Pooley put his eye once more to the knot-hole. “He is still there. Perhaps we could reason with him, or better still offer a bribe.”

Omally thought this sound enough, every man having his price. “How much have you in your pockets?” he asked.

Pooley smiled grimly. “We have not yet settled up over the game. I think that it is for you to approach him, John. Employ your silken tongue and feel free to invest a portion of my winnings if needs be. You can always owe me the difference. I consider you to be a man of honour.”

Omally licked the end of his captured roll-up. “All right,” he said nobly, “I shall go. We shall consider your winnings to be an investment to secure a further season of uninterrupted play. During this period I have not the least doubt that if your game continues at its present standard you will have the opportunity to lighten my pockets continually.”

Pooley opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it. In such matters Omally generally held the verbal edge. “Go then with my blessings,” he said, “but kindly leave me my tobacco tin.”

Omally straightened up his regimental necktie, squared his broad and padded shoulders, threw open the hut door, and stepped out into the sunlight. The figure lurking amongst the bean poles watched the Irishman with an inscrutable expression. Omally thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and gazed about the allotment with extreme nonchalance. He yawned, stretched, and then, as if seeing the figure for the first time, flicked at his mop of curly black hair and bid the stranger a hearty “Good morning there.”

The figure uttered not a word but merely stared on regardless.

“There’ll be rain before the evening I shouldn’t wonder,” said Omally, who was rarely rattled. “Won’t do the ground any harm though.” As he spoke he slowly strolled in the stranger’s direction, covering his approach with the occasional sidestep to scrutinize some flowering bloom. But soon there was less than fifteen yards between them. “Should get a rare old crop of beans up this year,” said John, stepping nimbly over Old Pete’s watering can.

In order that he might reach the Council spy, for by this time Omally felt one hundred per cent certain that this was in fact the lurker’s despicable calling, it was necessary for him to pass behind Soap Distant’s heavily-bolted corrugated iron shed. Soap himself had vanished away from Brentford under most extraordinary circumstances, but his rental upon the shed was paid up until the turn of the following century and his hut remained untouched and inviolate.

Omally sneaked away behind it. He lost sight of the spy for but a moment, but when he emerged at the spot where the malcontent should have been standing, to John’s amazement, not a soul was to be seen.

Pooley came ambling up. “Where did he go?” he asked. “I took my eyes off him for a moment and he was gone.”

Omally shook his head. “There is something not altogether kosher about this, I am thinking.”

“He must have legged it, had it away on his toes.”

Omally scratched at the stubble of his chin. “Perhaps,” said he, “perhaps. There is a terrible smell of creosote hereabouts, has anybody been pasting his paintwork?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Omally shrugged, “Shall we play another round then?”

Pooley scrutinized his Piaget wristwatch. “I feel a little unsettled,” he said. “Perhaps we should adjourn now to the Swan for a cooling pint of Large to ease our fractured nerves.”

“That,” said Omally, smacking his hands together, “is not a bad idea by any reckoning.”

Bitow… Bitow… Bitow… Bitow… Whap… “What?” The ungodly sounds echoed across the library-silent saloon-bar of the Flying Swan, rattling the optics and jarring the patrons from their contemplation of the racing dailies. Neville the part-time barman clapped his hands about his ears and swore from between freshly clenched teeth.

Nicholas Roger Raffles Rathbone, currently serving his time as local paperlad, stood before the Captain Laser Alien Attack Machine, his feet at three of the clock and his shoulders painfully hunched in his bid to defend planet Earth from its never-ending stream of cosmic cousins ever bent upon conquest, doom, and destruction.

Bitow… Bitow… Bitow… Bitow… His right forefinger rattled away at the neutron bomb release button and a bead of perspiration formed upon his ample brow. “Go on my son, go on.” Little streamers of coloured light, like some residue from a third-rate firework box, flew up the bluely-tinted video screen to where the horde of approaching spacecraft, appearing for all the world like so many stuffed olives, dipped and weaved.

Bitow… Whap… “What?” Young Nick levelled his cherry-red boot at the machine, damaging several of his favourite toes.

Neville watched the performance with a face of despair. He too had made that gesture of defiance with an equal lack of success.

The boy Nick dug deeply into his denim pockets for more small change, but found only a pound note, whose serial number corresponded exactly with one which had lain not long before in Norman’s secret cashbox beneath his counter. He turned his back momentarily upon his humming adversary and bounced over to the bar counter. “Give us change of a quid then, Nev.”

Neville viewed the diminutive figure with the lime-green coiffure. “I cannot give out change,” he said maliciously. “You will have to buy a drink.”

“OK then, a half of shandy and plenty of two-bobs in the change, the Captain awaits.”

Neville drew off a mere trickle of ale into the glass and topped it up from the drips tray. “We’ve no lemonade,” he sneered.

“No sweat,” said Nick.

Neville noticed, as he passed the flat half-pint across the gleaming bar top, that the boy’s right forefinger drummed out a continual tattoo upon an imaginary neutron bomb release button. Accepting the pound note, he rang up “No Sale” and scooped out a fistful of pennies and halfpennies and a ten-bob piece. “Sorry I can’t let you have more than a couple of florins,” he told the bouncing boy, “we are a little down on silver this morning.”

The boy shrugged. “No sweat.” He was well acquainted with the old adage about a prophet being without honour in his own land, and he made a mental note that he would always in future take his perks in silver before settling in for a lunchtime’s cosmic warfare. Without further ado he pocketed his ten-bob piece, swept up his pennies, pushed his half-pint pointedly aside and jogged back to the humming machine.

Pooley and Omally entered the Flying Swan. “God save all here,” said the Irishman, as more bitowing rent the air, “and a pox upon the Nipponese and all their hellish works.”

Raffles Rathbone heard not a word of this; he was hunched low, aiding the Captain in his bid to defeat Earth’s attackers. His face was contorted into the kind of expression which made Joseph Carey Merrick such a big attraction in the Victorian side-shows. His right forefinger twitched in a localized St Vitus’ Dance and his body quivered as if charged with static electricity.

Neville ground his teeth, loosening yet another expensive filling, and tore his eyes away from the loathsome spectacle and towards his approaching patrons. “What is your pleasure, gentlemen?” he asked.

Pooley hoisted himself on to his favourite stool. “Two pints of your very best, barlord,” he said. “My companion is in the chair.”

Making much of his practised wrist action, Neville drew off two pints of the very very best. He eyed Omally with only the merest suspicion as the Irishman paid up without a fuss, guessing accurately that it was some debt of honour. His eyebrows were raised somewhat, however, to the shabby and mudbespattered appearance of the two drinkers. He thought to detect something slightly amiss. “I think to detect something slightly amiss,” he observed.