Perhaps those leather-bound sets were just there for show, their pages still uncut. Well, it would be a different story if I were living here. And I’d keep a decanter of good brandy on the table beside me. No, two decanters, a pair of those wide-bottomed ship’s decanters, one filled with brandy, one with a vintage port. There’d be room for them when I got rid of the cigarette dish. The ashtray could stay. I liked the size and style of it, and I might want to take up smoking a pipe. Pipes had always burned my tongue in the past, but perhaps as I worked my way through the wisdom of the ages, feet up on the hassock, book in hand, port and brandy within easy reach, a fire glowing on the hearth…

I spent a few minutes on the fantasy, figuring out a little more about the life I’d lead in Mr. Flaxford’s apartment. I suppose it’s silly and childish to do this and I know it wastes time. But I think it serves a purpose. It gets rid of some tension. I get wired very tight when I’m in someone else’s place. The fantasy makes the place my own home in a certain way, at least for the short time I’m inside it, and that seems to help. I’m not convinced that’s why I started doing it in the first place, or why I’ve continued.

The time I wasted couldn’t have amounted to very much, anyway, because I looked at my watch just before I put my gloves on to go to work and it was only seventeen minutes after nine. I use sheer skintight rubber gloves, the kind doctors wear, and I cut out circles on the palms and backs so my hands won’t perspire as much. As with other skintight rubber things, you don’t really lose all that much in the way of sensitivity and you make up for it in peace of mind.

The desk had two locks. One opened the rolltop and the other, in the top right-hand drawer, unlocked that drawer and all the others at once. I probably could have found the keys-most people stow desk keys very close to the desk itself-but it was faster and easier to open both locks with my own tools. I’ve never yet run into a desk lock that didn’t turn out to be candy.