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I feel like death.”
    Tremaine smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He turned as he got to the door and said, “If there’s anything you want, just yell out.”
    Saracen nodded.
     
    By late afternoon Saracen felt a whole lot better, so much so in fact that he signed himself out of the ward at four thirty, assuring Sister Ellis that he was now perfectly all right. The speed of his recovery had surprised even him but reinforced his view that he had been subject to some mild form of poisoning. When the substance had cleared from his system he had immediately begun to feel better, just as if he had been suffering from an alcoholic hangover. Now, all that was wrong with him was a sore head and not out of keeping with the minor knock that Tremaine had declared him to have taken.
    Saracen had to walk round to the back of the hospital to collect his car which was still where the Gate Porter had left it the previous night. He was trying to remember what he had done with the keys when he came to the mortuary doors and paused for a moment to take comfort in the fact that everything looked normal again. There were no strange vans, no men in hoods and black visors and the door was securely locked. He examined the padlock and wondered for a moment about the door lock when a sudden whiff of ammonia filled his nostrils and made him reel back from the doors. “What on earth?” he exclaimed but the smell had already gone.
    It was over so quickly that Saracen began to wonder if the smell had ever really been there at all for now there was no trace of it. On the other hand a breeze had sprung up with the stopping of the rain and that could just as easily have taken away the gas. He approached the doors again and sniffed. Nothing. It must have been his imagination, some trick of his olefactory system, still upset after the events of the night before.
    Saracen shrugged and turned. He now remembered having dropped his keys beside the car in the darkness and went to look for them. Finding them in daylight presented no great problem and he was back at his flat within fifteen minutes, pouring himself a large whisky.
    Saracen took a gulp before placing a Vivaldi album on the stereo and adjusting the volume before sitting down and picking up the local paper. The big news, as it had been for the past three weeks, was concerned with predictions of Skelmore’s success in attracting the giant Japanese company, Otsuji Electronics to the area. True, the final agreement had not yet been signed and there were other towns competing for the factory, notably in Scotland and the industrial North-East, but all the signs were that Skelmore was the favourite and it was all over bar the shouting. There was, in fact, nothing new at all in the newspaper story but, in this case, Saracen found the euphoric repetition excusable for this was more than just an industrial story; it was something that meant life for the whole area.
    In the time that Saracen had been in Skelmore he had seen the industrial heart ripped out of the town. The giant steel works of Lever Hanah had closed, the iron foundry had gone and the local colliery had been declared no longer economically viable, and shut down after a bitter strike.
    The economic depression had cast a great shadow across the area and it showed in the streets where boarded up shops and For Sale signs sprouted like weeds reclaiming the earth; it showed in the faces of the people in whom hope had been destroyed. A greyness and a passive submission to the yoke of hard times had replaced the air of cheerful optimism that had once been the hallmark of the town. Crime had risen, particularly cases of violent crime where larceny might have been the crime predicted to increase most. It seemed that people at the end of their tether ran on an extremely short fuse. Minor irritations became major bones of contention in a town without a future.
    But then came the news of Otsuji and the prediction of not only five hundred jobs from the