6.17: An unmasking, of sorts

Pausing only to ask a sudden favour of Lois-the-Hippo, pTravis hurries back to the den to explain his thinking and gather up his friends. 

They then all head back, the way he has just come, to the Potting Shed, passing Lois again, already now struggling with her purl stitching and expressing herself fruitily. She looks up as they pass and says: “I think my brother is in his lair”.

They tumble, pell-mell, into Hipparchus’ study and fire questions at him with perhaps undue suddenness. 

“Did you really get that story about the Disorder of Catastrophe from your spook in East Molesey? The writing looked different – rubbish! – and it arrived too soon!” – Lottie, pretending that pTravis’ suspicion was her own.

“What did the insignia – or ‘insigne’, if you insist – that we found attached to my scarf mean: not the sponge, the other one?” – Masongill.

“Since no one else seems to know – or perhaps more accurately care – about our den, do you think Juggins might have returned?” This question, from pTravis, is asked, accompanied by a slightly embarrassed look towards Masongill. 

He continues: “You seemed wrapped up in two crossword clues but couldn’t explain where they came from.” 

Hipparchus raises a paw, with no effect, and then growls sharply, to make them pause. 

“I think you are right to ask that very strange question of the origin of the account of the Disorder of Catastrophe that I read out. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it but, as you say, the writing wasn’t right and it arrived at least a day too soon. On reflection it was too phoney-baloney by half. After turning this over in my mind I have come to a very disturbing conclusion… 

I must have written that account myself but I have no memory of it. 

I still don’t know where those two crossword clues came from. I found them on a scrap of paper on the floor of the Potting Shed. They were: 

• Disaster as endless pot and ecstasy is introduced by jazz fan (11) 

• Change drs or die – chaos (8) 

The latter is ‘disorder’: an anagram of ‘drs or die’. The former is ‘catastrophe’. (It comes from AS, TROPHy (pot) without the last letter (endless …) and E(ecstasy) is preceded by (introduced by) CAT (jazz fan)).

So this must have been playing on mind. 

Also, I’d stopped to watch Fabian racing round a hillock in the form of a fold in the ground of the very same form as the insigne you found. Both share the shape of the cusp-graph from Thom’s catastrophe theory. That, alongside the triple Armagnac one of you kindly poured me (!), probably disturbed my mind. Have any of you read that fine work of experimental psychology The Moonstone? 

And this, too, makes me think you are right about Juggins. I do not know how or why but I think that you, Masongill, put up the Dalí ‘Swallow’s Tail’ pictures in your den. 

And so, in conclusion, there is no Disorder or Catastrophe in opposition to your Order of the Sponge. It is, after all, so much mumbo-jumbo. 

You do not need to worry about it, after all.”