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home. Groaning aloud, I squelched the last mile and was welcomed home with the most eloquent and forceful telling-off I’ve ever had the bad luck to get in the way of. Water off a duck’s back, of course: when you’re facing the prospect of thirty years in jail for murder, even a level six tongue-lashing from your Mum dwindles instantly into perspective. I kicked off my shoes, muttered something like, ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right,’ and pottled sadly away to have my last-ever bath with the door shut.
    But the night passed, and the following morning, and still the SWAT teams hadn’t come for me. I sat and watched my formerly green-slimed trousers whirling round and round in the tumble-dryer, each evolution purging my sin a little more; I cleaned and polished my shoes to the point where light fairly ricocheted off them; and while I was at it, the radio news and the TV news didn’t say a word about little men drowned in watering troughs. Eventually, on the third day (can you say unconscious symbolism?) I dredged up enough nerve to go and take a look.
    When I got there, the trough was completely empty. Not a trace of elf to be seen. A Happy Easter 2.0 to all our readers.
    As I stood in the mud staring into a tank of elfless green goo, I can honestly say I was more freaked out than ever before. A silly little voice in the back of my mind was saying, Maybe it was foxes, or badgers , but I didn’t dignify it by taking any notice. As far as I could make out, there were only three possible explanations, and that was destruct-testing the tensile strength of the word ‘possible’.
    â€“ either the little bugger had risen from the dead and climbed out; or
    â€“ he hadn’t been dead, only stunned; or
    â€“ someone had come along, fished him out and disposed of him tidily in the manner advocated on the sides of beer cans without seeing fit to mention a word of it to anybody.
    Yeah , I thought, right; and will passengers waiting to board the 12.41 British Airways flying pig to New York please have their travel documents ready for inspection? There was, of course, a fourth possibility, namely that there had been no accident, no elf and no death, nothing more to it than me slithering one notch closer to total insanity. For sure, that’d have to be where the smart money would go, because for starters there’re no such things as elves –
    Of course not. Everybody knew that.
    Everybody, that was, except me.
    I went home and sat looking out through the French windows at the garden, at the spot where the rose bushes obscured the view of the place where I’d once seen a little man with pointed ears smoking a roll-up. The garden was looking particularly neat and crisp that day, which I took for a nice bit of irony; the lawn tidily trimmed and edged, the flower beds as straight and precise as Pythagoras’s Greatest Hits. Then again, I reflected, when hadn’t it been thus? In winter, the bare earth was always impeccably groomed and levelled, in summer the grass was invariably immaculate, the flowers colour-coded, the vegetables smartly lined up on parade and presenting leaves—
    Which was odd.
    Which was bloody odd, since I’d never known Daddy George to get his hands dirty, Mummy was allergic to outdoors and we’d never had a gardener.

CHAPTER TWO
    T hat was a long, hard holiday, believe me.
    It has to be said that my view of Christmas is quite like those of the unregenerate Scrooge and fifty billion turkeys. It’s not so much about the crass materialism that I object to (fact is, the crass materialism is the best thing about Christmas, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise) as the depressing convention that, at a season of the year when it rains non-stop throughout the severely truncated hours of daylight, it’s somehow desirable for families to gather like condors around a dying llama and pretend to like each other. This notion would be