Paddy Mac on the phone. He’s not happy.

Everyone he talks to says the books must be fake. Must be.

Same as the council when they said that ‘Certificate of Responsibility’ had to be fake. Not because of the evidence that’s right there in front of them, literally right in their hands. But because it doesn’t fit in with what they already think they know.

Idiots!

One of the booksellers said he’d once seen a book a bit like it before, from somewhere down the south-west – another weird Dickens. Someone must be manufacturing them as fakes, he said, just to fool people like me.

Yes, I know it’s all improbable – to say the least. But what’s that old Sherlock Holmes phrase, about ‘when you’ve eliminated the impossible’ and all that? And reading Aunt Kat’s diaries, I realise I’ve known about all of this for more than fifty years: I know it’s not impossible. Far from it.

But to anyone else, it is ‘impossible’. So how can I convince them otherwise – when they won’t even look at that evidence that’s right in front of them?

Short answer, right now: I can’t.

I’m not sure I can even convince Paddy Mac enough to stop him from throwing the books in the waste-bin – which is what everyone else has told him to do. I hope he’ll back off, and keep the books safe for me – but given how he sounded on the phone, it could be touch-and-go even for that.

So much at stake here – and I don’t know what to do…

Keep on clearing the house, I guess. That’s all I can do right now.