Soon after that night, which Porky now thought of as The Night, Porky had started to get a vague feeling that something was wrong. On The Night there had been so much happening that he had had no time for suspicions. Nor had he had any reason for them. There had been so much excitement that he hadn’t been thinking straight. But who had? Porky had thought “no one”, but now he wasn’t so sure. Now he was pretty sure that at least one person on The Night had been thinking straight. Porky had been driven back to look at the CCTV tapes. And the more he watched the bigger the nagging feeling that something was wrong became. A lot of things didn’t add up.
The bare bones of The Night were this. At about 8.00pm Porky had been in his office in Casino Byzantium. A group of X-Pets had arrived for a brief stopover before going on to Club Magik. They were the cat Cheese, Will the Pit the terrier, the three Corgi brothers, “Bloodbath” Henry the cat and the Hamster of the Moment, Harry. They had played for about an hour and won. Nothing big. Porky had made his usual move, trying to get the guys to stay on and play more. That was usually easy, at least with humans. Feed in a couple of girls, a bottle of champagne for the winner, that kind of thing. Porky had asked the X-Pets up to his office for a chat before they left for Club Magik. He had a hard time persuading them to stay, but they had stayed. They never did go to Club Magik. They stayed at Casino Byzantium until 5.00am and played. Played and won very big.
Now Porky was watching Cheese early in his Texas Hold ‘Em session on The Night. When Cheese had got to the table he had found the usual bunch of night-outers and half decent players. But there was one fly in the ointment and a big huge one. Zak Zargosa had also been at the table. Zargosa was the best Hold ‘Em player in the world. It had got to the stage where very few people in Britain would play him in a serious game. The expected outcome was that Zargosa would clean up and maybe not take too long about it. What had happened was that Zargosa, and everyone else, had been cleaned out by Cheese the cat. And the pot had been huge.
House of Glass 