In a moment I said, 'It'll pass.'

He said quietly, 'Not with you, it won't. Not so soon.'

'Take a bit of time, yes. There's no hurry.'

Most of the really shitty situations in life don't have an immediate answer; they have to work themselves out. The problem with this one was that they were absolutely, right, Tilney and Holmes: nobody could have stopped McCane getting killed last night, given the set up obtaining. But in a bleak shadowed corner of my mind the excoriating monologue kept up its whispering… He asked you to protect him, and what happened? He was killed.

'What bothers me,' Holmes said, 'a bit, is that Tilney says you're suddenly very keen to see Mr Shatner. I don't like that. I don't like that at all.' Watching me steadily.

He'd made the quantum leap, and it jarred me, because Shatner might do the same, and refuse me the mission. My only chance was that Holmes knew me very well and was exceptionally sensitive, even intuitive, whereas I'd never seen much of Shatner: we were almost strangers. He might not see what I was after.

'Would you like a nice buttered bun, old horse?' 'You go ahead,' I said. Even if I could have eaten anything, the buns in here were like bits off a boulder, and for butter read margarine.

'I don't think I will.' He stirred the scum on the surface of his tea. 'On the other hand, if you can get away with it, I realise a thing like that would deal with quite a lot of the angst going on in your soul, and that of course would please me. The eye-for-an-eye principle really does do the job, despite the fact that in my opinion it's morally indefensible. But then again, you're not passionately concerned with my opinion on the moral indefensibility of anything in the world, are you?'