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day-before’s customers, who arrived to collect their overnight-cooled souvenirs. To my own astonishment two of my assistants turned up, even though bleary-eyed, saying they couldn’t leave me to pack the whole delivery job alone; so it was with speed and good humor that my new century began. I looked back later at the peace of that brief morning with a feeling of unreality that life could ever have been so safe and simple.
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    Pamela Jane, twittery, anxious, stick-thin and wanly pretty, insisted on driving me to Bon-Bon’s place herself, leaving me in the driveway there and departing with a wave, hurrying back to the shop, as she’d left Irish alone there.
    Martin and Bon-Bon had agreed at least on their house, an eighteenth-century gem that Marigold had helped them buy. I admired it every time I went there.
    A small van stood on the gravel, dark blue with a commercial name painted on it in yellow: THOMPSON ELECTRONICS. I supposed it was because I’d been working myself that I didn’t immediately remember that that day was a national holiday; definitely a moratorium for television repair vans.
    Chaos was too weak a word to describe what I found inside Martin’s house. For a start, the front door was visibly ajar and, when I touched it, it swung wide, although it was only the kitchen door the family left hospitably unlocked, both for friends and for visiting tradesmen.
    Beginning to feel a slight unease, I stepped through the heavily carved front doorway and shouted, but without response, and a pace or two later I learned why I had misgivings.
    Bon-Bon’s mother, Marigold, frothy gray hair and floaty purple dress in disarray as usual, lay unconscious on the stairs. Worthington, her eccentric chauffeur, sprawled like a drugged medieval guard dog at her feet.
    The four children, out of sight, were uncannily quiet, and the door to Martin’s room, his den, was closed on silence.
    I opened this door immediately and found Bon-Bon there, lying full-length on the wood block floor. Again, as with Lloyd Baxter, I knelt to feel for a pulse in the neck, but this time with sharp anxiety; and I felt the living ga-bump ga-bump with a deeper relief. Concentrating on Bon-Bon, I saw too late in peripheral sight a movement behind my right shoulder ... a dark figure speeding from where he’d been hiding behind the door.
    I jerked halfway to standing but wasn’t quick enough on my feet. There was a short second in which I glimpsed a small metal gas cylinder—more or less like a quarter-sized fire extinguisher. But this cylinder wasn’t red. It was orange. It hit my head. Martin’s den turned gray, dark gray, and black. A deep well of nothing.
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    I returned slowly to a gallery of watchers. To a row of eyes dizzily in front of my own. I couldn’t think where I was or what was happening. It had to be bad, though, because the children’s eyes looked huge with fright.
    I was lying on my back. Into the blank spaces of memory slowly crept the picture of an orange gas cylinder in the hands of a figure in a black head mask with holes cut out for eyes.
    As a return to awareness grew clearer I focused on Bon-Bon’s face and tried to stand up. Bon-Bon, seeing this minor revival, said with great relief, “Thank God you’re all right. We’ve all been gassed and we’ve all been sick since we woke up. Totter to the loo next door, there’s a chum. Don’t throw up in here.”
    I had a headache, not nausea. My head had collided with the outside of a metal gas cylinder, not with the contents. I felt too lethargic to explain the difference.
    Worthington, notwithstanding the muscular physique he painstakingly developed by regular visits to a punch-bag gym, looked pale and shaky and far from well. He held each of the two youngest children by the hand, though, giving them what comfort and confidence he could. In their eyes he could do everything, and they were nearly