Ballinger's pitch, when it came, was as reasonable as it was inevitable. We bumped into each other in Crouch End. He was just going for a drink, did I want one?

Once we were in the pub and we had our drinks, he was straight to the point. He'd figured out what I'd been trying so hard to hide from the people I was playing poker with, and he had a proposition. He had the contacts to get me into some big games, out-of-town money. Out-of-country money, too, occasionally. It would make us rich. Well, it would make him richer than it made me, but they were, after all, his contacts.

The downside, of course, was that if I said no, my peculiar talents would become common knowledge and I'd be lucky to get out of London without incurring some sort of damage. People hate to be made fools of.

I could simply have asked for time to think about it and then fled, I suppose, but nobody likes to run away from threats. Call it male pride: that balless wonder crack had hurt, deep down in some place where I wasn't properly aware of it.

From then on things seemed to take on a momentum all of their own. Ballinger's contacts mainlined me into the deep vein of illegal gambling that goes on in London, an endless tour of subterranean rooms, big purposeful men with sharp suits, foreign accents and too much jewellery, hour after hour of passive smoking while I took the occasional peek into the other players' minds to see what cards they were holding.

Without amplification, all you can really pick up is impressions, but that was usually enough to give me an edge. You can have the world's best poker face, but you can't lock down every emotional reaction, no matter how trivial.

Sometimes I won big, lost small. Other times I won small, lost big, nothing that couldn't be ascribed to luck and a certain skill with the cards. Ballinger wanted to go for the big score, but I had to be careful. People get suspicious, and with some of these people being suspected and being dead are more or less the same thing.

I honestly don't think he ever understood my need for caution. Maybe he'd seen too many risks of his own pay off to believe that anyone else could possibly need to be careful. Of course, he hadn't grown up telepathic in a country where some of the Witchcraft Acts still haven't been repealed and there are pick horror stories on the tabloid shows every week.

Having said that, there was really only one bad moment. But that was so truly bad that I almost told Ballinger that it was all over.

It was at a big house out in Kent, perched on the curling brow of the North Downs not far from Maidstone, the home of some ailing blue-blood fatally addicted to Chance. There were pale squares on the walls where paintings had been sold to feed his addiction, the stables were piled with old furniture, the Scotch was the kind of stuff you can buy at any supermarket.

Lord Whatever-it-was had assembled a fairly motley band for the game, mostly minor London faces I knew by reputation, a crimson-faced Yorkshire businessman who brought with him a daughter of such fragile beauty that I assumed at first that she was his mistress. Ballinger had sold the game to me as easy pickings; none of these people was precisely world-class. Hardly any need to read minds at all, probably roll them up on talent alone, old son.

But fifteen minutes before the game was due to start a big grey car pulled up outside the house, and from it climbed three men. They all had Central European accents. One was a sallow little man in his mid-fifties in a cheap suit, the second was expensively-dressed and built like a bull. The third was tall and thin and patrician, with an impressive mane of white hair, a tanned face and a walking stick topped with a cluster of rock crystal the size of my fist. His Lordship fussed about him, called him 'Baron,' and received polite disdain in return.

We went into the musty, dimly-lit games room. The Baron's bodyguard took up position by the door, and I expected the Baron to sit with us at the table. But instead he took a chair at the side of the room and proceeded to chat up the businessman's daughter. It was the sallow little man who sat down opposite me, and then I knew.

He was the only other pick I'd ever met, and beneath the panic I was ashamed. Ashamed of myself. Ashamed for him. He was the Baron's creature, just as I was Ballinger's. Peculiar pets, sent into battle. Except the Baron made little pretence. He boasted to the girl of the little man's `luck,' told her of how it was fashionable, these days, in the highest circles of European aristocracy, to use a proxy at the tables, it being dreadfully de trop to actually play oneself. The girl fawned at his erudite conversation, giggled at his witty repartee. The bodyguard brought them more of His Lordship's cheap whisky. They might have been in another room altogether, for all the attention they paid the game.

And all the while the Baron's pick and I looked at each other. Knowing.

I lost heavily that night, whether in pure blind panic or from a sense of preservation I'll never know. At the end of it the Baron tucked his winnings away into a Gucci wallet that had been restitched almost well enough to look brand-new and offered me a ride back to London. I thanked him and said I was booked into an hotel nearby.

As the Baron and his entourage walked out to their car, the little man touched my shoulder. He didn't say anything, didn't even look at me. Just touched me, as if acknowledging our fraternity and the essentially comic nature of the Universe which had led to us being here together tonight.

I'd missed the last train back to London, and I didn't have enough money for an hotel, but I didn't care. I just wandered away from the house, found a field, and slept under a tree.

Ballinger didn't seem overly concerned when I told him about it the next day. He wasn't even that annoyed about losing his stake money. He'd heard of the Baron and his tame pick, of course, but he hadn't known they were in the country. I'd probably done the right thing by losing. These disinherited aristocrats hate to lose, old son. That's why they cheat. The Baron can't get a proper game anywhere, he's been thrown out of so many clubs. Relies on our own dear penniless upper classes, the stupid new industrial money, small-timers who don't know any better. Probably be lucky if he breaks even, this trip.

And he tapped me on the shoulder, just like the Baron's pick had, to show we were partners, not master and creature.