‘So if you lose the wager,’ I said slowly, ‘you lose the genetic rights to two children, Treacle and you make a fortune – but HiberTech obtain legal access to a couple of kids with a potentially valuable genome?’

‘Pretty much. But if I win the wager,’ she added, ‘I get no money but retain my children’s rights.’

‘You’re very brave.’

‘Nope,’ she said sadly, ‘I’m just a girl who’s all out of options – and who had rubbish parents.’

‘It could have been worse,’ I said, ‘they could have harvested and then sold all your eggs the day after your sixteenth birthday to pay for a, I don’t know – a new roof, kitchen extension and a minibus.’

‘I guess. But this is the only wager Treacle would take. The Gronk is out there. I just have to get some evidence. Keep that camera handy, won’t you?’

She jumped down from the counter where she’d been sitting, gave me a cheery smile and returned to her work. She was technically a winsomniac, but was earning her tuck. There was a world of difference between the deserving and undeserving awake.

My attention wandered back to the wall that was covered with the pictures of the missing. A sea of faces, all absent. Most ages, every gender, no pattern. As I scanned the posters a particular set of eyes caught my attention, sunk deep in the overlapping mass of lost souls. They were the same eyes I’d seen staring back at me from the Polaroid in my dream, the one that had been taken of me and Birgitta by the photographer on the Gower. Charles. Birgitta’s Charles. I reached out and plucked the picture from the board.

The missing man used to work at HiberTech as an orderly, and his name, I read, was Charles Webster. He went missing three years before, just after starting a Winter season – pretty much as Birgitta had described her missing husband.

And that wasn’t possible.

I couldn’t have recognised him because I didn’t know what he looked like. Reality first, then dream. I felt myself grow woozy again, and oak-dappled sunlight began to filter through to the office floor. I steadied myself against a table and took long, slow breaths. Treacle hadn’t noticed my attack of the narcs, Laura was busy filing and Toccata was still ranting behind the glass partition. I calmed myself, and repeated Birgitta Birgitta Birgitta Birgitta to quell the sense of rising panic. It worked, and now calmer, I ran over the likely scenario: I’d clothed my dream with Charles Webster’s name and face retrospectively. That he had the same first name as mine was coincidence, nothing more.

‘What you got there?’

I jumped, but it was only Treacle.

‘Some guy named Webster,’ I mumbled, passing him the flyer, ‘went missing three years ago.’

Treacle stared at the picture and nodded.