“Very good. Well, at least you were listening.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t very interested.”

“But you were listening.”

“Oh yeah, I was listening. But only in the hope that there might be some mention of genetic engineering. As that is what this course of lectures is supposed to be about.”

A rumble of mumbles signified that Molekemp was not all alone in this hope.

“Touché,” said the monochrome doctor. “But the stories did have a purpose. What do we really know about our own genetic makeup?”

“We don’t really know much at all, sir. We were hoping that you might enlighten us.”

“And that I was endeavouring to do. Let me briefly summarize. Firstly, the shaggy dog story. Here we have a mythic archetype. Cerberus, several-headed canine guardian of the Underworld. Ancient belief, brought fleetingly into a modern day setting. Of course, Mason was lying. The story was not true. It was a shaggy dog story with a twist in its tail. But think archetype, if you will. Think of old gods and old belief systems. Think of THE BIG IDEA, which existed in the beginning and from which all ideas come. I will return to this.

“Secondly we have the ghost story. The present-day scientists are studying the ghosts of the past. They can’t actually see them, but they think perhaps they might be able to hear them, to sense them. But then we discover that the scientists themselves are not of the present day. That they too are ghosts, mere shades and shadows. And the story could continue endlessly. The tramps turn out to be ghosts, witnessed by others who turn out to be ghosts and so on and so forth.

“So think here, the march of science, half-truth superseding half-truth superseding half-truth, on and on and on, towards what? Ultimate discovery? Ultimate revelation? Are you following any of this, Molekemp?”

“I suppose so, sir.”

“Jolly good. Third story. The fairy tale. The Old Pete character knows of the existence of fairies, he can see them with his own two eyes. But he cannot admit this to his friend who has just told him that only people with child-like minds can see fairies. Tricky dichotomy there, and one that cannot be resolved. The Old Pete character’s observation of the fairies is purely subjective. He may be a dullard, or he may be a visionary. And we all know how the scientific fraternity loves to mock the visionary. Science demands a provable hypothesis, repeatable experiments, double-blind testing and the seal of approval by those in authority. How well would fairies fare?”

Molekemp’s hand was once more in the air. “Surely this is all somewhat circuitous, sir,” he said. “Fascinating though it is, or, as far as I’m concerned, is not.”

Dr Steven shook his head. “I felt that the stories had a certain elegance,” he said, “and this too I wished to touch upon. Science holds elegance to be something worthy of veneration. The poetry of mathematics, always in stanzas rather than blank verse. The beauty of the models science creates to convey what can never truly be understood. The pigeon-holing of reason. The belief that one thing should actually balance another.”

“I’m lost again,” said Molekemp.

“Then you are a twat,” said Dr Steven, “and I shall waste no more time upon philosophical concepts.” He turned to the blackboard and chalked up the letters DNA. “So,” said he, “DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid, the main constituent of the chromosomes from which we are composed. The DNA molecule consists of two polynucleotide chains, in the form of a double helix, which contain…”

Somewhere in the distance a bell rang, and as if in silent tribute to Pavlov (whose lectures were apparently a howl a minute) the students gathered together their belongings and left the auditorium.

Dr Steven Malone stood alone before his black-board. Top of the tree, icing on the cake and ivory mouthpiece he might have been, but communicator of wisdom to the young and impressionable he was not. He was a visionary and he had glimpsed THE BIG IDEA, but getting this across to his students was proving tricky.

He had been leading up to his conviction that present-day scientists in the field of genetics (that field with the big tree in the middle on which perched Dr Steven Malone) went about things in all the wrong ways. They were obsessed with the study of present-day man’s DNA, in order to discover its secrets.

But the secrets did not lie in the DNA of present-day man. Present-day man was a genetic mutation, an evolutionary development. In order to learn the secrets of DNA you had to study it in its original form – the form that had existed in the very beginning. You would have to study the DNA of Adam and Eve. Or even go one better than that. God created man in his own image, so the DNA prototype was to be found in God himself.

But how could anyone study the DNA of God?

And what might you find if you did?

These were the thoughts that obsessed Dr Steven Malone, that had driven him into the field of genetics in the first place, and would drive him to his inevitable and devastating downfall.

But his downfall was still some months away.

Some years away, in fact, or even centuries, depending on just where you happened to be in time. So be it only said that Dr Steven had a plan. It was a brave plan and a bold one. It was daring; it was dire. And had it not already been given away on the cover of this book, it would have come as one hell of a surprise to the reader.

But such is the way of it, and so we must leave Dr Steven Malone for the present. A noble figure, all in black and white, still bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr Sidney Paget’s renderings of Sherlock Holmes.

Dr Steven stands in profile and points to something off the page.

And a great wind came out of the East, as it were a burning cloud consuming all before it. And the sons of Man did weep and wail and rend their garments, crying surely this is the breath of Pooley.

“Surely this is the breath of Pooley?” Jim Pooley reread the computer print-out. “How can this be?”

The obese genealogist leaned back in his creaking leather chair and clasped his plump fingers over an expanse of tweedy waistcoat. “How it can, I do not know,” said he. “But there you have it, for what it’s worth.”

Jim, now breathing into his cupped hands and sniffing mightily, said, “I might well have the twang of the brewer’s craft about the gums myself. But as to a burning cloud consuming all before it, that’s a little strong.”

“Hence all the weeping and wailing, I suppose.” The genealogist grinned.

“Are you sure it isn’t a misinterpretation or something? These ancient scribes were subject to the occasional slip-up, you know. A transposed P here, a wayward ey round the corner.”

Mr Compton-Cummings shook his bulbous head. “I’m sorry, Jim,” he said. “But it looks as though your forebears were notable only for their extreme halitosis. They put the poo in Pooley, as it were.”

Pooley groaned. “And this vile smear upon my ancestors you propose to publish in your book, Brentford: A Study of its People and History?”

“It would be folly to leave it out.”

Jim rose from his chair, leaned across the paper-crowded desk, knotted a fist and displayed it beneath the snubby nose of Mr Compton-Cummings. “It would be a far greater folly to leave it in,” he suggested.

Mr Compton-Cummings put a thin smile upon his fat face. He was a Kent Compton-Cummings and could trace his own ancestry back to the Battle of Agincourt. “I would strongly advise against a course of violence, Mr Pooley,” he said softly. “For it is my duty to warn you that I am an exponent of Dimac, the deadliest form of martial art known to mankind. With a single finger I could disfigure and disable you.”

Jim’s fist hovered in the air. A shaft of sunlight angling down through the Georgian casement of the genealogist’s elegant office made it momentarily a thing of fragile beauty. Almost porcelain, it seemed. Hardly a weapon of terror.