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gets into gear. Ashworth could do us a moderate amount of damage. I want you to get her off our necks.’
    While he was making threatening noises, I was thinking. Laura Ashworth was an emotional woman. She thought reasonably clearly until her adrenalin started flowing. There were ways of getting it flowing again which could guarantee she never wrote her article.
    â€˜I don’t see why we should have to trouble the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, Zak. You have trouble with the Howe twins and you have trouble with Ashworth. Why not put the two sides together and see if the problems don’t iron themselves out? I suggest you entice Ashworth on to your payroll and despatch her forthwith to Humbleden. She will not be able to resist the chance of reliving some of her former glories.’
    That was how it worked out. Ashworth accepted Zak’s offer. Whatever her intentions were about discovering ‘the truth’ about Humbleden – which she knew from Chris Dervish’s time – may never be revealed. A friend of mine wrote a letter to the editor of
Sense and Society
asking him if he knew that one of his female contributors had taken up employment with a right-wing organization with considerable interests in the Bedderwick Development Corporation, whose exploitation of black labour in Africa and Sri Lanka was well known. Miss Ashworth’s connection with that journal was speedily terminated.
    In Laura Ashworth’s background lay an involved story which I have no intention of relating here. Suffice it to say that she was the only daughter of a Church of England clergyman who later abandoned the cloth, and that she had no real place in society. She was one of those drifters our age so characteristically throws up. Equally characteristically, she gravitated towards the pop world – one of those homes for drifters where the inmates have taken over the asylum.
    At one time, Laura Ashworth had held a post in a Department of Abnormal Psychology in a northern polytechnic, after which she had qualified as a prison probationer attached to an open prison – another home for society’s drifters. Whilst at the prison, she had encountered Chris Dervish, who was there serving a sentence for drug smuggling a considerable quantity of heroin from Bahrain.
    It was at this stage of her life that Ashworth got herself divorced from her college professor husband, one Charlie Rickards, reverted to her maiden name, and devoted herself to Dervish. When Dervish emerged from prison – and of course his stretch in the nick merely enhanced the glamour of his image with his particular public – he reformed the Noise and went on two extravagantly successful tours of the States and Scandinavia. Ashworth went with him. As her enemies liked to point out, Ashworth was almost exactly twice Dervish’s age. But she had stamina. She survived Los Angeles and Stockholm and all the godless cities in between, and lived to return with him to the relative peace of Humbleden when the tours were over. I was always mystified as to how she avoided finishing up in Datchet Reservoir with him.
    Some claimed that Ashworth’s influence on Dervish had a stabilizing effect, others that it was she who drove him to take his life. Nick Sidney informed me that she had a disruptive effect on the Noise as a group, by which I took him to mean merely that she was par-ticular with whom she slept. Be all that as it may, and it is pointless to bring charges where evidence is incomplete, Dervish was a psy-chotic from the word go. For all his ranting before the microphones, in private he was an inadequate little wet. Which made Datchet Reservoir a not unsuitable terminus for his existence, whether or not Ashworth was involved.
    How the members of the group would take to her reappearance, I had no means of judging. That was not my problem. The vital thing at this juncture was that she should not raise any adverse publicity concerning the