'Humph,' said Sally. 'What's in the envelope?' She still wouldn't give him the knife.
'The envelope is not yours,' proclaimed Dirk, 'and its contents are not your concern.'
'It looks very interesting though. What's in it?'
'Well, I won't know till I've opened it!'
She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope from him.
'I insist that you - ' expostulated Dirk, incompletely.
'What's your name?' demanded Sally.
'My name is Gently. Mr Dirk Gently.'
'And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that have been crossed out?' She frowned, briefly, looking at them.
'No,' said Dirk. 'Certainly not.'
'So you mean the envelope is not yours either?'
'I - that is - '
'Aha! So you are also being extremely... what was it?'
'Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis.'
'How sad. I think it's much more fun being inquisitive and presumptuous as a hobby. So you are a professional while I am merely an amateur of Olympic standard. You don't look like a private detective.'
'No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection.'
'But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there.'
'Yes, but it's not one that keeps me awake at nights,' said Dirk in exasperation. 'Anyway, I am not as other private detectives. My methods are holistic and, in a very proper sense of the word, chaotic. I operate by investigating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.'
Sally Mills merely blinked at him.
'Every particle in the universe,' continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, 'affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table-leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don't, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can't.'
He paused, and said, 'Please will you let me have the envelope and the knife?'
'You make it sound as if someone's life depends on it.'
Dirk dropped his eyes for a moment.
'I rather think somebody's life did depend on it,' he said. He said it in such a way that a cloud seemed to pass briefly over them.
Sally Mills relented and passed the envelope and the knife over to Dirk. A spark seemed to go out of her.
The knife was too blunt and the Sellotape too thickly applied. Dirk struggled with it for a few seconds but was unable to slice through it. He sat back in his seat feeling tired and irritable.
He said, 'I'll go and ask them if they've got anything sharper,' and stood up, clutching the envelope.
'You should go and get your nose fixed,' said Sally Mills quietly.
`'Thank you,' said Dirk and bowed very slightly to her.
He picked up the bills and set out to visit the exhibition of waiters mounted at the rear of the cafe. He encountered a certain coolness when he was disinclined to augment the mandatory 15 per cent service charge with any voluntary additional token of his personal appreciation, and was told that no, that was the only type of knife they had and that's all there was to it.
Dirk thanked them and walked back through the caf.
Sitting in his seat talking to Sally Mills was the young man whose knife she had purloined. He nodded to her, but she was deeply engrossed in conversation with her new friend and did not notice.
'...in a coma,' she was saying, 'who had to be moved to a private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. Excuse me rabbiting on, but the patient had his own personal Coca-Cola machine and sledge-hammer with him, and that sort of thing is.all very well in a private hospital, but on a shortstaffed NHS ward it just makes me tired, and I talk too much when I'm tired. If I suddenly fall insensible to the floor, would you let me know?'
Dirk walked on, and then noticed that Sally Mills had left the book she had been reading on her original table, and something about it caught his attention.
It was a large book, called Run Like the Devil. In fact it was extremely large and a little dog-eared, looking more like a puff pastry cliff than a book. The bottom half of the cover featured the normal woman-in-cocktail-dress- framed-in-the-sights-of-a-gun, while the top half was entirely taken up with the author's name, Howard Bell,
