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two o'clock in the morning, I got up and made sure my door was locked. I checked the windows were securely bolted, too.

    I tried to think what the five girls might have in common quite apart from me. It was hopeless: they were from different regions of the country and they studied a range of subjects. This one's father was a Harley Street doctor while this one's was a coal miner. This one didn't like sex much at all while another one had an alarming enthusiasm for being tied to the bed and vigorously spanked. I couldn't see any shared ground at all.

    That's how the night was spent: It was a coincidence. It wasn't a coincidence. It was a coincidence. It wasn't.

    I was fairly certain one of my fellow students in the Lodge was behind it all, though I didn't immediately suspect Fraser. Door security was pretty tight after one or two thefts, so whoever was using the attic had to have access to the Lodge, and would also have to have spent some considerable time there to discover the panel by the attic door.

    There were twenty-two students in residence.

    It was easy to eliminate a few cheerful friendly guys who didn't seem to want much from life besides beer, burgers and Saturday mornings spent swinging a leg at a leather football. Then there were the hard-line politicos on the ground floor, a little group of nervy Marxists who cloned themselves in dungarees and soup-kitchen haircuts: their only menu was dialectical materialism and a proposed ban on all forms of humour. It just wasn't their style to bugger about with a goat.

    There was a deeply Christian cohort of four well-scrubbed lads; though I didn't discount them entirely because Christians are weird and so easily slip to their opposite master. I looked at them all closely but I couldn't see it. A few others in the Lodge were just too plain thick and unscholarly to immerse themselves in Hebrew sigils, so I ruled them out, too.

    All this left me with three possibles—and out of these, one probable—but from there I couldn't make progress short of confronting each of the three directly. So in order to help me flush out the would-be diabolic magician I sought the help of the poison dwarf in his cave of gloom.

    "Hi," I said genially. "I have to store some equipment in the attic at Friarsfield. Could I get it open?"

    The porter's polluted cubbyhole was located under the stairs leading down from the college administrative corridors. I stood at the open door. The Alsatian lying under the porter's desk had his head between his paws, but its ears were pricked up and it looked at me nastily with its one good eye.

    The porter didn't even look up at me from his red-top newspaper. Sucking passionately on his billowing pipe he said, "Can't you leave it in the drying room?"

    "Not really. One or two things have gone missing lately."

    "What is it?"

    "Just a box of stuff."

    "I'll come tomorrow afternoon. Leave it outside the attic door for me."

    "I won't be around tomorrow afternoon."

    "Thursday then."

    "Won't be around Thursday either, I'm afraid. And I don't want to leave it in the corridor. Sorry."

    His yellow teeth clacked in irritation on his pipe stem. He put down his paper and surveyed me for the first time, blinking at me, but without offering a solution.

    "Tell you what," I said. "I don't want to disturb you. Give me the key and I'll bring it right back to you."

    "Ha!" he said, rising to his feet. The dog raised its head, hopeful, looking at its master. "Not on your nelly, son! Come on, dog could do with a walk."

    I shrugged. The excitable dog was up and ready, its leather leash already in its drooling mouth like a postman's finger.

    The tiny porter took an age to slip on his coat. He munched on his briar stem again, whipped the pipe out of his mouth and said to me once more, rather unnecessarily, "Not on your very very nelly."

    I'm still not sure what a nelly is, but having accomplished my purpose I didn't say anything. Together we marched along to the Lodge. I