It had just turned 3pm. When Benjamin Russell had got up this morning he hadn’t expected to be spending his afternoon on the estates south of the river. Such places he only read about. He remembered sitting on the tube on the way to campus recently, reading an article on the front page of Metro the person sitting opposite him was holding aloft. Apparently the armed gangs that preyed on the Northern line after dark had now expanded their targets to the Jubilee line too.

Russell didn’t know what he was doing here, but when the pathologist Miss King had asked him to join her examining the crime scene, he had not declined.

They were being led along one of the balconies that ran around the outside of each floor of the Indigo Chase buildings. In the lead was a junior detective - Russell hadn’t caught his name - wearing a long, khaki trench coat. It was wet, windy and cold and they had climbed the stairs and walked around two sides of the building and they still hadn’t seen anyone else. The detective set a brisk pace.

A thickset man came out of a door up ahead.

“That’s Marsh,” said the detective, with a perpendicular hand gesture.

Marsh spotted them from a distance, but didn’t come to meet them. He went up to the edge of the balcony, turned, put his hands on the concrete beam behind him and rested the sole of a foot flush against the lower part of the wall.

He looks like a cowboy, thought Russell.

Up closer, he looked more like a crook. He had a round head, but he wasn’t a fat man. His muscular frame swelled inside a worn black leather jacket. The top of his scalp had a mere buzz of dark hair, as did his strong jaw-line.

The junior detective seemed intimidated.

“Try and not piss him off,” he told them in a low voice. “Between the months of November and April, Detective Marsh will not want to be your friend.”

Miss King glanced at Russell. “Thanks for the warning.”

They arrived outside the open apartment.

“You two with the coroner’s office?” Marsh asked, finally stepping away from the edge-wall and blocking their way, pugilist’s hands on pugilist’s hips.

“I’m Indira King, with New Scotland Yard pathology department, yes, and this is Professor Benjamin Russell from King's College,” she began.

Marsh smirked. “Didn’t think you guys did field-work, Miss King.”

“I have warrant papers.” She reached into her bag.

Marsh waved his hand. “Are we here to look at a crime scene or look at a bunch of forms? Skip ‘em, and let’s get out of the fucking cold, all right?”

Benjamin Russell took an immediate liking to the guy.

“Your colleague told us you know who the victim is,” Miss King was saying as Russell followed her and Detective Marsh into the apartment. The junior detective didn’t follow them in; he closed the apartment door behind Russell.

“We’re not positive yet, but we have a good idea,” Marsh replied. He strolled toward the kitchen, his hands in his pockets, then turned round.

Miss King looked through the door on the left. She had explained to Russell that morning that the body remained unidentified because the police hadn’t found an identity card on him. Given that he had probably come to Indigo Chase to buy drugs, it wasn’t a great leap to imagine his wallet had been stolen.

“We found a car in the parking lot that isn’t registered to anybody living on the estate,” Marsh went on. “And door-to-door inquiries haven’t shone any light on who it belongs to. Of course, first we have to rule out that it hasn’t been stolen, but it doesn’t look like it. The owner himself hasn’t been seen in days, either.”

Russell proceeded along the hall. It was a sparse apartment, little in the way of possessions; not the abode of a materialistic person, he thought.

“What do you know about him?” Miss King said.

Marsh sniffed. “Name’s Toby Welsh, lived in the Hammersmith area. Until a year ago he worked in the City, was quite successful by all accounts, until he just quit one day. His sister lives in Barnet. I spoke to her on the phone. She said he had something of a drugs habit. But we’ve never had any trouble with him.”

“I see,” Miss King said. Russell caught up with her.

He peered into the dark room. He had smelt excreta from the moment the junior detective had shut them in. He saw the dark brown stain on the sofa. It had a gradient; was darker in the centre, and got lighter as it spread out.

“That’s where we found the body,” Marsh said.

Russell put his hand to his chin and hooked his forefinger over his top lip, hoping it looked like a contemplative gesture rather than a nauseous one.

“But forensics say he died in here.”

Marsh parted what was left of a bead curtain. Several of the strands had been broken and there were spilt beads on the kitchen floor beyond.

“So he was moved,” Miss King said.

“Obviously,” said Marsh.

Russell followed them into the tiny kitchen. There was barely enough room for the three of them to fit. He noticed blue circles had been drawn across the tiled walls, the cupboard doors and the faux linoleum floor with a wax pencil. Only when Marsh turned on the light did Russell realise they were encircling dried blood.

“He was standing where you are,” Marsh told him.

Russell looked down at the floor, where there were strips of red tape. Russell realised that Marsh wasn’t speaking generally and stepped aside.

“You can be that precise?” he said, his pitch higher than he’d hoped.

Marsh nodded. “Our boys are good.” He definitely sounded proud. “They can map out one-hundred-and-twenty-six separate blood spatters and then project within a couple of inches margin for error where the victim was standing.”

Mr Welsh must have been standing pretty close to his attacker, Russell realised; perhaps he was trying to defend himself, he thought.

“They can even tell which direction he was facing,” Marsh added. “These marks on the wall behind me, for example, are what they call ‘recoil’. It’s what gets sent flying when the attacker yanks his blade back out of you again.”

Miss King frowned. “So he was facing our way.”

“Yep. He was probably coming into the kitchen at the time, but we reckon he staggered back and pulled half those beads down as he collapsed.”

Russell and Miss King looked back into the hallway. In the light from the kitchen Russell spotted more - heavier - bloodstains, which had been almost invisible on the dark carpet. Their positions were marked with streaks of white chalk.

“Who’s your main suspect?” Miss King asked.

“The tenant,” said Marsh. “Obviously. If you look in here,” he went on, stepping around Miss King. Russell got out of his way, into the hallway. Marsh went through the door on the right. “We think some of his clothes are missing.”

Russell followed him into the bedroom. “He did a runner.”

“And stole the guy’s wallet, from the looks of things.” Marsh looked at him; not down at him, like he did Miss King. “He wouldn’t want me on his jury.”

Miss King was still in the kitchen. “Who phoned you?”

Marsh returned to the doorway. “What?”

“Who called you to let you know there’d been a murder here?”

“I don’t know. We got an anonymous tip-off.”

Miss King frowned. “Anonymous?”

“Yeah. Some guy in a public call-box about five miles from here. Didn’t give us a name, just told us there was a body, and where to find it.”

“A witness?” Russell wondered.

Marsh snorted. “A witness on the run is what we call a suspect, Professor.”

“I thought you said the tenant is your suspect,” Miss King said.

Marsh leant against the doorframe. “He is.”

“So you’re not ruling out the idea that he called you himself?”

Marsh paused. “I’m not ruling out anything.”

Miss King nodded. Her eyes were flitting about, Russell noticed, but it didn’t look like she was searching for something. She was frowning, pensive.

“Why would he do that, Detective?” Russell asked.

“What? Call in a dead body?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t that implicate him?”

“You bet it does.” He snorted. “Beats me why, if he’s guilty.”

“If he’s guilty,” Miss King repeated.

Marsh turned on her. “The innocent don’t run, Miss King.”

“And the guilty don’t report their crimes to the police.”

There was a long silence in which the pair of them just stared at each other across the threshold between the kitchen and bedroom.

“Can I take a closer look where you found the body?” she asked eventually.

“Sure. Go ahead.” Marsh’s voice was clipped and cold.

Russell pressed himself against the wall of the narrow hallway as Miss King breezed past, and Marsh followed her; the detective rolled his eyes at Russell.

Russell didn’t go into the lounge with them. He stayed looking into the kitchen, doing a little applied mathematics. Miss King’s theory about killer monsters seemed even less plausible than it had back in the Met lab. If she was right, and whatever was burnt on Mr Welsh’s eyeballs was what killed him, then it would have to have been big, the size of a man, for its elongated claw-like limbs to have done the damage. Yet the tiny image on the back of Mr Welsh’s retinas was of something small, or conversely, of something large, some distance away.

Hell, you don’t need mathematics to see that’s impossible, Russell thought; there wasn’t enough room in the kitchen. The back wall was three feet away.

The more he thought about it, the more he came to the conclusion that the image branded onto Mr Welsh’s eyeballs was unconnected. Mr Welsh might have seen a nuclear flash somewhere, and the image might have been burnt onto his retinas then. It was unlikely, yes, but more plausible than the size of the room changing, surely. Russell remembered Miss King telling him that to her, Mr Welsh’s wounds looked like they’d been caused post-mortem. So that was it: Mr Welsh saw a nuclear explosion, someone killed him; they brought his body here, stabbed it a few times to make it look like he actually died here too, then fled the crime scene, but felt guilty enough afterwards to call the cops themselves. Yeah, right.

Russell stopped. He took off his spectacles and wiped them.

Some words coursed through his thoughts; Latin words he’d encountered so many times after the switch from medicine to philosophy that he had memorised them without trying to: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. It was the principle of Occam’s razor: no more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary; in essence, the simplest solution is also the likeliest.

Except there is no simple solution, Russell thought; nothing made any sense, nothing fitted together; no wonder Miss King was seeing monsters.

Russell looked into the dark bedroom again. There was a door on the other side of the bed. Russell had thought it was a built-in wardrobe, but from this angle he saw that it was in fact a room. The door was slightly ajar and there was light coming from the other side. Of course, he thought; the bathroom.

He went across and pushed the door open. The bedroom carpet around the door was soaked; Russell heard the squelch beneath his shoes. The bathroom had been flooded recently. The water on the floor reflected the light from the bare bulb. It was a tiny bathroom, most of it comprising the shower cubicle, with a toilet next to it, and a small sink. The sink was full to the brim with water. The water was stagnant. Little bubbles clung to the submerged enamel. The tap wasn’t dripping.

The slightly elevated floor of the shower cubicle was dry, and here Russell found a police-band digital radio and various measuring apparatus. There was also a roll of the same red tape that Russell had seen stuck to the kitchen floor. He presumed Detective Marsh was in here when told they were coming.

The detective was still in the lounge with Miss King.

As Russell pottered into the malodorous front room, the young pathologist was showing Marsh a print out of the magnified image from Mr Welsh’s eyes.

“What exactly am I looking at, Miss King?” he was saying.

“You don’t recognise anything about it?” she said.

He turned it upside down, then completed the revolution. “Afraid not,” he said, glancing quickly at Russell in the doorway before handing it back.

His look said unpleasant things about Miss King.

“What happened in the bathroom?” Russell asked.

“We don’t know,” Marsh said. “We found the tap running when we got here; the overflow couldn’t take the surplus, so the bathroom flooded.”

“Deliberately?” asked Russell.

“Unknown.” He shrugged his shoulders and gave a weary look.

Miss King folded the print out and put it back in her bag. “Would you mind if I had a look, Detective?”

“What? At the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

Marsh sighed. “Sure.”

Russell got out of their way. He stayed in the lounge whilst they ventured into the bedroom; his nose was even beginning to grow accustomed to the smell. He saw a television lying on the floor, but on closer inspection found it was hollow. He didn’t get too close to the sofa. He kept imagining Mr Welsh lying dead on it.

As he stood there, there was a rap on the front door, followed by two separate knocks, a second apart. Russell turned round.

Detective Marsh called from the next room, “It must be Sergeant Mbeki. Let him in, will you, Professor.”

Russell couldn’t understand why the junior detective had decided to wait outside to begin with. He hadn’t found Detective Marsh that disagreeable. Russell went out into the hallway and opened the front door.

But it wasn’t the junior detective.

The man on the doorstep was slight-figured and dishevelled-looking. His clothes hung loosely on his body and he wore an oversized baseball cap. He was reaching into his inside pocket as Russell opened the door, but when he saw Russell he froze, looking startled. Then he turned and ran.

“Hey, wait!” Russell said, stepping out after him.

But the running man just ran faster.

“Detective!” Russell shouted into the apartment.

Detective Marsh blustered into the hallway in seconds. He charged, bull-like, through the front door, and spied the running man turning the corner.

“Who was it?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. They just saw me and ran.”

Marsh clapped a heavy hand on Russell’s shoulder. “I’ll follow him. You go the other way; we have to cut him off before he reaches the stairs.”

“What?” Russell cried. “But-”

But Detective Marsh was not a man you said ‘but’ to. He broke into another charge, leaving Russell’s protests ignored in his wake.

Russell looked back into the apartment. Miss King was coming toward the open door. She was frowning and looking perplexed.

With a private groan, Russell started running. He ran in the opposite direction to the way Detective Marsh went, the opposite direction to the way the man went. The apartment was almost on a corner, and the fire escape Russell and Miss King had walked up not twenty minutes before was on the diagonally opposite corner. If anything, Marsh had further to run than Russell, but then, he was chasing the man, and Russell was only there to cut him off.

But what if I get to the guy first? Russell thought.

Benjamin Russell was not an athlete. He was not a sedentary type; he liked to walk, providing his journey was no longer than three miles each way, but he hadn’t done a sustained run since his student decathlon days. These days he only ran from the bus stop to the tube station, which were only fifty yards apart, and even then, only when it was raining.

He rounded another corner; he didn’t slow down. His lungs roared and his throat burned, but he could see the fire escape now.

As he slammed through the door fifteen seconds later, he saw a very red-faced Detective Marsh powering along the balcony toward him. There was no sign of the running man. Russell stopped. Marsh was too far away to shout and be heard over the wind, but he urged Russell on with a forceful fist gesture.

Russell let the fire escape door bang shut. He went to the banister and looked down the gap between the stairs. Over his own fitful breathing, and the sound of the blood coursing through his ears, he could hear running, tripping footsteps.

The man was close, only a few storeys below.

Bolstered by a fresh surge of adrenaline, Russell started down the fire escape, taking the stairs two or three at a time. He couldn’t hear the running man’s footsteps over his own, but he reckoned he hadn’t escaped yet. In theory he could have pushed through any of the doors on any of the levels, but Russell imagined he was so close that the doors wouldn’t have shut after him by the time Russell ran past them.

After he’d got a few storeys, he did hear a fire door open, but that one was above him; Detective Marsh had just started thundering down after him.

Russell remembered the door at the bottom of the fire escape being stiff and screeching when it was opened. When he heard that screech again, he knew he was gaining on the running man; he had just passed the second floor.

He caught the slow-closing fire door before it shut. The running man was only twenty yards ahead. His rubber soles were squeaking on the faux marble floor. He turned his head, saw Russell; he wasn’t looking where he was going; he slipped, and went flying. But he quickly clambered back to his feet.

“Wait!” Russell cried, breathless, pulling himself through the door. He almost resigned himself to the fact that the running man was about to escape.

The man had reached the abandoned foyer. He went out of sight again as he reached the unmanned reception porthole, and headed for the revolving doors.

But then, completely unexpectedly, he came running back. He came a few feet, saw Russell still chasing, and stopped. He stepped backwards, glancing over his shoulder. Russell froze. The man was hopping about like a trapped rabbit; he had nowhere to go. He started reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Russell held up his hands, and they were shaking.

“Wait,” he said, starting forward again.

He saw through the glass in the revolving doors. Sergeant Mbeki was walking across the parking lot from a police car; he’d be here in twenty seconds.

His hands still raised, Russell looked back toward the fire escape. The door had nearly shut. Detective Marsh would be here even sooner.

Next to the reception was a door marked ‘laundry’. Russell tested the door; it was open, and it was dark inside. He tried to calm his breathing down.

“Go in here. I won’t tell them where you are,” he said.

The running man stopped darting about, and gave Russell the same shocked look he imagined he would have given himself for what he just said.

“You’re a cop,” the man said.

“No, I’m a lecturer. I’m just working with them.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you?”

“You don’t have a choice.”

The man didn’t seem to like that implication; he reached further into his jacket. He was only seven or eight feet away from Russell now.

“Plus I’m pretty sure you’ve got a knife in that pocket,” Russell added quickly. “And I’ve only got a ballpoint pen in mine.”

Russell reckoned he saw a small smile tease the edge of the man’s mouth. A second later, the man removed his hand from his pocket and headed for the door.

“Actually, it’s a gun,” he said in passing. “Kapiche?”

“Kapiche,” Russell said, closing the door.

A moment after the laundry door shut, Detective Marsh burst from the fire escape door to find Russell leaning against the wall near the reception, doubled over with a painful stitch. Marsh charged forward, only slowing after he passed.

Then Sergeant Mbeki pushed through the revolving doors.

“Mbeki, you see him?” Marsh hollered.

The junior detective’s face was completely blank.

“He got away,” Russell cried.

“Fuck!” went Marsh. “Which way?”

Russell pointed down the opposite corridor, the one that took a left at the reception window. “Sorry. He was just too fast for me.”

“Mbeki, take the outside.”

“There’s no exit down there, sir,” Mbeki protested.

“Christ! Just do it, Sergeant!”

Then the burly detective started running again.

“You okay, Professor?” The sergeant gave him a sympathetic look.

“Don’t worry about me,” Russell told him, pretending that his pretend stitch had now alleviated. “Don’t want to piss Marsh off, do you?”

Mbeki nodded, then ran from the building.

Russell waited about ten seconds, then he opened the laundry door. The light from the corridor caught the glare of a shiny pistol being pointed right at him.

Russell felt his throat tighten. “It’s just me,” he managed.

Slowly, the gun lowered, then the man stepped into the light. His eyes stayed in the shadow that fell on his face from the peak of his cap.

“Is it safe for me to go now?” he asked.

Russell stayed in the doorway, occasionally glancing round to make sure Sergeant Mbeki hadn’t returned. “I’d stay put for a while.”

“This better not be a trap, man.”

“Didn’t I have that opportunity already? It’s not. Calm down.”

The two men stared at each other whilst they caught their breath.

“You going to tell me what’s going on?” the man asked eventually.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Russell said.

The man didn’t say anything to this.

“Look, unless you’re Michael Philips, it’s not you they’re after,” Russell told him. “And I reckon if you were Michael Philips, you wouldn’t turn up at your own front door with a gun. And you certainly wouldn’t knock.”

“What do you want with the Guru?”

Russell frowned. “The what?”

“Philips; the Guru. What do you want with him?”

“They think he’s a murder suspect.”

Russell couldn’t see the man’s face very well, but something about the way his posture changed made Russell think he’d hit a nerve.

“Who’d he kill?” the man asked in a low voice.

“There was a body found in his flat; a drug addict’s,” Russell said, quickly adding, “but nobody’s sure Michael Philips killed him yet.”

The man snorted. “You bet he did.”

“What makes you say that?”

The man didn’t say anything for a while.

“Look, if you know something about Michael Philips, you don’t need to run from the police,” Russell said. “Tell them. It’s not you they want.”

“Not for this maybe,” the man muttered.

Russell decided to ask outright: “Did you come here to kill Philips?”

The man laughed. “Well, if nobody else will.”

“Why do you want to see him dead?”

“An eye for an eye.” Russell heard the man hawk and spit.

“Revenge? Revenge for what?”

The man paused. “My girl.”

“What happened to her?”

There was a sigh. “Drugs. Drugs we got off the Guru. Drugs he said were safe; no, drugs he said were fucking amazing mind-fucking out-of-this-world shit.”

“I’m sorry.” Russell tried to sound sincere.

“She ain’t dead, dude.” The man snorted. “But she might as well be. She’s a vegetable. I mean, she’s like in a fucking coma or something.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“People wake up from comas,” Russell said, looking back into the foyer to check the coast was still clear. “Trust me, I’m a medical doctor.”

“They said she won’t,” the man mumbled.

Russell didn’t say anything for a while.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said. “About the drugs.”

“What about them, man?”

“Did she put them in her eye?”

“Purity; yeah.”

“Purity?”

“Yeah. That’s what it’s called; Purity. You put it in your eye and then you see and hear all this funky shit. But it’s supposed to be harmless, you know?”

Russell knew there was a reason he’d hid this man from the police; would Marsh have been interested in hearing any of this when he was intent on pinning a murder on Michael Philips? No, I think not, Russell thought.

“Look, I don’t think Michael Philips is going to come back here,” he told the man. “Not now. They’re going to be watching his place until he’s caught.”

The man sniffed. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll find him.”

“You will? Do you know where he might be hiding out?”

“Yeah. I only came here in the first place ‘cause I reckoned I might be able to catch him off his guard. Got somebody to tell me his secret knock and everything; he won’t open the door if you don’t use it. I’ve never actually been here before. Usually I just go to him when he’s dealing over Lambeth way.”

“And you think he might be there now?”

The man bobbed his shoulders. “Sure. The guy’s got dozens of dealer mates in the ghetto. That’s where he does most of his business, I bet.”

Russell paused for a moment, and found himself chewing his tongue.

“You thinking of going after him too?” the man asked. “Well, if you are, you better hope you get to him first. I don’t give a shit anymore. He’s as good as killed the only person I gave a shit about, so I’m going to total the motherfucker.”

“What if I said he wasn’t responsible?” Russell said.

“What are you talking about?” the man said.

“Well, did you try this Purity yourself?”

“Yeah. ‘Course.”

“But you’re fine.”

“So? So what?”

“Well, maybe Michael Philips is the most obvious person to blame, but what if there were other contributing factors? Did you mix the drugs, for example?”

The man sighed. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

Neither of them spoke for perhaps half a minute.

“Look, if you’re intent on killing Michael Philips because you think it might make you feel better about what happened to your friend, then there’s nothing I can do to stop you. Plus like I said, you have the gun. I couldn’t stop you now even if I wanted to. But I want you to think about it. Right now Michael Philips is on the run because he knew the cops were going to peg this drugs death on him. But at the end of the day, it’s not like he deliberately poisoned the guy, and it’s not like anyone forced the guy to put this Purity stuff in his eyes; so, you know, is it really his fault?”

The man tipped his head back, as if to get a better look at Russell. The light fell on his eyes and for the first time Russell saw how young he was.

“Take this,” Russell said, reaching into his breast pocket. He took out a white card. It had his name, departmental office number and campus extension on it.

The man - the boy - took it. “What is it?”

“If you do go looking for Michael Philips, I want you to give serious thought about not killing him. Give him that instead. And tell him I don’t think he did it.”

“You really don’t, do you?” the boy murmured.

“No,” Russell said, even though he wasn’t entirely sure why he was starting to believe it himself. “I don’t think he did, no.”

Benjamin Russell told the boy to hide in the laundry until he received a sign from him that the coast was clear. After that he went and found Detective Marsh, and Sergeant Mbeki returned shortly not long after. Marsh was raging about losing the boy; was already painting him as another murder suspect to add to the list. Russell was starting to understand what Mbeki had meant. Marsh decided to return to the apartment, and as Russell passed the laundry door, he faked a double sneeze.

Miss King had remained in the apartment on her own the entire time, and was ready to leave as soon as Russell got back. She drove him all the way back to the university. They didn’t have much to say to each other. It was dark by the time he got to campus, and he sent the students lingering outside his office away.

He stayed in his office beyond the end of the day; the cleaners came and went, and Russell sent them away, too. He sat in his office through dinner, into the early evening, and only when it got to 10pm did he decide he had waited long enough.

He walked to the station, got home and went to bed.

NOTES:
Though I never got round to using it, I imagined Detective Marsh's first name to be Franklin, and that higher-ranking colleagues than Sergeant Mbeki would call him Frank. I was originally planning to have a whole team crawling over Michael Philips's pad, but then I thought that might make it seem too high a profile case, when Indigo Chase is plagued with suspicious deaths. In my head, I saw Marsh as being played by the guy who plays a similarly leather-sporting detective in "The Bill", though I can no more remember the actor's name than the character's. The description's accurate. As for Sergeant Mbeki, I never say he's black, but hope it's implied. This is the second ethnic character in this story, but I reckon that's only appropriate given its inner-city setting. I also think it makes the story more colourful in another way, too. As for the name, I believe Mbeki is/was the President of South Africa.

Occam's razor is a genuine philosophical principle, exactly as I described it. Conveniently enough, I found the Latin version of it in "The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time" by Mark Haddon, which I was reading as I wrote this chapter. I probably wouldn't have included it at this point otherwise.

I changed the last paragraph at the last minute. Originally Professor Russell decided to give up waiting for Michael Philips to call, but just after locking his door, the phone rang:

Russell quickly dropped his case and coat, fumbled with his keys, swung open the door and snatched up the telephone. “Hello?”
The line crackled, but nobody spoke. He heard a breath.
“Am I talking to Michael Philips?” he asked.
After a while, a voice said, “Yes.”

In the end I decided to change this because it just wasn't convenient for the plot to have Michael Philips make contact with Professor Russell at this time; it was too early in the story. There are other things I envisage Russell having to do. One possible problem I foresee is that as (and if) and when I do write that section, it may end up seeming rather serendipitous that the Guru turns up again just when Russell needs him. I don't know if I'll write any more, anyway.