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apparently it’s more or less true.’
    Winter looked up sharply. ‘Timmy Eliot, don’t talk nonsense.’
    ‘It’s not nonsense. It’s the point of the whole thing. This badgerer knows what only the real Spider could know.’
    ‘The real Spider?’
    ‘Oh, dear, I mean the real Spider – the one in the books.’
    Winter stirred uneasily in his chair. ‘You are sure’, he said, ‘that you are not a badgerer yourself, trying to pull my leg? Or that you haven’t been reading too hard?’
    The young man opposite stretched himself in feline luxury in his rowing kit. ‘Do I look’, he asked, ‘like a Grammarian’s Funeral? And I’m really quite serious. This person pretending to be the Spider knows what only the real Spider could know.’
    ‘Timmy, you’re saying something meaningless. What you call the real Spider isn’t a person with a brain and knowledge. He’s a number of black marks printed on paper. This person can’t know what only the Spider could know.’
    ‘Prosaically true. But he knows, daddy says, things that the Spider of the books thought of doing, and didn’t. In other words, he has a supernatural insight into daddy’s mind.’
    Another bus lumbered down the High and again the windows rattled as if in the clutch of an angry demon. Far away, muffled in the thickening air, a deep bell began to toll.
     
    ‘It started’, said Timmy, ‘in the long vac. With the perpetration of a very elaborate joke. The person chiefly concerned is a Mrs Birdwire, and first I must tell you about her.’
    ‘I seem to have heard of her. A traveller, isn’t she?’
    ‘Yes. Only you mustn’t call her that: she doesn’t like it. The explorer. Mrs Birdwire the celebrated explorer. She’s our nearest neighbour about a couple of miles off.’
    Winter raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know you were as isolated as that.’
    ‘Not our nearest local neighbour; our nearest county neighbour. Mrs Birdwire is the nearest polite society we have – she’s incredible vulgar, by the way – and Mrs Birdwire was burgled by the Spider. It was all very difficult. You see, daddy and she have never got on.’
    ‘Embarrasing.’
    ‘Quite so. Mrs Birdwire was burgled and a lot of beastly trophies and curios and things taken, and the Spider left his celebrated signature: a large Spider cut out of black velvet. He left it in Mrs Birdwire’s very own bath.’
    ‘He always does that?’
    Timmy blushed. ‘Rather foul rot, isn’t it? He used always to do something of the sort. Remember that the burglary was by the Spider of very long ago; he’s been doing nothing but detective stuff for years now. He had a bad throwback, so to speak, and burgled Mrs Birdwire. He also insulted her. You must know that there’s supposed to be a Mr Birdwire, though nobody has ever seen him. Mrs Birdwire’s formula is that he’s “cruelly tied to the city”, and there’s a joke to the effect that one day Mrs Birdwire may go exploring after him. Well, the Spider left a picture. It showed Mrs Birdwire in the fantastic tropical kit she’s photographed in, cutting her way through a jungle of telephones and typewriters to a little man who was sitting at a desk necking with a secretary. And underneath was written: “Mr Birdwire I presume?” Just like that.’
    Winter gave a loud unacademic guffaw. ‘Crude,’ he said, ‘unquestionably crude. But satisfactory nevertheless. Where was the picture?’
    ‘Mrs Birdwire has built herself a house in an awful style she calls Spanish Mission – all white walls and little bogus wrought-iron grills. The Spider chose the biggest, whitest wall he could find and did his drawing rather more than life size in red paint. It was a place of pilgrimage from miles around for days.’
    For a moment Winter closed his eyes as if the better to visualize this revolting manifesto. ‘Timmy,’ he said, ‘you fascinate me. But let me say that your linguistic habits are appalling. Consistently to refer to this joker as