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pretty well on duckboards and on 2,000 calories a day has become uncommonly fashionable. People disappear for years on end, and nobody bothers about them. Or so I gathered. And loners tend to be loners in the domestic sense as well. He travels the fastest who travels alone, and so forth. No waiting wife or weeping kids.’ Budgery said this with a snap suggesting that, despite his sociable airs, he was a lonely man himself. ‘But to proceed. Colin Buzfuz ended by running aground on a cannibal isle.’
    ‘Buzfuz,’ the judge said, ‘seems a less and less appropriate name for the fellow. But we are all agog. Did he suffer a further traumatic experience in a cooking pot?’
    ‘Not so far as his recollection went. The cannibals enjoyed many of the blessings of civilization – but not, it seems, that of wireless telegraphy. There was a trading post, manned by a Dutchman of a wholly non-flying order, and a vessel put in four times a year to pick up cargo. Lord knows what. Copra, would it be? Or perhaps just coconuts.’
    ‘Copra is coconuts, my dear Tim,’ Merryweather said tolerantly. ‘Do step on it. The hour grows late.’
    ‘Very well. Colin Buzfuz put in a perfectly agreeable three months on his island, marred only by that blankness of mind from time to time. Typee -stuff, one supposes. Dusky beauties. And not even a dose of the pox anywhere.’
    There was a faintly disapproving silence, which Budgery thought to dissipate with more brandy.
    ‘And then?’ the judge asked.
    ‘That’s the end of act one. Act two opens with Buzfuz simply having the Jabberwock patched up by his copper-skinned cobbers, and then off he set again. Whereupon the real horrors began. The chap had the very devil of a time. Eventually he arrived, safe but far from sound, in our extremely dismal Outer Harbour. You remember what is first to greet one? A hoarding announcing that some soap or other is guaranteed under the pure food act. The land of the sapophagi, one might say.’ Budgery paused on what was evidently a favourite joke. ‘But at least he was an object of considerable curiosity. Even our excellent Governor came down to the hospital to have a chat with him. Unfortunately he was in a coma at the time. Buzfuz, I mean, not the Governor. My God, how we fought for the life of that much travelled Odysseus!’
    ‘Well, we pulled him through – and filled our notebooks meanwhile. He really was of interest. You see – and here’s the really weird thing – he wasn’t at all sure which brother he was.’
    There was another silence – decidedly an impressed silence, this time. Adelaide’s professor of clinical medicine had clearly reached the denouement of his narrative. It was difficult to see that anything more could follow.
    ‘Unique in the literature?’ Appleby asked respectfully.
    ‘Oh, absolutely. We raked through everything we could lay our hands on. No trace of such a bizarre disorder anywhere on the record. In a general way, I suppose, it was classified within the area of disassociation of the personality. But none of the mad doctors – and the world is full of them nowadays, God knows – had ever run up against this particular quirk before. Here was a man claiming – quite confidently, and as soon as he was in a state to claim anything at all – to be Adam Buzfuz, the younger of two brothers who had set out from England on a crackpot voyage in the Jabberwock donkeys’ ages ago. The yacht was his brother’s property, he explained, and his brother’s name was Colin. He had been simply crewing for Colin, as he’d done once or twice before. He rather suggested, at the same time, that he knew a good deal more about the sea than Colin did.
    ‘Not unnaturally, we started off by accepting all this as gospel. It tallied with the ship’s papers, and with the logbook Colin Buzfuz had kept almost to the moment of that mast’s coming down in a storm and killing him. After that, there was every appearance of Adam’s having