‘Taxi!’ hollered O’Singh, scuttling down the steps of the Royal Academy of Philosophy onto the busy Georgian terraced street. Upstream, in the flow of one-way traffic, a black cab fell back and began drifting skilfully across lanes. Something odd about it, thought O’Singh. Quite possibly the periscope, maybe something else… no definitely the periscope…

A strange affair, the cab. A kind of submarine vehicle for hire. Though ‘sub’ would suggest ‘under’ as in ‘submarine’ – under the sea. This was surely an above water carriage, something that was driven above the sea – a ‘supermarine’, if you will.

The cab glided to the kerb, O’Singh’s side of the road. O’Singh tucked in his pockets, blew hard and with a resolve squeezed himself into the back of the taxi.

‘The Investigations of the Para-Usual, if you please,’ requested the professor, addressing the back of the cabbie’s head, which was swaying gently with the vehicle’s bulk-accommodating suspension. Professor Breville O’Singh was a gentle colossus, big enough to fill the back of a London taxi like a ship in a bottle.

‘The offices are located on Great Albemarle Street, the City. Thank you,’ the professor added, flourishing the unopened letter of recommendation.

‘Great Albemarle Street, mate?’ replied the cabbie, instinctively following the tradition of repeating the fare’s requested destination. She inched the cab out from the kerb, denting a flow of cyclists like a big fish scattering a shoal of smaller fry.

‘Look at ‘em all,’ marvelled the cabbie. ‘Sign of fuel prices, what it is.’

The professor considered for a moment the fish-cyclist connection and the cost of petrol. He had set his senses to red alert. He needed to keep his wits about him. Ten o’clock, an appointment, today. The very same day he had believed his last chance of attaining a position rested at the Royal Academy of Philosophy. Now here he found himself tearing away from that institution as fast as a supermarine could take him.

O’Singh consulted his watch, peered out the window to check that the progress they were making was good and flumped back into the upholstery. His attention drifted to the interior of the cab. Something caught it. Not something extraordinary, as he saw it, but more than ordinary, all the same. Ordinary with a little something thrown in, perhaps. Apart from the peculiarity of the periscope, there was the image in the cabbie’s rear view mirror. Ordinarily it’s the cab driver’s eyes reflected. When you talk to the cabbie, that’s what you talk to – the eyes detached and removed to the mirror, staring back in another dimension; and the back of the driver’s head. One only really sees this optical phenomenon, mused O’Singh, as a passenger in a taxi or as a viewer of a Picasso.

Picasso was a man who painted things but he probably got someone else in to do his house because he couldn’t see properly because he said his paintings were paintings of things like ladies who were walking up stairs but then they had four chins and a marshmallow in a place where her eyes should be really. Horse’s Ghost Schmidt

The professor’s chauffeur was sat bolt upright in her seat, so high in fact, as O’Singh observed, that the periscope eyepiece was abutting the roof of the cab. Instead of the eyes, he could see framed in the mirror the ‘Los Angeles Lakers’ logo on her T-shirt, emblazoned across her chest.

It was then, after making the Picasso-cabbie observation, that O’Singh said something. Asked a question. One which would throw the fate of the Earth, this small corner of the cosmos, into uncertainty. And at the same time carve one of the few moments in human history when someone in a moment of clarity sits up and announces something like, ‘Hold on a minute, this apple headache. Might be something to do with gravity.’ Or, ‘C-cubed? No, what was I thinking? It’s not as much as that. What if we ease off the Cs? Make it e = mc, e = m c-squared at the very most?’

O’Singh asked the cabbie: ‘What if we wanted to stuff a dead bat?’

‘Say it again, mate?’ replied the Lakers’ T-shirt. She had stopped to wave an old couple dithering at the edge of a zebra crossing outside the British Museum. ‘Hola! Hola! she called, to coax them across, assuming that they were either Spanish, Latin American or bilingual Irish.

With a trousers against leather squelch and a ker-dang of strained springs, the professor shifted his bulk and squirmed forward in his seat. He sniffed the air a little distractedly – ‘lettuce,’ he thought and edged closer to the glass partition separating him from the driver. The cab lurched forward so his broad features became momentarily squashed and splayed broader across the pane.

‘Blet us splay a blat…’ began O’Singh.

‘Take yer lips off the partition,’ urged the cabbie.

O’Singh eased his features from the glass and started afresh.

‘Let us say a bat-owner – a dead bat owner – knows of a taxidermist in Kensington, in west London…’ ventured O’Singh, leaning forward again this time though looking like he was in a deadly headlock, his head to the side so he could reach with his shirt collar to wipe the condensation of his features from the partition window.

‘Taxidermist? What them animal stuffers?’ returned the cabbie.

‘Ab-absolutely. But, but the bat-owner lives in Whitechapel over in London’s East End.’

‘Right,’ drawled the cabbie charitably. In one word she was saying, ‘No idea what you’re saying, but here, here’s some slack’. She pulled the cab through a tight arc to bolt down the kind of unknown-to-mankind-save-the-London-cabbie city passage and set swinging a miniature basketball on a chain, attached to the rear-view mirror.

O’Singh scanned the dashboard, clocked the clock and computed. Just before 9, weekday. Appointment at 10.

‘So he’s on the Whitechapel High Street…’ continued the professor, once again to the T-shirt logo as the cabbie wriggled in her seat, back into the fully upright, attentive position. The professor faltered, making a mental note of a flag sticker on the dash. Red, gold and green horizontal bars, a black star centred on the gold. The Ghanaian flag, O’Singh recalled.

‘Yeah?’ prompted the cabbie.

‘Yes, quite. So, the dead bat-owner is hopping about looking out for a black cab, when he spots one. At once he bawls “Taxi!”’

‘Right.’

‘Only he is stood, unwittingly, right outside the premises of a taxidermist, right there on the Whitechapel High Street. One whose practice he had not been aware of.’

‘Oh?’

‘Out bursts the taxidermist, eager for custom, and bundles the bat-owner and his unstuffed pet back into his premises. The cab driver meanwhile, having been hailed, pulls over but loses out to the animal stuffer. His fare is gone. Do you see what has happened?’

‘Got a picture in me mind.’

‘Taxi!’ hollered O’Singh, unexpectedly, slightly alarming the driver, for it was a rare instance where a passenger hailed from actually inside a cab. ‘Now “Taxi!” could be a constriction of “taxicab” or “taximeter”, a form of chauffeured transport; or it could be short for “taxidermist”. Who gets the business depends on who gets to the customer first. After all, why pay the cab fare to Kensington when you can get your bat stuffed in Whitechapel?’

‘Never thought of it like that, mate,’ said the cabbie, contemplating that special situation.

‘Problematic. Tricky. Could be a problem, but what you could do, you see, as a business association of cab drivers, to prevent this situation ever occurring, is act to patent the taxi hail. Save this type of thing happening.’

‘What, you mean so taxidermists can’t use it?’

‘Ab-ab-absolutely. Any taxidermist found answering the call would then be doing so illegally.’

‘Right.’

‘Prevention, as it is said, being the best solution.’

‘I’ve ‘eard pretty much.’

This was the cue for O’Singh to deliver his coup de grace, to earn his fare.

‘Now, in your opinion, would you say that your association might find this a valuable piece of information?’ enquired O’Singh.

The cabbie pulled herself up abruptly in her seat once again.

‘Depends what you mean, guv,’ she replied, stiffly.

And she was about to find out. How she would then react to O’Singh’s answer would determine whether or not the professor stood that one last chance of earning a research post and the chance to discover everything. Of at last finding out how to read people’s minds; or why old dogs always belong to old owners.

In the back of the cab, O’Singh sniffed. He smelt something. He smelt lettuce.