going to believe you. Mr Piper is the most peaceful non-violent citizen around these parts.'
'Well, he may be around these parts,' said Frensic, 'but from where I'm sitting in London...'
'You ain't sitting in London now,' said Baby, 'you're sitting right here in my chambers and shaking like a hound dog pissing peach pits.'
Frensic considered the simile and found it disagreeable. 'You'd be shaking if you'd just been accused of having a spare tyre filled with heroin,' he said.
Baby nodded. 'You could be right at that,' she said. 'I can give you life for that. Throw in the threats and menaces, the firearm and the blackmail and it could all add up to life plus ninety-nine years. You had better consider that before you say anything more.'
Frensic considered it and found he was shaking even harder. Hound dogs having problems with peach pits were no comparison. 'You can't mean it,' he gasped.
Baby smiled. 'You'd better believe I mean it. The warden of the penitentiary's a deacon in my church. You wouldn't have to do the ninety-nine years. Like life would be three months and you wouldn't last in the chain gang. They got snakes and things to make it natural death. You've seen our little cemetery?'
Frensic nodded. 'So we've got a little plot marked out already,' said Baby. 'It wouldn't have no headstone. No name like Frensic. Just a little mound and nobody would ever know. So that's your choice.'
'What is?' said Frensic when he could find his voice.
'Like life plus ninety-nine or you do what I tell you.'
'I think I'll do what you tell me,' said Frensic for whom this was no choice at all.
'Right,' said Baby, 'so first you make a full confession.'
'Confession?' said Frensic. 'What sort of confession?'
'Just that you wrote Pause O Men for the Virgin and palmed it off on Mr Piper and hoodwinked Hutch and instigated Miss Futtle to arsonize the house and '
'No,' cried Frensic, 'never. I'd rather...' He stopped. He wouldn't rather. There was a look on Baby's face that told him that. 'I don't see why I've got to confess to all those things,' he said.
Baby relaxed. 'You took his good name away from him. Now you're going to give it back to him.'
'His good name?' said Frensic.
'By putting it on the cover of that dirty novel,' said Baby.
'He didn't have any sort of name till we did that,' said Frensic, 'he had never published anything and now he's so-called dead he isn't going to.'
'Oh yes, he is,' said Baby leaning forward. 'You're going to give him your name. Like Search for a Lost Childhood by Frederick Frensic.'
Frensic stared at her. The woman was mad as a March hare. 'Search by me?' he said. 'You don't understand. I've hawked that blasted book round every publisher in London and no one wants to know. It's unreadable.'
Baby smiled. Unpleasantly.
'That's your problem. You're going to get it published and you're going to get all his future books published under your own name. It's that or the chain gang.'
She glanced significantly out of the window at the horizon of trees and the empty sky and Frensic following her glance gazed into a terrible future and an early death. He'd have to humour her. 'All right,' he said, 'I'll do my best.'
'You'll do better than that. You'll do exactly what I say.' She took a sheet of paper from a drawer and handed him a pen. 'Now write,' she said.
Frensic hitched his chair forward and began to write very shakily. By the time he had finished
