And Neil sought to lighten the mood of this waiting by remarking that in my snow-capped green baize flare-trousered jumpsuit, I made for a passable Christmas tree.

And at very great length, when we were all about to keel over and die from the cold, we did what we should have done earlier and beat upon the back gate with our fists and demanded entry.

And presently someone came to answer our beatings.

But not a nightclub bouncer or barman.

A little old lady with a candle.

‘What do you want?’ quoth she. ‘Banging on my gate at this ungodly hour?’

‘We want to come into the club, we’re freezing.’

‘Club?’ went the old woman. ‘Club? There’s no club here. This is a private house.’

And then it all sort of slotted together.

All of it. Like the pieces of a jigsaw.

And we looked at one another.

And reached what is known as a consensus opinion.

And we ran, fairly ran, all the way back to The Green Carnation Club. But there was no one there. No one. Just that door hanging off its hinge.

And outside that door, a sort of patch of road that had less snow on it than the rest. A patch that corresponded exactly in area to that of our Bedford van. Which, dear reader, as you may well have guessed, was no longer there to be seen.

We trudged back, freezing and forlorn.

To The Divine Trinity, where we had left our street clothes.

We were glum and we were angry, too.

We had been had, big time. Done up like a kipper. We had fallen prey to a most inspired piece of chicanery, it was true, and we could hardly have been expected to see it coming, but that didn’t make things any better. We had lost all of our instruments.

And then we arrived at the allotments.

And the allotment gates were wide open.

And so was the door to The Divine Trinity. For it had been crowbarred from its hinges.

And there were the tyre tracks of what must surely have been a lorry. And all of our amps and speakers and other expensive equipment-

Had gone.

And so I became a private detective.

Well, not quite as quickly as that and things are never that easy. I was very upset, I will tell you that. The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that this terrible happenstance was really all my fault. I did my best to deny this, of course, because it did seem logical at the time that there had to be someone to blame who wasn’t me.

Neil and Toby put me straight on this, however, and I was forced to review the entire sad episode part by part and come to the dire conclusion that it was all my fault.

It had all started with the copy of Teenage She-Male Today that had come through our letter box. This magazine, it now appeared, was a clever fake, run up by some dodgy printers and brimming with big news about a non-existent band called Venus Envy.

I determined to track down the printer. But I was immediately thwarted in this enterprise by the discovery that my fundamentalist mother had consigned Teenage She-Male Today to the flames of the sitting-room fire.

But I had the poster.

But the poster had obviously been turned out on one of those Roneo machines. There was one at Southcross Road Secondary School. They were everywhere. And there would be no way of telling which machine the posters had been printed on.

But did I say posters? Of course, as it turned out, there had been no other posters, just the one that had been – and I had to have a little think about it then – how had I come by the poster in the first place? Oh yes, it had been posted through our letter box the day after the Teenage She-Male Today had arrived.

And then, of course, there had been that roadie. The one who had volunteered to come to The Divine Trinity to help load the equipment.

But why such an elaborate scheme? Why not simply turn up at any time we weren’t there and steal all our equipment?

Well, that was sort of obvious, too: because I pretty much lived there and I wouldn’t have given up the equipment without a fight. So they would probably have had to kill me.

No, it was a masterpiece. They’d even made sure that Mr Ishmael showed up for the gig. There had been no loose ends. And with all the wigs and heavy make-up, there would be no way of identifying the villains.

I could identify the roadie, though. He looked like… well, he looked like… well, he looked just like a roadie, really, and they all look very much the same. That roadie looked like my dad.

So I was stuffed, good and proper. Just like a turkey. Which was, at least, seasonal.

But I would have them. I would. Somehow. I would track them all down and retrieve our equipment and bring those blighters to justice.

I was lying in bed, planning the terrible revenge that I would take, when the doorbell rang, and this was shortly followed by my mother coming upstairs and beating upon my bedroom door. ‘It’s a Mr Ishmael to see you,’ she shouted through the pine panelling. ‘He seems to be rather upset.’

So I rose from my bed of pain, shrugged on my dressing gown and went downstairs to face the music.

My mother had admitted Mr Ishmael to our sitting room and he stood, his turquoise velvet jacket raised at the back, a-warming his bum by the fire.

‘This is a very bad business,’ he said as I entered the room, which felt somewhat colder than usual. ‘All of the equipment, all of it. This is appalling.’

And I agreed that it was.

‘Well, come on, then,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Get your clothes on and I will take you down to the police station. You can make a full report and get a “crime number” so that you can claim on your insurance.’

‘Ah,’ I said. And, ‘That.’ And I think I said, ‘Really?’ also.

‘Step to it,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘These things take time and the legitimate gig that I have arranged for you is next week.’

‘Ah,’ I said, once again. And I do believe that I might have said, ‘Now there’s a thing,’ as well.

But I stood and I dithered and I think that must have been what gave the game away.

‘You do have the equipment insured, don’t you?’ asked Mr Ishmael. ‘The equipment is legitimate? You did pay for that equipment, didn’t you?’

And I don’t think I made any reply at all to this. Although I might well have done some mumbling, and I’m reasonably certain that I scuffed my naked heels upon the green baize carpet.

‘Calamity!’ cried Mr Ishmael. ‘Ruination!’ And he began to thrash about with his black Malacca cane, the one with the penis-and-balls handle. And he swept the mantel clock from the mantel shelf and overturned the Peerage fireplace companion set, the one that was made out of brass and resembled a galleon in full sail.

‘Disaster!’ he cried, and he kicked over the visitors’ chair.

And all this shouting and knocking about of things attracted the attention of my mother, who was turning parsnips gently in a bucket by the stove.

‘Whatever is going on?’ she shrieked, entering our sitting room with the parsnip-turner raised above her hair-netted head. It was a big parsnip-turner, made of brass and of the Peerage persuasion, with a handle that was fashioned into the likeness of an Indian chief.

Mr Ishmael glared at my mother. He fairly glared, I can tell you. And my mother turned tail and fled back to her turning of the parsnips (well, Christmas was coming, and a well-turned parsnip is better than a badly shuffled sprout [9]).

‘Well,’ said Mr Ishmael to me, ‘what do you intend to do about this aggrievous situation?’

‘I think I might go and assist my mother,’ I suggested. ‘And whilst doing so, give the matter some most intense thought.’

‘Oh you do now, do you?’ And Mr Ishmael rocked upon his heels and, although it must surely have been some trick of the winter light, it looked for all the world as if little sulphurous wisps of smoke issued from his ears.