When they get up the next morning, the white chocolate they left out for the hinge is gone. Ellen opens the door and instead of the �hmmmmm� of yesterday, she gets a �tingngngng�.

�What do you put on a hinge to stop it tinging?�

�An mp3 player,� the hinge says.

�Okay. And would we just��

�Yeah, just leave it on the ground next to the door. I�d really appreciate that.�

�It�d be no trouble at all.�

�Thanks ever so much.�

Cicely is very quiet during breakfast again. She has a feeling that something is wrong, so Alan suggests that she asks Albert Ink.

After breakfast, they go to see Albert. She writes on a piece of paper with Albert Ink, and Ellen hears something about trees, but the others hear the words: the new butler was looking around the house in the middle of the night.

�Oh no!� Hilda says. �Not another thief.�

�No, there�s nothing to worry about there,� Alan says.

�You have to worry if your new butler is searching the house in the middle of the night.�

�He�s not really a butler. He�s a detective. We told ye that he was a butler just in case ye accidentally told Dotter who he really is.�

�Dotter? Why do ye want to fool Dotter?�

�Because Reg is here to observe Dotter.�

Alan calls Reg into the room and he tells him that the sisters know who he really is. Reg insists that they always think of him as a butler. Dotter must never suspect anything.

Alan explains why he thought they needed someone to keep an eye on Dotter. �Do ye remember when we got back from Jimmy�s place, just after the robbery? William told us that Uncle Hugh called on the phone and he said he�d send Dotter around to solve the crime. William said that Hugh had been talking about cigars, but when had visited Hugh he was obsessed the bolts and bon-bons. He had completely forgotten about the cigars. I remembered this after Cicely saw Dotter walking around the house in the middle of the night. I asked William about that phone conversation he had with Hugh. He�s sure that Hugh, or the man pretending to be Hugh, said nothing about bolts and bon-bons, just cigars. That�s what made me suspicious. And then when we visited Hugh again he was still obsessed by the bolts and bon-bons. So I hired Reginald to see what Dotter is up to, and it was Reg�s idea to pose as a butler.�

Dotter is looking for Tessie again, but he can�t find her anywhere. He meets Dresscoat in the glasshouse and he asks him where she is. Dresscoat says, �She�s gone into town today, to, ah, get some weed killer. She�ll be there all day.�

Dotter is disappointed because he�d thought of lots of new things about his cousin and her shoes. He goes walking around the gardens and through some woodland. It�s a perfect summer day. There are sharp shadows of leaves on the ground as he walks; the sound of birds above. He meets Hilda and he can�t get away from her. She convinces him to help her with the leaves. Hilda hates to see a leaf alone. She often walks around the woodland looking for leaves on their own on the ground. She�ll talk to the leaf, and try to figure out why it ended up alone. And then she�ll look for a group of leaves and introduce this lonely leaf to them.

She finds a leaf on its own and kneels next to it. She looks around her, saying nothing, occasionally looking down on the leaf, almost as if she�s waiting for it to say something. She eventually says, �Hello� My name is Hilda� It�s a lovely day, isn�t it?�� Dotter gets the impression that she�s waiting for a response here. �It�s a beautiful day alright� But I couldn�t help noticing that you�re on your own. You know it doesn�t have to be like that. I know it can be difficult to make friends sometimes, but if you just talk to the other leaves, I�m sure they�d really enjoy your company.�

She goes on for about ten minutes about all the benefits of friends, and then she says, �Hey, I have an idea. She picks the leaf up very carefully and then looks around for a group of leaves. When she finds one she kneels next to them and says, �Hi. Sorry to interrupt like this, but I was just wondering if ye met Leslie before?� Dotter is wondering where the name Leslie came from. �Leslie is great. He�s so intelligent and witty�� She spends a few minutes listing out Leslie�s qualities and then she stands up and says, �So I�ll just leave ye to get better acquainted. Goodbye. Goodbye Leslie.� She winks at Leslie and gives him the thumbs up. She looks back at the leaves as she walks away with Dotter, and she says, �Isn�t it amazing the way they accept him into the group straight away. Leaves are so friendly.�

Dotter keeps looking at his watch. At least it�s nearly time for lunch. As they�re walking back towards the house, they hear voices from a tree house above them. Dotter climbs the ladder and finds Tessie telling Alan one of her stories. When she sees Dotter she says, �Oh. Hello. I went into town earlier to get some� some��

�Knee pads,� Alan says.

�Knee pads, yeah. I went into town to get some knee pads but the shop for the knee pads was closed so I came back.�

Dotter can see that she�s been trying to avoid him. He returns to the ground. As Tessie and Alan go down the ladder, they can hear Soots barking. He runs towards them and Tessie says, �Hessy Dress must be around. I better get back to the glasshouse.�

Dotter doesn�t say a word on the way back. They walk slowly because of Alan � he can only move quickly when he�s wearing his hurry legs. Hilda looks out for more leaves and Tessie finishes telling Alan her story about one of her battles with Hessy. She stops and points at the ground under a tree. �Look, a wild flower.�

She goes over to it, but just before she reaches the flower, Alan shouts, �Look out! It�s Hessy!�

Tessie jumps back. Hessy drops from the tree and lands on the ground right in front of her, on the flower. They walk quickly out of the woods. Tessie says, �Thanks for that, Alan. That was a close call.� She kisses him. Dotter goes back to the house.

That night he walks around the empty house again. He goes to see the ants in the study. He sits on a chair and tells them about Tessie, but they don�t seem to have any advice for him. He says, �Why did I ever think she�d be interested in my cousin�s shoes?�

The ants look at each other, then look back at Dotter. Two of them do anyway. The rest just get on with their work.

�I should have stuck with the clouds� That�s it! Of course! Just tell her more about the clouds. The simplest ideas are the best. She loved hearing about the clouds.�

Those two ants look at each other again. If Dotter had been looking carefully at them, he�d have noticed that one of them was trying his best to roll his eyes to heaven.

When they get up the next morning, the mp3 player is gone. Ellen opens the door and today the hinge makes a �beep-beep� sound. They say you should put a PlayStation on a hinge to stop it beep-beeping. The hinge says so anyway. He said to leave it on the ground next to the door.

After breakfast, Dotter goes out to see Tessie. He tells her about his childhood by the sea, when everyone in the village used to listen to the wind for all the latest news. The wind always spoke so sweetly and sadly. It was difficult to make out all the words � they had to fill in a lot of the details, but the news was always sad. The winter months stayed around until summer. Summer eventually became just a tiny speck on the calendar. Everything seemed to be an October afternoon that had no evening.

Dotter can�t help thinking that this must sound depressing, but there are so many opportunities in this story to talk about clouds, so he�s convinced she�ll want to hear it.

The sisters decide to visit their uncle again. They want to know if he found out about the bolts and bon-bons, and maybe they�ll get a chance to ask him about Dotter too. Maybe.

Or maybe not. He�s too excited to talk about anything but bolts and bon-bons � he�s figured out what they were for, and the sink too. He tells them the story.

In the 1930s they got a self-christening cooker in the kitchen. It was fine at first, but then it got bored and it kept changing its name, and then it started changing the names of everything else in the kitchen. They never knew what anything was called anymore, and they were all afraid of the cooker. The toaster once got into an argument with it and the cooker christened it �Burney the crap toaster�. He once christened the maid �the dog� and he called the dog �the maid�.

The uncle had bought a new table for the kitchen, and the old one was to be taken away. On the day when the new one was to arrive, the oven christened the sink with the name �Pine Table�, and he called the table �Mr. Steve�. When the delivery men called with the new table, they said, �We�re looking for a pine table,� and the sink said, �That�s me.� So they left the new table, and took the sink instead of the old table.

Hugh ordered a new sink, and at the same time he ordered the shipment of bolts and bon-bons as the retirement present for the gardener. This was about the time he first got into cigars, and when the sink arrived he wasn�t really paying attention to what was going on because he was too engrossed in his cigar. He got things mixed up and presented the new sink to the gardener. He completely forgot about the shipment of bolts and bon-bons. They�ve been in a warehouse for all these years. He finally collected the shipment over the weekend and he presented them to the gardener � his father�s retirement present. It�s fitting in a way. It marks the completion of his life�s work, and his father�s life�s work. He feels fulfilled now that he�s solved the mystery of why they gave his father a sink.

So for all these years, they�ve had two tables in the kitchen and no sink. When Hugh asked the butler how they�ve been washing the dishes all these years he said, �The maid cleans them.�

Hugh has found a new hobby to replace the cigars � falling. He�s started falling in different places around the house and gardens. When he falls and looks at the ground he finds more notes that he left decades earlier, and he remembers lots of different things that he�d completely forgotten about. When he started smoking cigars he forgot that he used to even write these little notes. He uncovers a whole past life that he�d forgotten about. As he walks across a lawn with Alan and the sisters, he tells them about this, and he suddenly falls over in mid-sentence. He reads a tiny note written on a small piece of wood in the lawn: Beautiful lawns but Cam doesn�t count.

�Oh God!� Hugh says. �I loved those days when Cam didn�t count. She didn�t hear for a while either. And the lawns��

They have to listen to him for another hour before they can finally get away. When they arrive home, Inny is waiting for them. She asks if she can stay for a few days while her house is being painted, and they tell her she�s more than welcome. That�s their official position, but the actual state of affairs would be slightly less than welcome. It�s bad enough when she comes to visit for a few hours. A few hours of listening to her pointing out faults is more than enough for one year.

That night, Alan takes Reg up to the attic to show him the glowing lawn. Alan asks him how he became a detective, and Reg says, �It was in my college days that I first got interested in it. We used to build human rooms back then. We started out with human pyramids, and when we got bored with them we moved onto the rooms. The unfortunate ones got to be the floors. The ceilings weren�t the easiest of things to be either, but the door wasn�t so bad. The best of all to be was the windows. It used to be considered the worst of all � whoever got the window had to find a way of making themselves invisible. They spent years researching it but couldn�t come up with anything. Some just dressed themselves in curtains, but that was frowned upon. And then one day someone finally came up with the answer, the perfect way to make themselves invisible � just go to the pub.

�After a while we got bored with empty rooms, so to make them more realistic we�d have people live in them. We thought it�d be exciting, but it was just endless hours of people arguing about what to watch on TV. And then watching them watch TV. But it was strangely compelling. We built a human house on one bank holiday weekend. People were desperate to be a wall in the bedroom, but they were sadly disappointed. Most of the walls in the bedroom chose to be the study after the first night, and they had to build an extension to make the study. They couldn�t look in the eyes of the couple who lived in the house again. Whole walls would close their eyes as soon as one of them came into the study, but they hardly ever went into the study. And the kids in the house were a nightmare. They shaved the eyebrows off an entire wall. It was a great weekend for the windows, though. Someone eventually came up with the idea of building glasshouses. We drank so much we forgot we were a house at all. But it was those days in the human house that first got me interested in detective work. I found it fascinating, just observing people. I realised that so much of human behaviour was predictable. You can always tell� What the hell is that?�

Reg points down at a man running across the lawn. Alan tells him the story of the Wednesday man and Ella, and Reg says he must try to find him. He might have seen something on the evening of the theft.

They leave the attic, and as they�re walking down the stairs into the hall, they see the cat dragging the PlayStation into the drawing room. The hinge doesn�t notice Alan and Reg. Alan takes it by surprise when he moves the door backwards and forwards. The hinge says, �Beep� I mean, bling bling?�

�You�re blinging now, are you?�

�That�s right, I�m blinging.�

�And what would you put on a hinge to stop it blinging?�

�A few PlayStation games � that normally does the trick.�

�Is that for the cat as well?�

�The cat? I don�t know what you�re talking about. Ha ha ha ha ha.�

�What would you put on a hinge to stop it laughing?�

�I don�t know. Some cavier would be nice.�

�We know about the cat.�

�What cat? I don�t know any cat.�

�Don�t give us that. We saw the cat take the PlayStation.�

�It was her idea. Well, the cornflakes was my idea, but everything else was for her. She asked me to get these things for her.�

�And why did you do it?�

�Well, it�s difficult to say no to her at times� when she puts on that voice.�

Reg and Alan go over to the fireplace where the cat is pretending to be asleep. They search the fireplace and find the PlayStation and the mp3 player, and she still has some of the chocolate left.

Alan is angry with the cat, but he promises not to tell the sisters because the cat once did him a little favour. Last year they needed to find the money to repair the heating before winter. Their cousin, Low-tide Toddy, was staying with them for a few days. Low-tide loves playing poker, but he always seems to lose when you cheat against him, so Alan saw an opportunity to get the money for the heating. But Low-tide realised that Alan was cheating and he was furious. He took the hand-drill from under the table and threatened to make a hole in Alan�s head, put a screw into it and see if he could identify what type of screw it is. As Alan backed away and tried to reason with him, he noticed that the cat was boiling her jam, so he assumed that Soots was around, but then he saw Soots run across the lawn outside the window, and he realised that the cat was boiling the jam for him. He lifted up the pot of boiling jam and threatened to throw it over Low-tide if he didn�t put the drill down, and he backed down then.

While Alan lectures the cat, Reg goes outside to look for the Wednesday man. After about an hour he finds him hiding in a bush. He gets a bit of a shock when Reg comes up behind him and says hello, but when he realises that it�s not Ella he stands up and says, �It�s Wednesday. Wednesday!�

�Yeah, it�s Wednesday. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.�

�It�s Wednesday, yeah.� He�s still smiling at his success in hypnotising Reg.

�I want to ask you a few questions about a recent break-in at the house. Did you see anything suspicious in the grounds? A ladder maybe?� This would have been on a Wednesday.�

�Oh Wednesday, yeah. Actually I did see a ladder. It was at one of the windows downstairs. Or in one of the windows. It was making its way through the window.�

�Right. And was it alone?�

�No.�

�No?�

�No.�

�Who else was there?�

�Hm?�

�Who was with the ladder?� On the Wednesday.�

�Oh, on the Wednesday. Yes, someone was with the ladder. A man.�

�Did he look familiar?�

He thinks about it for a few seconds and then says, �Now that you mention it, he did look a bit familiar.�

�Can you describe him to me?�

He thinks for a few seconds again and says, �No.�