Frightful rubbish, of course. Except, whenever one of these people straggles in, I wonder if all of it was rubbish. I think to myself then – when it’s quiet and late at night, like now – that our whole world, everything we think of as nice and normal and sane, might be like a big leather ball filled with air. Only in some places, the leather’s scuffed almost down to nothing. Places where the barriers are thinner. Do you get me?’ ‘Yes,’ Farnham said, and thought: Maybe you ought to give me a kiss, Vetter – I always fancy a kiss when I’m getting my doodle pulled.

‘And then I think, ‘Crouch End’s one of those thin places. Silly, but I do have those thoughts.

Too imaginative, I expect; my mother always said so, anyway.’

‘Did she indeed?’

‘Yes. Do you know what else I think?’

‘No, sir – not a clue.’

‘Highgate’s mostly all right, that’s what I think – it’s just as thick as you’d want between us and the Dimensions in Muswell Hill and Highgate. But now you take Archway and Finsbury Park. They border on Crouch End, too. I’ve got friends in both places, and they know of my interest in certain things that don’t seem to be any way rational. Certain crazy stories which have been told, we’ll say, by people with nothing to gain by making up crazy stories. ‘Did it occur to you to wonder, Farnham, why the woman would have told us the things she did if they weren’t true?’

‘Well…’

Vetter struck a match and looked at Farnham over it. ‘Pretty young woman, twenty-six, two kiddies back at her hotel, husband’s a young lawyer doing well in Milwaukee or someplace. What’s she to gain by coming in and spouting about the sort of things you only used to see in Hammer films?’

‘I don’t know,’ Farnham said stiffly. ‘But there may be an ex…’

‘So I say to myself’ – Vetter overrode him – ‘that if there are such things as ‘thin spots,’ this one would begin at Archway and Finsbury Park… but the very thinnest part is here at Crouch End. And I say to myself, wouldn’t it be a day if the last of the leather between us and what’s on the inside that ball just… rubbed away? Wouldn’t it be a day if even half of what that woman told us was true?’