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many questions and fouling up too many times, they strike out on their own, setting up their own agency and taking some of your clients with them, promising a cheaper deal and more (ha!) care. But what the hell, Philo had left school at seventeen with seven GCSEs and two A levels and had vainly been searching for work for two-and-a-half years before turning up on my doorstep. Yep, I felt sorry for him. A little ashamed too, because I knew the fact that he was black - a light brown tone actually - hadn’t helped him in the job market. Besides, I needed an extra hand - the workload was good at that time - and he was willing to accept low wages. Almost twenty, he was a good-looking kid whose grandparents had arrived in Southampton shortly after the Second World War, when the country was in desperate need of young, manual labourers. They’d done their bit, and so had their offspring son, who eventually had married a Greek girl; now Philo, English bred and born - as English as his surname might suggest, in fact - wanted to do his bit, if only that residual prejudice, rump of a sorry past but still rampant in certain low quarters, would so allow. Philo hadn’t sought work to prove himself worthy as an Englishman; no, he’d never suffered from that foolish kind of race-paranoia. He simply wanted to work because that was the normal thing to do. Besides, he was ambitious.
    Philo dressed smartly, despite his meagre earnings, and he looked good. Even Henry was impressed by his keenness, and working together, Henry, Ida and Philo, well, they made a good team.
    So that just leaves me, Nicholas Dismas.
    I was found, thirty-two years ago, among the dustbins behind a nuns’ convent in a poorer part of London. Found by the convent’s caretaker/handyman when he took out the trash early one cold winter’s morning. God knows what he thought of the misshapen little gnome lying there among the bins, barely a few hours old and not even wrapped in a blanket but swaddled in yesterday’s newspaper, although without doubt it must have given him one hell of a shock. Perhaps he even crossed himself, while muttering a prayer and wondering what demon had had the temerity to leave its hideous spawn on holy ground.
    I was born a monster, you see.
    I’m not shamed by the term, nor embarrassed. Saddened, of course. Made desperately bloody miserable by it. But that’s the way it goes. It’s what I am in most people’s terms.
    Doctors told me in later life that my physical condition was probably due to birth trauma. I’m not diseased at all, there was never any sign of spina bifida or any form of deficiency: I was just bon| malformed. And as I grew older, the deformities augmented, became more defined and ever more distorted. The infant monster ripened into a grotesque.
    My forehead overlapped my eyes, a Neanderthal protuberance that frightened children and dogs; my jaw grew more pointed, my mouth more leering, lips more twisted. The curve of my spine increased and veered to the right so that my shoulder was huge, the blade amalgamating with the hump of my back. I crouched further and further forward until crooked was my normal walking, sitting, resting stance, and my right leg was slightly - oh thank You God, only slightly - withered, so that I walked with a hobbling lurch. Even my chest was disfigured, breastbone and upper ribs on one side overlapping their neighbours, and hair spread down my back to form a tail between my buttocks, one that I kept shorn regularly, a DIY job because I’d have hated for anyone else to see my naked body.
    Would the hair on my head were that thick, but no, His torment - did I thank God a moment ago, albeit ironically? -was far too comprehensive to allow such favour; it hung in loose drab strands over my scalp and forehead, the bushi-ness of my eyebrows mocking its very sparsity. My ears, too large even for this large cranium, looked as though they’d been chewed by a couple of unfriendly Rottweilers.
    But there was