I breathed a sigh of relief and glanced around. Thursday5 was regarding me with such a sense of abject loss and failure on her face that I thought at first she’d been hurt.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded and looked down. I followed her gaze. Lying at her feet was my pistol.

“Is that where it ended up after it was knocked from my grasp?”

She nodded miserably, her eyes brimming with tears of self-anger.

I sighed. She and I both knew that this was the end of the road when it came to her cadetship. If Scampton-Tappett hadn’t intervened, I might well be dead-and she’d done nothing to prevent it.

“You don’t have to say it,” she said. “I’m manifestly not cut out for this work and never shall be. I’d try to apologize, but I can’t think of words that could adequately express my shame.”

She took a deep breath, pulled the bow out of her hair, put it in her mouth and then gathered up her hair in a ponytail again before retying it. It was just the way I did it, and I suddenly felt a pang of guilt. After all, she only acted in her morbidly peaceable way because that’s how she was written, as an antidote to the rest of the Thursday series. The thing was, the sex-and-violence nature of the first four books had been my fault, too. I’d sold the character rights in order to fund Acme Carpets.

“I’d best be getting back to my book now,” she said, and turned to go.

“Did I say you could leave?” I asked in my stoniest voice.

“Well, that is to say…no.”

“Then until I say you can go, you stay with me. I’m still undecided as to your fate, and until that happens-Lord help me-you’ll stay as my cadet.”

We returned to Jurisfiction, and Thursday5 went and did some Pilates in the corner, much to the consternation of Mrs. Dashwood, who happened to be passing. I reported the Minotaur’s appearance and the state of the Austen refit to Bradshaw, who told me to have the Minotaur’s details and current whereabouts texted to all agents.

After returning to my desk, dealing with some paperwork and being consulted on a number of matters, I drew out Thursday5’s assessment form, filled it in and then checked the “Failed” box on the last page before I signed it. I folded it twice, slid it into the envelope and wavered for a moment before eventually placing it in the top drawer of my desk.

I looked at my watch. It was time to go home. I walked over to Thursday5, who had her eyes closed and was standing on one leg. “Same time tomorrow?”

She opened her eyes and stared into mine. I got the same feeling when staring into the mirror at home. The touchy-feely New Age stuff was all immaterial. She was me, but me as I might have been if I’d never joined the police, army, SpecOps or Jurisfiction. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been any happier if I’d connected with the side of me that was her, but I’d be a lot more relaxed and a good deal healthier.

“Do you mean it?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t. But remember one thing: It’s coffee and a bacon roll.”

She smiled. “Right. Coffee and bacon roll it is.” She handed me a paper bag. “This is for you.”

I peered inside. It contained Pickwick’s blue-and-white knitted cozy-finished.

“Good job,” I murmured, looking at the delicate knitting enviously. “Thank-”

But she’d gone. I walked to the corridor outside and dug out my TravelBook, turned to the description of my office at Acme Carpets and read. After a few lines, the air turned suddenly colder, there was the sound of crackling cellophane, and I was back in my small office with a dry mouth and a thirst so strong I thought I would faint. I kept a pitcher of water close by for just these moments, and thus I spent the next ten minutes drinking water and breathing deeply.

I arrived at Tuesday’s school at ten to four and waited patiently outside the math room. She’d shown a peculiar flair for the subject all her life but had first achieved prominence when aged nine. She’d wandered into the sixth-form math room and found an equation written on the board, thinking it was homework. But it wasn’t. It was Fermat’s Last Theorem, and the math master had written it down to demonstrate how this simple equation could not be solved. The thing was, Tuesday had found a solution, thus rendering a proof of the unworkability of the equation both redundant and erroneous.

When the hunt was on for the person who had solved it, Tuesday thought they were angry with her for spoiling their fun, so she wasn’t revealed as the culprit for almost a week. Even then she had to be cajoled into explaining the answer. Professors of mathematics had tubed in from every corner of the globe to see how such a simple solution could have been staring them in the face without any of them noticing it.

At four on the button, Tuesday came out of the math class looking drained and a bit cross.

“Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “How was school?”

“S’okay,” she said with a shrug, handing me her Hello Kitty school bag, pink raincoat and half-empty Winnie-the-Pooh lunch box. “Do you have to pick me up in your Acme uniform? It’s, like, soooooo embarrassing.”

“I certainly do,” I replied, giving her a big smoochy kiss to embarrass her further, something that didn’t really work, as the pupils in her math class were all grown up and too obsessed with number sets and parameterized elliptic curves to be bothered by a daughter’s embarrassment over her mother.

“They’re all a bit slow,” she said as we walked to the van. “Some of them can barely count.”

“Sweetheart, they are the finest minds in mathematics today; you should be happy that they’re coming to you for tutoring. It must have been a bit of a shock to the mathematics fraternity when you revealed that there were sixteen more odd numbers then even ones.”

“Seventeen,” she corrected me. “I thought of another one on the bus this morning. The odd-even disparity is the easy bit,” she explained. “The hard part is trying to explain that there actually is a highest number, a fact that tends to throw all work regarding infinite sets into a flat spin.”

Clearly, the seriously smart genes that Mycroft had inherited from his father had bypassed my mother and me but appeared in Tuesday. It was odd to think that Mycroft’s two sons were known collectively as “the Stupids”-and it wasn’t an ironic title either.

Tuesday groaned again when she saw we were driving home in the Acme Carpets van but agreed to get in when I pointed out that a long walk home was the only alternative. She scrunched down in her seat so as not to be spotted.

We didn’t go straight home. I’d spoken to Spike before leaving work, and he mentioned that he had some news about Mycroft’s haunting and agreed to meet me at Mum’s. When I arrived, she and Polly were in the kitchen bickering about something pointless, such as the average size of an orange, so I left Tuesday with them: Mother to burn her a cake and Polly to discuss advanced Nextian Geometry.

“Hiya,” I said to Spike, who’d been waiting in his car.

“Yo. Thought about what to do with Felix8?”

“Not yet. I’ll interview him again later this evening.”

“As you wish. I made a few inquiries on the other side. Remember my dead partner, Chesney? He said Mycroft’s spooking was what we call a Nonrecurring Informative Phantasm.”