicals?’ The policeman stabbed an angry finger at Doyle. ‘You stitch me up and think you’re going to get one inch of co-operation out of the Met?’

Doyle shaped a telephone out of thumb and finger and stuck his hand by his ear. ‘If I need a car towed, I’ll be sure to speed-dial you, chief inspector. Enjoy the match at Twickenham.’

‘Wanker!’

‘That’s just speaking ill of the dead.’

Thorson’s eyes wrinkled in despair as Dourdan slammed the door behind him. She sighed and didn’t bother to disguise her irritation with Doyle. ‘Next time, why don’t we place Spads in charge of police liaison?’

‘Spads would only rub the chief inspector up the wrong way. This is as fun as it gets. How about it, Spads . . . just how much potential rammage is the Orifice up for with this one?’

‘I’m past the encryption,’ said the hacker. ‘Come over quick. The file’s going to lock itself under a fresh key as soon as it’s played a second time.’

Doyle and Thorson sprinted behind the laptop, the light of the movie file washing over them. It lasted for two minutes and, much like the firm’s head of security who had seen it play the first time, Doyle wished he could just call for help and then vanish to safety.

‘Shit,’ said Doyle. ‘I mean really. Shit.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s too late to ask the High Court to wave through my extradition to the States,’ said Spads. ‘Right now, being locked up inside the Florence Supermax is looking pretty good.’

‘You still think we’re not going to need her help,’ asked Thorson.

‘You tell me,’ said Doyle. ‘You’re the one who worked with her. She was before my time.’

‘You need her. We need her.’

‘Get it done, then,’ ordered Doyle, half a groan. ‘Put the wheels in motion to spring her out.’ He tapped the computer. ‘Get me a copy of this film. A clean one, not the kind that ends with This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Spads. I want the file unencrypted for good.’

Thorson raised an eyebrow. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to the porcelain throne.’ Doyle reached for the door behind the corpse. He had changed his mind about the bidet. As far as his long-suffering digestion was concerned, this was turning out to be a Three Flush Mystery. But then, the Office didn’t get lumbered with any other sort.

Chapter 2

Dancing With Niven

Psychiatric care has come on a little way since the days of Bedlam , Agatha mused. When Victorian gentlemen paid to bring their families into mental homes of a Sunday afternoon and poke sharp sticks through the cages. Handing over good money to be regaled by tales of prisoners’ crimes of slaughter and sexual deviancy. Why, you could glance around my room with its thick comfortable rug and television and cosy oak reading table and you’d hardly know that you were inside a cell. Apart from the nearly blank wall that concealed the one-way mirror and the viewing room. And the straitjacket binding Agatha Witchly’s arms, of course. Her jacket made it hard to dance with David Niven; the old actor’s ghost wearing the same Royal Airforce uniform he had worn his 1946 hit, A Matter of Life and Death . The irony of his choice of clothing wasn’t lost on Agatha. Niven had played a ghost in the film returning to make peace with his true love, played by the actress Kim Hunter. Agatha wasn’t anyone’s true love now. But if there is one thing I do know about ghosts, it is that you can’t choose who will come to visit you, or when.

‘Are they still watching?’ Agatha asked Niven. The ghost considered his answer as held her, not too taut, not too loose, both of them turning to the tune of The Specials’ Ghost Town playing on the television’s radio setting.

‘Yes,’ Niven smiled, reassuringly. ‘Three doctors and a nurse, the oldest one is dictating notes to his intern.’

‘That would be Doctor Bishop,’ Agatha whispered. She made sure she talked to the actor only when her back was turned towards the mirror’s one-way viewing glass. Doctor Bishop could lip read, and she didn’t want to feed his salacious case file on her anymore than she absolutely had to.

‘The good doctor appears somewhat miffed,’ said Niven.

‘He should be.’

Niven raised an arm, thoughtfully brushing his neat moustache. ‘He knows they are coming for you. Their car pulled up outside a couple of minutes ago. The doctor’s had his staff ringing around the ministry all day trying to find someone with the authority to revoke your release order.’

‘Good luck with that.’ Agatha stopped whispering as Niven pirouetted her to face the large mirror across the room. The mirror showed no sign of David Niven. Just a silver-haired old lady of around sixty years swaying and turning in the centre of the room as if she were demented. Mirrors can never show the dead, only the living.

‘When they arrive for you, tell them that you can tie the fanciest of nooses,’ said Niven.

‘Are you helping me?’ Agatha’s words came out softly, angled for Niven’s ear alone.

‘We like to try.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For the dance?’

‘For letting me know they were on their way before they arrived.’

‘We thought it was best.’

‘Would it be presumptuous to ask you to hold me for a little longer?’ Agatha asked. I haven’t danced with anyone for a very long time.’

‘I understand perfectly,’ said Niven. ‘My final dance was on the set of Better Late Than Never with Maggie Smith. At least, my last dance on this side.’

Doctor Bishop stood ramrod straight, his arms behind his back, his fingers digging into his palm in anger. He didn’t deign to look around at the man and the woman as the pair entered.

‘I’m Doyle,’ said the man, ‘this is Thorson.’

‘Papers,’ said the doctor. The words came out like escaping air from a grass snake.

‘The Telegraph or The Sun?’ Doyle tossed a sheaf of documents across to Bishop’s intern, the doctor still too angry to directly address these two intruders into his realm. ‘Save your time, chum, they’re all in order.’

‘In order? In order for THAT?’ The doctor’s hand jabbed across towards the one-way glass. Agatha Witchley turned slowly in the centre of the room, her head resting at an unnatural angle. Her rheumy blue eyes stared back at the glass with defiance written across every line of her forehead. ‘Does Agatha Witchley look like she’s ready to be released from the unit?’

‘Is the straitjacket really necessary?’ asked Thorson. She didn’t bother to disguise her contempt for the unit’s methods. ‘At her age?’

‘Last Tuesday,’ spat the doctor, ‘Witchley shattered the knee bone of one of my orderlies and dislocated the shoulder of a second staff member when they attempted to remove the pills she’d been hiding under her sofa’s cushions. She did that with her bare feet, no shoes. With her straitjacket on!’

‘You’ve seen the release papers,’ said Doyle. ‘Now, chuck me the keys to her nut-shirt, Doctor Mengele. We’ll be taking tea and biscuits with the old girl before she leaves with us.’

‘Has anyone told the Israeli Embassy she’s being released?’ demanded the doctor.

Doyle raised an eyebrow.

‘That’s why she was admitted to us, man,’ spat the doctor. ‘Haven’t you fools even read her case notes? She was dragged from the Israeli Prime Minister’s jet on the tarmac of Heathrow after she attacked his bodyguards. She was planning to kidnap him and take him to The Hague for war crimes. She’s a stalker, psychotic . . . devious, violent, displaying every sign of extreme paranoia. For crying out loud, she believes she can talk to John Lennon and Julius Caesar. She suffers from severe compulsive disorders. Twelve months of treatment in the unit and I haven’t even made a dent on her state of mind.’

Doyle pointed to a dispensary in the room’s corner. ‘The code for her room and the keys to her nut-shirt, or I’ll take that syringe and find a new home for it up your hairy, dark porcelain-pincher.’

‘If I can’t find anybody inside the ministry willing to rescind her release from the unit, I’ll telephone the Israeli Embassy and have their lawyers slap an injunction against all of you,’ warned the doctor.

‘Thank you for your concern, doctor,’ said Thorson. ‘We will be handling her case from here.’

When Doyle and Thorson entered the secure unit, Agatha was no longer spinning around in the middle of the carpet. The old lady waited for them, sitting calmly on her sofa. She was pouring three cups of tea with her feet, using her toes to hold the teapot as if an Indian faker had trained her in his arts.

‘Hello, Witchley. I’m Gary Doyle. I believe you know my colleague here, Helen Thorson.’

Indeed I do. So, a man. Is the Office under new management? ‘Sit down, dearie.’ She indicated the two armchairs opposite. There was a huskiness to her voice, deep and sensual, a tone that looked to have taken Doyle by surprise. ‘Hello, Helen. If you’ve got the keys to my little fashion accessory here, you might do me the favour of releasing me now.’ She nodded down towards her straitjacket and added, ‘Then I might be able to pass you a chocolate hobnob, without the delicate scent of my toes intruding.’

Doyle gazed appraisingly at Agatha. He appeared to be in his early fifties, the slightly brutish features of a boxer with acne-scarred cheeks and black hair turning to silver at the sides – a man who filled his Crombie coat with six brutal feet of well-aged muscle. It isn’t a kind face, but it might be a just one.

‘What makes you think I’ve come to release you from this nut-house, love?’ he asked.

‘I don’t receive many visitors here. You have the whiff of the Office about you, also, Mister Doyle. And you appear far too sane to be a psychiatrist.’

Thorson looked at the table. ‘Three cups laid out ready. Lucky guess?’

I never keep a man guessing – he’s sure to find the answer somewhere else. Agatha eased back in the sofa, pale blue eyes switching between her visitors. She passed Doyle his cup clutched between the toes of her foot. ‘You, I would say, are a quarter Chinese, on your grandmother’s side. Born in Essex. Service with the Royal Hong Kong police force. Repatriated after the island was handed back to the communist party. Returned to the UK and joined the police, probably at too junior a position for your experience. Later offered a position in the Office by a superior who felt threatened by you and only too glad to see you transferred out from under his or her feet.’

‘Thank you, Michel-de-bloody-Nostradamus,’ said Doyle.

‘Don’t mind me, dearie,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m just a little miffed that Margaret didn’t come here personally to spring me out of the unit.’

‘The old girl retired,’ said Doyle.’ Last year. She’s sitting in the House of Lords now as Baroness Rosalinda of Trumpton or some old bollocks. I’m the new head of section.’

‘She must’ve done something right, then,’ said Agatha. Shittysticks, I do hope it wasn’t leaving me here to rot.

‘All right then,’ said Doyle. ‘Good enough. Get Miss Marple here out of her nut jacket.’

Agatha shook her head as Thorson produced the key, twisting and writhing for the minute it took the straitjacket to fall off.

Doyle kicked the jacket into the corner. ‘If you could do that, why not take it off before we arrived?’

‘The doctor would have only sent more orderlies in to try to put it back on again,’ explained Agatha. ‘I don’t enjoy hospitalising the staff here. Some of them are nice enough. They’ve got a job to do, after all. Quite a few of the patients on the premises actually do have mental health issues.’

‘More than a bloody few,’ said Doyle. He passed Agatha a bag containing the exact same clothes she had been admitted with.

‘It’ll be nice to be able to put something on that doesn’t need to be tied at the back,’ said Agatha, tugging at the blue hospital gown hanging from her diminutive frame.

‘Of course, you know they would have allowed you to wear your own clothes for good behaviour?’ said Thorson.

‘Oh bobbins,’ smiled Agatha. ‘There was never much chance of that, was there?’ She fixed Thorson with a steely glare. ‘Am I needed, Helen?’

Doyle answered for the woman. ‘Enough for the minister