Claire had made some progress in her investigation of the French words. She had managed to lift several good clear fingerprints. It was rather unfortunate that as an important rock musician she had no access to a readily searchable index of fingerprints that would have quickly assisted her in tracing the origin of the French words.

It is a little known aspect of the rock music industry that for the most part rock musicians are failed private investigators. There is the classic clue in Dire Straits' 'Private Investigations', but very few people follow it through to the logical conclusion that Mark Knopfler only ever wanted to be a private detective and was lured into the rock music industry by misbegotten aliens of some kind. All rock musicians want to be private detectives. They are just very, very good at hiding it. If you can't even manage to be a private detective, than you should at least be able to be a rock star. If you're a failed private detective who went on to fail in the rock music industry, then you are commonly know as a politician. This is because these are the three easiest jobs known to mankind. In downwardly descending order. They are also among the best paid jobs. Private detecting pays far better than many people would have you believe. There are an infinite number of cats to track down, and also an infinite number of cheating spouses to betray. This would not be so impressive were it not for the fact that in this case 'infinite' really does mean 'infinite', not just very, very, very, large as it is commonly believed to indicate. Particularly in the case of the cats. It's easy to tell that these are the three easiest jobs it's still possible to get paid for performing because they are the three jobs people doing them most often complain about. Usually they complain that their work is misunderstood. The private detective complains that if they hadn't wanted to be watched they should have pulled the blinds down. The rock musician complains that blinds are an invention that they shouldn't have to deal with, being artistic. The politician campaigns against the existence of windows (sometimes Windows, but not in an election year). You don't hear astro physicists or garbage collectors making these sorts of complaints. This is because they don't have time. Their jobs are so much more important and difficult that if they stopped to complain then garbage would pile up on Alpha Centauri and probably cause some sort of highly technical mishap that only garbage collectors and astro physicists are qualified to explain. Not that they would explain it, as the explanation would take so long that we would all be sucked into something quantum. The life of the average garbage collector is much more interesting than you might suppose. Those garbage trucks have technology developed for NASA by astro physicists (as far as I know) for use in the space shuttle. You've seen the arm that comes out of the space shuttle to collect satellites and so on? Watch carefully the next time a garbage truck picks up your garbage bin. Now, having watched this exercise as closely as Peter-Bowman would watch the growth cycle of a coconut, tell me that the arm on a garbage truck doesn't use the same technology as the arm on the space shuttle. How else could it manoeuvre[8~ so exactly to grasp your garbage bin? It couldn't, that's how. NASA and the garbage truck industry have links going back to the 50's. Who do you think worked out what to do with waste products on the Mercury missions? Apollo was independently contracted, which is why the moon has so much garbage on it now. It is enough to say that the average garbage collector knows far more about conspiracies and such then the average private detective.

This always annoys private detectives, and is one reason that they become rock musicians. Apart from the fact that they were no good at being private detectives. Often rock musicians acknowledge this by leaving cryptic clues in their lyrics. 'The answer, my friends, it's blowing in the wind.' Certainly it is. It's blowing in the wind caused by a Saturn V rocket launching. If you watch the film clip very closely you'll see Dylan turn his eyes upwards. This is because he is looking at the moon and wistfully wondering what it would have been like to be a garbage collector. Or an astro physicist. Or even a successful private detective, for that matter. This is the dream that rock musicians often refer to without being overly specific - whenever a rock musician speaks of 'the dream', this is what they mean. Especially if they say that the dream was to be a rock musician. Nobody actually dreams of being a rock musician, any more than they dream of being a politician. A rock musician who admitted that the dream was to be a private detective would lose fans faster than Apollo 13. They really want to be astro physicists of course (rock musicians are people who realised early in life that they had absolutely no hope of passing the necessary exams to become a garbage collector) but being a private detective is better than nothing.

With this clear link between rock musicians and private detectives, it may come as a surprise to you that rock musicians in general have no access at all to the private database files of criminal fingerprints that would so very much assist Claire at this stage in her investigation of the French words. I expect you should write letters to the Saturday newspapers about this restriction. It's very clear that very important rock musicians such as Claire should have free access to any and all information that could be potentially seen to help them in their private hobby as private detectives. Anything less is a miscarriage of justice and should be trampled by some sort of enraged rhinoceros with squinty eyes and bad breath. After all, this is the fate in store for all other miscarriages of justice. Something should certainly be done about it. Probably with a large bulldozer.

Claire, among her many pleasing attributes, is very patient with me when it comes to my tendency to go off on a tangent. She has taken the time devoured by the above digressions and turned it into a solid fact of some sort or other. It's somewhat embarrassing actually. I've just spent a couple of paragraphs proving beyond all reasonable doubt that Claire would be unable to trace the fingerprints she had lifted from the French words because of her status as a failed private detective very important rock musician soon to become a politician. In spite of all this, Claire has managed to get a solid match on the fingerprints from a bloke in Interpol she met at a party last week in London. I had not previously suspected that Claire was the type to go gallivanting across the Channel to parties in the midst of writing a very important rock song, but it appears that she is. I shall have to keep a closer watch on her in the future. Not to mention the past.

Such investigations put to one side (for the moment), it seems that Claire has discovered something rather interesting. She has discovered a name the matches the fingerprints she earlier lifted from the French words using her previously little used private detective kit. She had bought it cheaply from an ad in the back of a magazine. This was in fact the first time that Claire had ever attempted to make use of the kit. The shipping time was so horrendous that by the time the kit had arrived, Claire had already moved beyond private investigation to the rock music industry. Many great music careers have begun in this fashion. A number of rather less great ones have also begun because of a shipping delay. Britney Spears, for example. I bet you didn't know that she started out wanting to be a private detective. It's hard to know which is worse. Britney Spears PI, or Britney spears alien rock child of Satan. I only hope she quickly tires of it and moves on to politics. I for one would sleep more soundly at night. Especially if she ended up as President. I'd vote for her. Not that they count my vote, not being a citizen and so on, but I'd send in a postal vote. Possibly it would work in Florida.

You may by now be thinking that obviously Claire was not so great at being a private detective, which is why she ended up as an important rock musician. This is not the case. Claire was in fact a rather exceptional private detective. She was let down by the long delay when it came to ordering her professional private detecting kit, and because of this was not allowed to join the union and so was not allowed to advertise her services in anything but the lowest places. While members in good standing with the union were allowed to post hand bills at eye level on any wall they could find for this purpose, Claire had no choice but to drop leaflets in the gutter. This was a rather big disadvantage, as I'm sure you can see. Very few people search for a private detective in the gutter. This is in fact why you can find so many private detectives in the gutter. They are hiding from their fans. The same is true for rock musicians and politicians, but hiding in the gutter is rarely as successful for them. They lack the disguise skills that private detectives take for granted. I hear you asking me to back pedal for a moment here. If rock musicians and politicians start out as private detectives, then why don't the retain their skills of disguise? There is no easy answer to this question, but it's believed to involve orange juice in some highly unorthodox manner. Suffice to say - if you are in the gutter looking for stars, don't look up into the sky. Gutters are city dwelling creatures, and cities never have stars in the sky. They all have private villas in the country. You can look at the stars whilst lying in a gutter, but only if you keep your eyes firmly focused within an arc that traverses about fifteen degrees from street level and look beyond the private detectives to the rock musicians and politicians. Many of the private detectives will be disguised as rock musicians and politicians to more successfully blend in, but you can always spot a private detective by the way they gaze longingly at garbage collectors and never drink orange juice. Rock musicians and politicians have sunk to low to bother about dreaming of being a garbage collector, and guzzle orange juice by the orange. It's has to be freshly squeezed, or they melt. This is useful information if you are planning to dissolve a rock musician in the near future.

As I said earlier before I was cruelly distracted by a politician (pesky things politicians. They're always trying to get you to talk about them and their rock musician buddies instead of talking about private investigation. This is because they are jealous as slugs that you have seen through their little scheme and understand that in the way of the world private detectives are far more important than they are. Merely be kissing a baby in an antagonistic manner, a politician caused me to go off into the shameful digression that made up most of the last paragraph. And indeed most of this one. Ah. Well, at least it's a handy illustration of how wily and cunning politicians can be when it comes to causing digression. Why, just last week I was down at the shopping centre trying to buy some fruit, and a politician prevented me simply be standing in the car park - which I could not even see from my vantage point over the fruit shelves - and handing out leaflets. And. Whoops. They are very, very good at this you see).

The name on the fingerprints was Anton the Alligator. Claire had called in her Interpol contact (I'm still worried about that. Fancy dashing off to London for a party without telling me.) and he assured her that it was perfectly usual and not at all upsetting to find that, under sufficient magnification, fingerprints often did indeed have names written on them. Or by them, however it is that fingerprints work these days. I have a hard time keeping up with the technology. Presumably it's something to do with genetics. The interpol contact explained the process at great length and, luckily, distance from Claire over the phone. When a child is born, it has no fingerprints to speak of, and so they print the feet instead for future identification. It's only after a name is chosen that the fingerprints begin to develop in such a manner that the name is what makes up all the lines. In very, very small writing. Some scientists have postulated that when a person changes their name, for example a women getting married and taking her husbands name or a criminal inventing an alias, the fingerprints do in fact change. Most people think this theory is not entirely correct. Not at all correct in fact. It does serve the useful purpose of explaining why it was that Claire found the name Anton the Alligator in the small print of the fingerprints on the French words. It doesn't really matter at any rate. I expect these technical details bore you as much as they bore me. I only wish Claire had found them as boring. She asked the Interpol connection in London to explain things in far more detail than was really required and indeed I was tempted to break the connection with some sort of phone outage or other. Unfortunately I couldn't remember whether the best way to break a phone connection between Paris and London is to dig up and sever an undersea cable or to make a satellite explode. I was on the point of giving the Interpol officer a severe case of unnecessary hiccups, when Claire brought the conversation to an end. I refuse to report the full content of that conversation here, as it would only upset me. I've given you the general gist of it without any of the meaningful silences. She's a good girl, really. None of this matters to you of course. I'll deal with it in good time. It is enough to narrate that the fingerprints found on the French words did indeed spell out Anton the Alligator quite clearly. Well, the name was in French of course, but since Claire couldn't read French, they were handily translated by an ingenious device of some sort that was small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough to use as a self defence device should it become necessary. It could translate German quite alarmingly, for example.

Claire looked in her private detectives list of useful contact numbers to see if she had anybody nearby who could help her run a trace on Anton the Alligator. Her French contact will be very ugly, as in fact will all future men that Claire comes in contact with. They are extremely unlikely to speak French, however long they have lived in the country. This is because I want to know exactly what they say.