reached the hallway, it suddenly became apparent to him that the gentle sounds of day-time television which he had heard from out in the garden had previously been masked from inside by the insistent sound of the record stuck in its groove.

He was surprised now to realise that they were in fact coming from somewhere upstairs in this house. With a quick look round to see that he was not observed he stood on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the upstairs floors of the house and glanced up them in surprise.

The stairs were carpeted with a tastefully austere matting type of substance. Dirk quietly made his way up them, past some tastefully dried large things in a pot that stood on the first landing, and looked into the rooms on the first floor. They, too, were tasteful and dried.

The larger of the two bedrooms was the only one that showed any signs of current use. It had clearly been designed to allow the morning light to play on delicately arranged flowers and duvets stuffed with something like hay, but there was a feeling that socks and used shaving heads were instead beginning to gather the room into their grip. There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room - the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall. There was an air of tension and of sadness and of things needing to be cleaned out from under the bed.

The bathroom, which opened out from it, had a gold disc hung on the wall in front of the lavatory, for sales of five hundred thousand copies of a record called Hot Potato by a band called Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo. Dirk had a vague recollection of having read part of an interview with the leader of the band (there were only two of them, and one of them was the leader) in a Sunday paper. He had been asked about their name, and he had said that there was an interesting story about it, though it turned out not to be. "It can mean whatever people want-it to mean," he had added with a shrug from the sofa of his manager's office somewhere off Oxford Street.

Dirk remembered visualising the journalist nodding politely and writing this down. A vile knot had formed in Dirk's stomach which he had eventually softened with gin.

"Hot Potato... " thought Dirk. It suddenly occurred to him looking at the gold disc hanging in its red frame, that the record on which the late Mr Anstey's head had been perched was obviously this one. Hot Potato. Don't pick it up.

What could that mean?

Whatever people wanted it to mean, Dirk thought with bed grace.

The other thing that he remembered now about the interview was that Pain (the leader of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo was called Pain) claimed to have written the lyrics down more or less verbatim from a conversation which he or somebody had overheard in a cafe or a sauna or an aeroplane or something like that. Dirk wondered how the originators of the conversation would feel to hear their words being repeated in the circumstances in which he had just heard them.

He peered more closely at the label in the centre of the gold record. At the top of the label it said simply, "ARRGH!", while underneath the actual title were the writers' credits - "Paignton, Mulville, Anstey".

Mulville was presumably the member of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo who wasn't the leader. And Geoff Anstey's inclusion on the writing credits of a major-selling single was probably what had paid for this house. When Anstey had talked about the contract having something to do with Potato he had assumed that Dirk knew what he meant. And he, Dirk, had as easily assumed that Anstey was blithering. lt was very easy to assume that someone who was talking about green-eyed monsters with scythes was also blithering when he talked about potatoes.

Dirk sighed to himself with deep uneasiness. He took a dislike to the neat way the trophy was hanging on the wall and adjusted it a little so that it hung at a more humane and untidy angle. Doing this caused an envelope to fall out from behind the frame and flutter towards the floor. Dirk tried unsuccessfully to catch it. With an unfit grunt he bent over and picked the thing up.

It was a largish, cream envelope of rich, heavy paper, roughly slit open at one end, and resealed with Sellotape. In fact it looked as if it had been opened and resealed with fresh layers of tape many times, an impression