Still, you don’t know everything. Crouch End is strange. You ought to have a peek in the back file sometime, Farnham. Oh, a lot of it’s the usual… girls and boys run away from home to be hippies or punks or whatever it is they call themselves now… husbands gone missing (and when you clap an eye to their wives you can most times understand why)… unsolved arsons… purse-snatchings… all of that. But in between, there’s enough stories to curdle your blood. And some to make you sick to your stomach.’

‘True word?’

Vetter nodded. ‘Some of em very like the one that poor American girl just told us. She’ll not see her husband again – take my word for it.’ He looked at Farnham and shrugged. ‘Believe me, believe me not. It’s all one, isn’t it? The file’s there. We call it the open file because it’s more polite than the back file or the kiss-my-arse file. Study it up, Farnham. Study it up.’ Farnham said nothing, but he actually did intend to ‘study it up.’ The idea that there might be a whole series of stories such as the one the American woman had told… that was disturbing. ‘Sometimes,’ Vetter said, stealing another of Farnham’s Silk Cuts, ‘I wonder about Dimensions.’

‘Dimensions?’

‘Yes, my good old son – dimensions. Science fiction writers are always on about Dimensions, aren’t they? Ever read science fiction, Farnham?’

‘No,’ Farnham said. He had decided this was some sort of elaborate leg-pull.

‘What about Lovecraft? Ever read anything by him?’

‘Never heard of him,’ Farnham said. The last fiction he’d read for pleasure, in fact, had been a small Victorian Era pastiche called Two Gentlemen in Silk Knickers. ‘Well, this fellow Lovecraft was always writing about Dimensions,’ Vetter said, producing his box of railway matches. ‘Dimensions close to ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would drive a man mad at one look.