I suppose he was right, but that didn’t help explain how a twin puncture outside the station, a broken wireless, one fortuitous ticket and an approaching Skyrail could all turn up together out of the blue.

I stepped into the single Skyrail car and took a seat at the front. The doors sighed shut and we were soon gliding effortlessly above the Cerney lakes as we crossed into Wessex. I was here for a purpose, I thought, and looked around carefully to see what that might be. The Neanderthal Skyrail operator had his hand on the throttle and gazed absently at the view. His eyebrows twitched and he sniffed the air occasionally. The car was almost empty, seven people, all of them women and no one familiar.

‘Three down,’ exclaimed a short woman who was staring at a folded-up newspaper, half to herself and half to the rest of us. ‘Well decorated for prying, perhaps? Ten letters.’

No one answered as we sailed past Cricklade station without stopping, much to the annoyance of a large, expensively dressed lady who huffed loudly and pointed at the operator with her umbrella.

‘You there!’ she boomed like a captain before the storm. ‘What are you doing? I wanted to get off at Cricklade, damn you!’

The operator seemed unperturbed at the insult and muttered an apology. This obviously wasn’t good enough for the loud and objectionable woman, who jabbed the small Neanderthal violently in the ribs with her umbrella. He didn’t yell out in pain; he just flinched, pulled the driver’s door closed behind him and locked it. I snatched the umbrella from the woman, who seemed shocked and outraged at my actions.

‘What the—!’ she said indignantly.

‘Don’t do that,’ I told her, ‘it’s not nice.’

‘Poppycock!’ she guffawed in a loud and annoying manner. ‘He’s only a Neanderthal!’

‘Meddlesome,’ said one of the other passengers with an air of finality, staring at an advert for the Gravitube that was pinned at eye level.

The objectionable lady and I stared at her, wondering who she was referring to. She looked at us both, flushed, and said:

‘No, no. Ten letters, three down Well decorated for prying. Meddlesome.’

‘Very good,’ muttered the lady with the crossword as she scribbled in the answer.

I glared at the well-heeled woman, who eyed me back malevolently.

‘Jab the Neanderthal again and I’ll arrest you for assault.’

‘I happen to know,’ announced the woman tartly, ‘that Neanderthals are legally classed as animals. You cannot assault a Neanderthal any more than you can a mouse!’

My temper began to rise—always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.

‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘but I can arrest you for cruelty, bruising the peace and anything else I can think of.’

But the woman wasn’t the least bit intimidated.

‘My husband is a Justice of the Peace,’ she announced, as if it were a hidden trump. ‘I can make things very tricky for you. What is your name?’

‘Next,’ I told her unhesitantly. ‘Thursday Next. SO-27.’

Her eyelids flickered slightly and she stopped rummaging in her bag for a pencil and paper.

‘The Jane Eyre Thursday Next?’ she asked, her mood changing abruptly.

‘I saw you on the telly,’ said the woman with the crossword. ‘You seem a bit obsessed with your dodo, I must say. Why couldn’t you talk about Jane Eyre, Goliath or ending the Crimean War?’

‘Believe me, I tried.’

The Skyrail swept on past Broad Blunsdon station and the passengers all sighed, made tut-tut noises and shrugged at one another.

‘I am going to complain to the Skyrail management about this,’ said a heavy-set woman with make-up like woad who carried a disgruntled-looking Pekinese. ‘A good cure for insubordination is—’

Her speech came to an abrupt end as the Neanderthal suddenly increased the speed of the car. I knocked on the heavy acetate door and shouted:

‘What’s going on, pal?’

‘Open this door immediately!’ demanded the well-heeled woman, brandishing her umbrella. But the Neanderthal had taken about as much umbrella jabbing as he could that day.

‘We are going home now,’ he said simply, staring straight ahead.

‘We?’ echoed the woman. ‘No we’re not. I live at Crick—’

‘He means I,’ I told her. ‘Neanderthals don’t use the singular personal pronoun.’

‘Damn stupid!’ she replied, yelling a few more insults for good measure before she harrumphed back to her seat. I settled closer to the driver.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Kaylieu,’ he replied.

‘Good. Now, Kaylieu, I want you to tell me what the problem is.’

He paused for a moment as the Swindon airship stop came and went. I saw another shuttle that had been diverted to a siding and several Skyrail officials waving at us, so it was only a matter of time before the authorities knew what was going on.

‘We want to be real.’

‘Day’s hurt?’ murmured the squat woman at the back, still sucking the end of her pencil and staring at the crossword.

‘What did you say?’ I said.

‘Day’s hurt?’ she repeated. ‘Nine down; eight letters—I think it’s an anagram.’

‘I have no idea,’ I replied before turning my attention back to Kaylieu. ‘What do you mean, real?’

‘We are not animals,’ announced the small and once extinct strand of human. ‘We want to be a protected species—like dodo, mammoth—and you. We want to speak to head man at Goliath and someone from Toad News.’

‘I’Il see what I can do.’

I moved to the back of the shuttle and picked up the emergency phone.

‘Hello?’ I said to the operator. ‘This is Thursday Next, SO-27. We have a situation in shuttle number, ah, 6-1-7-4.’

When I told the operator what was going on she breathed in sharply and asked how many people were with me and whether anyone was hurt.

‘Seven females, myself and the driver; we are all fine.’

‘Don’t forget Pixie Frou-Frou,’ said the large woman.

‘And one Pekinese.’

The operator told me they were clearing all the tracks ahead; we would have to keep calm and she would call back. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t a bad situation, but she had rung off.

I sat down next to the Neanderthal again. Jaw fixed, he was staring intently ahead, knuckles white on the throttle lever. We approached the Wanborough junction, crossed the M4 and were diverted west. One of the younger passengers caught my eye; she looked frightened.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

‘Irma,’ she replied, ‘Irma Cohen.’

‘Poppycock!’ said the umbrella woman. ‘I’m Irma Cohen!’

‘So am I,’ said the woman with the Peke.

‘And me!’ exclaimed the thin woman at the back. It was clear after a short period of frenzied cries of ‘Ooh, fancy that!’ and ‘Well I never!’, that everyone in the Skyrail except me and Kaylieu and Pixie Frou-Frou were called Irma Cohen. Some of them were even vaguely related. It was quite a coincidence—for today, the best yet.

‘Thursday,’ said the squat woman.

‘Yes?’

But she wasn’t talking to me; she was writing in the answer: Day’s hurt—Thursday. It was an anagram.

The emergency phone rang.

‘This is Diana Thuntress, trained negotiator for SpecOps 9,’ said a businesslike voice. ‘Who is this?’

‘Di, it’s me, Thursday.’

There was a pause.

‘Hello, Thursday. Saw you on the telly last night. Trouble seems to follow you around, doesn’t it? What’s it like in there?’

I looked at the small and unconcerned crowd of commuters, who were showing each other pictures of their children. Pixie Frou-Frou had fallen asleep and the Irma Cohen with the crossword was puzzling on six across: The parting bargain.

‘They’re fine. A little bored, but not hurt.’

‘What does the perp want?’

‘He wants to talk to someone at Goliath about species self-ownership.’