‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘I bought a date with her at a charity auction in aid of the Sector Twelve Pool. She didn’t find any of my jokes or anecdotes remotely interesting, then threatened to bite me on the face if I tried to kiss her when we said goodnight. She didn’t elaborate, but I figured a second date was out of the question.’

‘Very astute of you.’

He held up the two thumbs and stared at them.

‘The large thumb was from a travelling sire named Eddie Tangiers,’ I said, ‘the smaller from a female, also Siddons, mid-twenties, freshly married.’

‘I’ll call Lloyd,’ he muttered, ‘he’ll know.’

He wrote down ‘Tangiers’ and ‘Manderlay’ and ‘Newlywed Siddons’ on a slip of paper and went off to confirm them.

‘What do you think?’ asked Jonesy, who had finished her report and was hunting in vain for a stapler.

‘What do I think about what?’

‘About Treacle.’

‘Owning Laura’s child options makes him something of a heel.’

‘To a bondsman, that’s good business – and legal. They’ll both be millionaires when Laura hits eighteen; I can see her point, though. I meant aside from that.’

‘He’s very keen on you.’

‘I know,’ she said, looking all crestfallen. ‘Do you think I should just kill him and make it look like a Gronk attack? It would help Laura out, too.’

‘You could pay back the dowry,’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, right – and who would I borrow the cash from? Treacle himself?’

‘No, you could—’

I didn’t get to finish my sentence as the door to Toccata’s office had opened. I turned, expecting to see Winter Consul Toccata. But it wasn’t – it was Aurora. I opened my mouth to greet her but then stopped. Although she looked the same, her demeanour seemed utterly different. Aurora had been relaxed and friendly, whereas this woman seemed sharp, driven, and utterly without humour. She strode forward with a purposeful swagger and a clearly aggressive sense of purpose. The only other differences I could see were in her clothes, which were now Consular uniform, and her eyes. Unlike Aurora’s, her right was gazing absently off and looking blank, and her left fixed me with a steely glare.

But they weren’t twins. Aurora and Toccata were the same person.

Toccata

‘ . . . The barograph recorded atmospheric pressure as a trace of ink on a 12hr strip of paper and was not only useful for gauging the weather, but could detect a pulse weapon’s discharge at a kilometre, less in a snowstorm. A skilled reader could often tell not just the weapon’s power and vortex gradient from the bump or spike profile, but the range, too  . . . ’

– Handbook of Winterology, 1st edition, Hodder & Stoughton

‘Well, well,’ said Toccata, ‘the forgotten sleeper of the Sarah Siddons. Charlie Worthing, isn’t it?’

Confused by the sudden turn of events, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.