Night fell upon Brentford.

Neville evicted the last of his patrons, drew the bolts upon The Swan’s saloon bar door, switched off the bar lights and took himself off to bed. Where he spent a fitful night, his dreams beset with images of high-security prisons, where he was banged up at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a small and dismal cell, in the company of a tattooed Neanderthal lifer who referred to himself as “The Daddy” and Neville as his “bitch”.

Jim Pooley also spent a troubled night. His dreams were of football, with Jim being called on to the pitch to substitute for the Brentford striker who had been shot by a sniper during a penalty shootout with Real Madrid. And Jim was trying really hard to kick the ball, but his feet kept sticking to the turf and the ball wasn’t a ball at all, but a sprout. And the Real Madrid goalie certainly wasn’t a goalie, he was some sort of dragon.

And Jim kept getting woken up by all this noise coming from the bed to the right of him (when looking from the door). All this grunting and erotic moaning and—

Jim fell back asleep and dreamed some more about football.

Professor Slocombe rarely slept. He sat long into the night poring over ancient and not-so-ancient tomes. He pored over the Roy of the Rovers annual and Rommel’s How to Win Tank Battles Bedside Companion and the autobiography of Alexander the Great and The Necronomicon (naturally) and Death Wears A Tottenham Strip (a Lazlo Woodbine thriller) and a copy of Banged Up and Gun Totin’ that had been delivered with his morning paper by mistake. And at four in the morning he slept for an hour in his chair and dreamed an alternative and far cleverer ending to the last episode of The Prisoner.

Mahatma Campbell slept and dreamed, but what he dreamed of when he slept, only the Campbell knew.

Others slept and dreamed of Brentford. Old Pete, for instance – he slept and dreamed and his dreams were troubled, troubled by memories he had long suppressed. Memories of things which he knew to be true, but had spent a lifetime convincing himself were otherwise.

And Gwynplaine Dhark slept, but didn’t dream.

And John Omally eventually slept and did. And his dreams were of a pretty nurse and John enjoyed these dreams.

And so the folk of Brentford slept and mostly dreamed.

And the moon was in its seventh house and Jupiter was in alignment with Mars.

And eventually something cock-a-doodle-do’d and a new day came to Brentford.

John Omally woke and yawned and wakened not the nurse who slept beside him. Divesting himself of his bandage turban, he slipped from his bed of not-too-much-pain-really and nudged the sleeping Pooley.

The sleeping Pooley woke to find the face of John Omally grinning down upon him.

“Wah?” went Jim. “What are you doing in my boudoir?”

“You’re in the hospital,” John told him. “Summon up your powers and let’s be on our way.”

“Oh yes,” mumbled Jim. “I remember.”

“Up and at ’em, Mr Manager,” said John. “The borough’s relying on you.”

Jim’s mumbling became a groan. “I really hoped I’d just dreamed yesterday,” said he.

“Well, you didn’t,” said John. “I’ll treat you to a breakfast at The Plume, then we’ll get down to business.”

“We?” queried Pooley.

“We,” said John. “We’re in this together, I told you, thick and thin. We’re the boys, aren’t we? The boys from Brentford.”

“There appears to be a penguin in your bed,” said the casual observer, “from where I’m lying, of course. Which must be on the left, if you’re looking from the door. Although I might be wrong.”

“First thing, then,” said John, as he and Pooley took to their breakfasts in The Plume Café, “is to go to the ground and get you settled into your manager’s office.”

“First thing,” said Jim, “is for me to go to Norman, purchase my copy of Sporting Life and make my selections for the day. And check on the results for yesterday. I might already be a multi-millionaire.”

“No,” said John, a-shaking of his slightly bruised but otherwise undamaged head.

“No?” said Jim, a-shaking of his head in a similar fashion.

“Those days are behind you. You are a man of responsibility now.”

“I don’t want this,” said Jim. “I really don’t.”

“You trust the professor, though.”

“He has a rare sense of humour. He might just be winding us up.”

“I don’t think so.” John tucked into his double eggs.

“Woe unto the house of Pooley,” quoth Jim, “for it is surely undone.”

“Another cup of tea?” asked John.

“A mug,” said Jim, taking out a Dadarillo and lighting it. “I need to keep my strength up.”

There was a degree of unpleasantness.

In fact, it was more than just a single degree.

In fact, there were sufficient degrees involved to construct an isosceles triangle.

Mahatma Campbell, groundskeeper of Griffin Park[8], refused the team’s new manager’s entrance.

“Open up these gates,” demanded Jim.

“I know you,” spat the Campbell. “I know you well, wee laddie.”

“Hear that,” said Jim to John. “The team may not know me, but he does. This is such a bad idea.”

“The Campbell knows everyone,” said John. “He knows Professor Slocombe, don’t you, Campbell?”

There was more unpleasantness, and much shouting from the Campbell, but eventually much limping off to the telephone and much grudging limping back and even greater grudging unlockings of the gate.

“I willna call ya sir,” the Campbell told Jim. “And I have this job fer life here. It’s in m’contract, so dinna think of sacking me.”

“It was the furthest thing from my mind,” said Pooley. “Would you kindly lead the way to my office?”

Now, there are offices. And there are offices.

Some offices are directors’ offices. These are well-appointed offices, they are spacious and luxurious, with a window that occupies the entirety of one wall through which can be viewed panoramic cityscape skylines.

Other offices are poky and wretched, like those of downbeat private eyes, for instance, such as Lazlo Woodbine, the fictional gumshoe created by the mercurial mind of P.P. Penrose (Brentford’s most famous and fêted writer of detective “genre” fiction). Such offices as these have a ceiling fan that revolves turgidly above fixtures and fittings of the direst persuasion: a filing cabinet with few files to call its own; a water cooler that steams gently throughout the summer months; a desk that one would not care to sit at, accompanied by a chair that no one would ever care to sit upon; and a carpet that, should it receive a description, certainly doesn’t deserve one.

Jim Pooley viewed the office that was now his own.

“Well appointed,” said Jim, approvingly.

“Poky and wretched,” said John Omally, “but nothing a lick of paint won’t cure.”

“And see, John,” said Jim, “a desk of my very own. Do you think it has anything in its drawers?”

“I think I’ll open the windows,” said John, “and let the bluebottles out.”

“Isn’t it interesting?” Jim sat down in the manager’s chair that was now his own and had a little swivel about on it. “It should be me complaining, but it’s not. It’s you. How would you explain this, John?”

“I’m only thinking of your interests,” said Omally, who certainly was not. “I want what’s best for you. Perhaps we could knock through a wall, put in a Jacuzzi and a sofa bed?”

“I can’t imagine why I’d need those.”