First up is Errol Walker, a cop, “a DI for London Metro,” who is a little too free with his fists. Suspended, he introduces himself as “Error.” “Well,” he tells Trile Chandry, a Pakistani man who will become his buddy, “it was supposed to be Errol—Errol Flynn and all—but who wants a name like that? And then with the way I was always screwing things up, flunking out at maths, somebody came up with Error and it just seemed to stick.”
Now to Trile. “Actually, back home,” he explains to Error, “it is two syllables, not one. Tree-Lay. But once I moved here, I got tired of telling people they were saying it wrong. And so I decided, along with a new home, I would have a new name too.” So, yes, Trile and Error.
Trile works in Receiving at a mysterious firm called Tyler-Downs. What does Trile “receive”? “None of us really know.” One day he happens to see something very strange changing hands. Shortly thereafter his boss is fired. Something isn’t right.
Meantime, Error quietly drops in at the station and finds a fellow cop going through the missing persons files. Error notices Christian Matterly is missing. Matterly, he’s told, is “some high mucky-muck over at the Tate. Apparently he’s some genius at fleecing the rich, getting them all to contribute.”
Somehow Tyler-Downs, Matterly, and the Tate gallery are all connected. Before it’s over Trile will find and hide the something that is Nothing (to gaze at it is to almost lose oneself in darkness) which will then go missing again, and Trile will be incarcerated (“Outside it is the day called Thursday. Inside it is just now. A day that is just like all the rest, so it doesn’t deserve a name”). Error must put the plot pieces together which turns out to be an art.
It's a delightful romp proving once again that he who has a Tate’s is lost.
