I turned to where Landen was pointing. It was Tony and Sue, and they waved cheerily before walking across to say hello.

‘Goodness!’ said Tony when they had seated themselves ‘Looks like the regimental get-together is early this year! Remember Sarah Nara, who lost an ear at Bilohirsk? I just met her in the carpark; quite a coincidence.’

As he said the word my heart missed a beat. I rummaged in my pocket for the entroposcope Mycroft had given me.

‘What’s the matter, Thurs?’ asked Landen. ‘You’re looking kind of… odd.’

‘I’m checking for coincidences,’ I muttered, shaking the jam jar of mixed lentils and rice. ‘It’s not as stupid as it sounds.’

The two pulses had gathered in a sort of swirly pattern. Entropy was decreasing by the second.

‘We’re out of here,’ I said to Landen, who looked at me quizzically. ‘Let’s go. Leave the things.’

‘What’s the problem, Thurs?’

‘I’ve just spotted my old croquet captain, Alf Widdershaine. This is Sue Long and Tony Fairwelle; they just saw Sarah Nara—see a pattern emerging?’

‘Thursday!’ Landen sighed. ‘Aren’t you being a little—’

‘Want me to prove it? Excuse me!’ I said, shouting to a passer-by. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Bonnie,’ she said, ‘Bonnie Voige. Why?’

‘See?’

‘Voige is not a rare name, Thurs. There are probably hundreds of them up here.’

‘All right, smarty-pants, you try.’

‘I will,’ replied Landen indignantly, heaving himself to his feet. ‘Excuse me!’

A young woman stopped and Landen asked her name.

‘Violet,’ she replied.

‘You see?’ said Landen. ‘There’s nothing—’

‘Violet De’ath,’ continued the woman. I shook the entroposcope again—the lentils and rice had separated almost entirely.

I clapped my hands impatiently. Tony and Sue looked perturbed but got to their feet nonetheless.

‘Everybody! Let’s go!’ I shouted.

‘But the cheese—!’

‘Bugger the cheese, Landen. Trust me—please!’

They all grudgingly joined me, confused and annoyed by my strange behaviour. Their minds changed when, following a short whooshing noise, a large and very heavy Hispano-Suiza motor-car landed on the freshly vacated picnic blanket with a teeth jarring thump that shook the ground and knocked us to our knees. We were showered with soil, pebbles and a grassy sod or two as the vast phaeton-bodied automobile sunk itself into the soft earth, the fine bespoke body bursting at the seams as the massive chassis twisted with the impact. One of the spoked wheels broke free and whistled past my head as the heavy engine, torn from its rubber mounting blocks, ripped through the polished bonnet and landed at our feet with a heavy thud. There was silence for a moment as we all stood up, brushed ourselves off and checked for any damage. Landen had cut his hand on a piece of twisted wing mirror but apart from that—miraculously, it seemed—no one had been hurt. The huge motor-car had landed so perfectly on the picnic that the blanket, Thermos, basket, food—everything, in fact—had disappeared from sight. In the deathly hush that followed, everyone in the small group was staring—not at the twisted wreck of the car, but at me, their mouths open. I stared back, then looked slowly upward to where a large airship freighter was still flying, minus a couple of tons of freight, on to the North and—one presumes—a lengthy stop for an accident inquiry. I shook the entroposcope and the random clumping pattern returned.

‘Danger’s passed,’ I announced.

‘You haven’t changed, Thursday Next!’ said Sue angrily. ‘Whenever you’re about something dangerously other walks with you. There’s a reason I didn’t keep in contact after school, you know—Weirdbird! Tony, we’re leaving.’

Landen and I stood and watched them go. He put his arm round me.

‘Weirdbird?’ he asked.

‘They used to call me that at school,’ I told him. ‘It’s the price for being different.’

‘You got a bargain. I would have paid double that to be different. Come on, let’s skedaddle.’

We slipped quietly away as a crowd gathered around the twisted automobile, the incident generating all manner of ‘instant experts’ who all had theories on why an airship should jettison a car. So to a background muttering of ‘Needed more lift’ and ‘Golly, that was close’ we crept away and sat in my car.

‘That’s not something you see very often,’ murmured Landen after a pause. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know, Land. There are a few too many coincidences around at present—I think someone’s trying to kill me.’

‘I love it when you’re being weird, darling, but don’t you think you are taking this a little too far? Even if you could drop a car from a freighter, no one could hope to hit a picnic blanket from five thousand feet. Think about it, Thurs—it makes no sense at all. Who would do something like this anyway?’

‘Hades,’ I whispered, hardly daring to say the word out loud.

‘Hades is dead, Thursday. You killed him yourself. It was a coincidence, pure and simple. They mean nothing—you might as well rail against your dreams or bark at shadows on the wall.’

We drove in silence to the SpecOps building and my disciplinary hearing. I switched off the engine and Landen held my hand tightly.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he assured me. ‘They’d be nuts to take any action against you. If things get bad, just remember what Flanker rhymes with.’

I smiled at the thought. He said he’d wait for me in the cafe across the road, kissed me again and limped off.

‘Thursday Next?’ enquired a tall man with a gravelly voice as soon as I stepped into the SpecOps building.

‘Yes?’

He flashed a badge.

‘Agent Walken, SO-5; this is my associate, James Dedmen.’

Dedmen tipped his hat politely and I shook their hands.

‘Can we talk somewhere privately?’ asked Walken.

I took them down the corridor and we found an empty interview room.

‘I’m sorry about Phodder and Kannon,’ I told them as soon as we had sat down

‘They were careless,’ intoned Dedmen gravely. ‘Contact adhesive should always be used in a well-ventilated room—it says so on the tin.’

‘We were wondering,’ asked Walken in a slightly embarrassed manner, ‘whether you could fill us in on what they were up to, they both died before submitting a report.’

‘What happened to their case notes?’

Dedmen and Walken exchanged looks.

‘They were eaten by rabbits.’

‘How could that happen?’

‘Classified,’ announced Dedmen. ‘We analysed the remains but everything was pretty well digested—except these.’

He placed three small scraps of tattered and stained paper wrapped in cellophane on the desk. I leaned closer. I could just read out part of my name on the first one; the second was a fragment of a credit card statement and the third had a single name on it which made me shiver Hades.