Sometimes, but not always, they left him a note, stating their case. And sometimes he found a coffee-table volume, prominently displayed, as if trying to impress him.
Occasionally, the visit turned out to be not for themselves, but for others. And he would regret, in the letter he would send them afterwards as a follow-up, but those others would have to apply on their own behalf, though he always made it clear that he applauded the sentiment.
Each visit became an arrangement, an ordering, one entry repeated in a row of vast permutations in his database; a piece of music practised over and over like the twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
Whatever they left for him to see, and whatever they craved for him not to see, they could not, in the end, deceive him. He saw the ghosts of their outlines leaning against the walls, and the soft dents their heads made on the feather pillows of the super-king beds, and the deep imprint of their boots on the stairs.
The first thing he did when he undertook a valuation was to select his methodology. His arms ached with the weight of carrying it around with him and he sighed with relief as he put down his case in the centre of a room and wiped its handles, flicked open its combination locks.
The contents of the case were not always indicative of the outcome: a homing pigeon did not always mean vermin; a pale rabbit did not always foretell children; and the littlebrown hoodoo-voodoo doll did not always mean the otherworld.
Those who understood their own value, and trusted that he would too; those were the most pleasurable visits. Those people left him familiars, knowing he would hold fast to their wishes; respect their beliefs and their possessions – not feral cats but Persians with strange opaque eyes that wound round his legs as he stepped through the door; an elf owl flying up in the attic, crying in the eaves.
Sometimes, but not always, he gave them what they asked for. More often, he gave them what they did not.
As he left this one last case, a gibbous moon shone the way ahead of him, the early-morning light made a misty patchwork of the playing fields and the whitewashed cricket pavilion. His laptop case felt strangely weightless in his grasp, as if defying the gravity of the situation; his findings floating out of his keyboard and his memory sticks and drifting up into the air around him.
He looked up, into the reflection of the earth in the sky and saw a lack of stars there. The truths, he decided, would not need him for so very much longer now.
