Gagged [antikvár]

PROLOGUE Sunday 24 September, 11 p.m. When Jasper Philips pushed open the door of the hotel room, four things struck him as being wrong. Really, very vnrong indeed. First was the floor. It didn't go with the rest of the room at all. From what he had seen of the hotel interior so far, Jasper had expected a fancy carpet. Plush, patterned and so deep he'd have to jump up and down to see what shoes he was wearing. What Jasper hadn't expected was paper. A4 typing paper. Hundreds of sheets of it. Some crumpled, some torn in half, some screwed up in tight white balls. It blanketed the room almost entirely, from the doorway where Jasper stood, all the way over to the second unusual aspect of the room, namely the strangled corpse by the bed. The third thing that struck Jasper was the noise. It sounded like somebody sprinkling cat litter on a Billy Connolly LP going at the wrong speed. It wasn't, of course. It was Angus Fisher, slumped grotesquely over a laptop computer at the dressing table in the centre of the room. Angus Fisher. One half of the Angus & Malachy Madcap Madhouse — an exhaustingly rubbish variety act he'd shared the bill with at the Edinburgh Festival that summer.