Although your suggestion is interesting (I’m glad to hear of the demon Gaap, in particular!) I think it’s a bit too much of a stretch, especially since there’s no homophone indicator. I think “?”s are used pretty widely to just mean “perhaps a dodgy cryptic definition” (among other things). I think the simpler explanation is probably the intended one, myself.

I’m a bit late, as always, to add comments and I don’t know if anyone will bother to respond, but I am still unhappy about the explanation of 11A. Nobody has explained the us of ? at the end of the clue which usually indicates something very cryptic. The explanations given so far don’t do that, and the wording of ‘gravy train’ isn’t really explained.

It is a long shot but could it be something to do with the homophone link between GAP and GAAP. The latter actually has two meanings and the links are below. One is the standard accounting principles which would seem to apply to the clue. The second refers to Gaap the mythical demon who is there to keep people on the straight and narrow. People on the gravy train are not usually on the straight and narrow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAAP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaap

If anyone is reading this, what do you think?

Best wishes.

Good to get it exactly from you. I felt sure I’d seen something of the sort in newspaper columns etc. Sorry about the typos etc. I must have been a little under the affluence of incohol!

Re Heart as singular. You were right earlier of course that it stands for the card suit Hearts. But can’t it also be used in that context in the singular? I am not a bridge or whist player, and others will know better, but I would not be surprised if one found find a description of a game where ‘one H’ is used as an abbreviation for one Heart card (e.g. in a hand) or one Heart trick. Perhaps other late commers might comment.

All this has , of course, nothing to do with Gordius as such, although the two clues I mentioned gave me a melancholic feeling of going way back in time – in fact, in the 50s/60s my late father was an ‘arbeider’ [one who works in a factory], a Dutch word that is almost identical to ‘arbeiter’.

BTW, looking back at this puzzle [that I didn't like yesterday] I am not so negative anymore. Apart from 10 and 11ac [which deal with something beyond me],both 22′s and the H for the singular ‘heart’, there is not that much wrong with it.