"I love my new nose" beamed Francois Devine as he held the mucus-filled object above his head in triumph.

"It’s tacky" I muttered petulantly.

"On the contrary – the mucus is extremely well formed and is very pleasant to the touch. Not that you will ever be touching it as I shall put it behind bullet proof glass before the hour is out."

"Do it now" I snapped. "Do it immediately."

"Can’t I have a little more boasting time first?" he pleaded.

"No – seal this tawdry trinket in the prescribed manner and get out of my house."

"Gasp" said Francois Devine.

"I mean it – leave Brent Towers immediately and don’t come back until I’ve calmed down."

"How will I know whether you’ve calmed down?"

"It will be obvious from my general demeanour."

"But I won’t be able to observe and judge your general demeanour because I’ll be in exile."

"Then you’ll have to keep popping back to check my demeanour. I warn you – this isn’t like the time you gazumped me over Fraser Hines’s dirk or mislead me for your own purposes when Anneke Wills’s face flannel was up for auction. This is the final straw on top of a most trying day. I am sorely vexed and will be in no mood for a reconciliation for some time to come."

"I suppose we could share custody of the nose" mumbled Francois Devine.

"I want nothing more to do with that nose. It is an ugly thing and I wouldn’t give it room in my collection."

"It’s a beautiful nose" protested the funny little man (who was still there even though we’d both forgotten about him). "I picked it myself."

"For that remark you too can leave immediately" I told him. "This is no time for jokes."

I pointed firmly to the hole and ushered him out. I then wrote the nose-picking joke down on my pad for later use. Perhaps I would use the quip during Francois Devine’s public unveiling of the nose and steal his thunder. Yes, that’s what I’ll probably do.

Banishing Francois Devine had an important down side – it left me once more entirely on my own. I tried calling them both back so I could at least visit the facilities in safety but both were long gone.

"I’m constantly amazed by the way you can always make me that little bit more ashamed of you" said Uncle Gaylord as I paced about the room on guard duty.

"It’s not my fault my associates have no character" I told him. "Besides, it’s your fault I lost the auction and if I hadn’t lost the auction I wouldn’t have banished Francois Devine and sent the funny little man away with a flea in his ear.

"How is it my fault?" asked Uncle Gaylord who, being a figment of my imagination, had no excuse for feigned deafness.

"You introduced me to Francois Devine. You invited him round to Brent Towers for playtime when we were two years old. He broke my fort and while I was blubbing he re-ordered my toy soldiers from alphabetical to chronological. You only wanted me to play with him because his Uncle Benton was next in line to be secretary of the golf club."

"Don’t mention the name Benton Devine in my house" roared Uncle Gaylord. "That man was a woman or might as well have been given his deficiencies. He got me banned. Banned. Me. Got. Don’t mention him to me. I ought to have horse whipped him when I had the chance."

"When did you have the chance to horse whip Francois Devine’s Uncle Benton?" I asked, hoping I wouldn’t be sickened by the answer.

"I forget. It was quite innocent. His belt just snapped. It was made in France or somewhere. It looked worse than it was. Sixpence a week it cost me when the blackmail man found out. All above board. It saves on washing expenses if you don’t necessarily wear trousers all the time. And then the springs broke while we were listening to the plumbing and his arms got tangled in some chord which had been left hanging from the ceiling because the previous occupant of the room had tried to kill himself."

"A similar thing happened to Francois Devine and I when we became trapped in a sleeping bag after hiding from a wasp in the airing cupboard and the dampness caused several zips to malfunction at exactly the same time."

"Yes" we agreed, implicitly cursing the others perfectly understandable and damnable bad luck.

Every time I looked at the hole it seemed to get darker. The sight of my garden became the shapes of my garden, which became the silvery impressions of the shapes of my garden and then the final blackness. I stared at my hole and saw nothing at all. A void. An absence. It was as if Brent Towers had been scooped up and dumped in outer space but without either the stars to look at or a fascinating monograph to be written about the practical differences between Kirby wires and genuine zero gravity. The last time I’d seen anything so black and empty was when I looked into ‘Smasher’s’ eyes and saw his soul. I buttoned up my tweed jacked at the breeze had become icy and sharp.

An owl hooted in the blackness but I couldn’t see even enough to take a pot shot at it. Besides, my rifle was in the weapons cabinet and that was in the hall. All I had for company were books. How was I going to pass the next few hours with nothing but one thousand six hundred and ninety eight books? I tried piling them up by the entrance to my hole as an early warning system of any intrusion but I hadn’t even reached the door before the top few books were stolen by an unseen figure in the darkness. One of them was "Camera Tracks of the 1970s – a Critical History of Moving Cameras Along Fixed Paths" by Dennis Brent and I was sorry to lose a rare autographed edition. I peered into the darkness in the hope of spotting the culprit.

"Ow" I cursed when a book hit me in the face. The thief at least had some moral fibre – he’d recognised the significance of "Camera Tracks of the 1970s – a Critical History of Moving Cameras Along Fixed Paths" and returned it to its owner.

Then there was silence.