I liked the idea of a man so consumed with a love of killing, of creating death to be the ultimate high, that real sex never appealed to him. He never needed sex because he gets off on being responsible for killing people. Hmmm, perhaps I read too much Ian Fleming as a child.

I had also forgotten that, via the scene with the bottle in the door, that I had set up the origins of the pale young man this early. I thought that’d only come out of the sequel to this, Business Unusual. Still, it fits in with the concept of the Vault. As does the fact that Traynor’s dog is augmented with Stahlman’s gas. Nevertheless, it’s a horrible over-use of continuity and I apologise. Sadly I just know it won’t be the last piece of gratuitous continuity in Scales. Oh dear...

Ooh, we get to see Liz’s home. How nice. Mrs Longhurst who lives downstairs is named after a lovely lady called Claire Longhurst who I met at the same time as Rob Lines (see Chapter Two). I’ve never owned guinea pigs, but my elder brothers did and I have vague memories of them from when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. They were originally going to be rats, because my friend David Bailey had pet rats when I wrote this. He then got rid of the rats and so John-Paul and George-Ringo became guinea pigs.

Corbett Woodall was a real TV news reporter – I think from a local rather than national BBC service but during the sixties and seventies he found a new career as the man who played newsreaders in everything the BBC did. Alex Macintosh (he was in Day of the Daleks) was the same. But Corbett Woodall was always better.