‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, patting me on the arm and chuckling. ‘Toccata beat me so hard with a broom handle when I first arrived that I had concussion for a week. It’s just kind of her thing.’

‘I wish she would find some other thing.’

I went to look for Laura in the filing room, and when she saw me she offered me a seat at one of the desks.

‘So, tell me about the Gronk,’ she said excitedly, drawing up a chair herself. ‘Did you actually see her?’

I repeated the story with as much detail as I could, which wasn’t much. I’d been unconscious from the moment she arrived to the moment she left. Laura made notes, and nodded vigorously at the smallest detail, but when I’d finished she looked disappointed. It wasn’t the slam dunk she’d been hoping for.

‘So no pictures?’ she asked.

‘Not a single one.’

‘Treacle has already dismissed it as Hibernational Narcosis,’ she said with a sigh, ‘yours. He thinks you killed Lucky Ned and are now blanking it from your mind.’

‘Do I look like the sort of person who would bite off a finger?’

‘You bit off Gary Findlay’s ear.’

‘You heard about that?’

‘No secrets in the Twelve.’

‘So I’ve realised.’

She fell silent for a moment and stared at the floor. I looked around the room. My accelerated course at the Academy hadn’t included filing duties.

‘How does this work?’ I asked.

Laura, who seemed not to be able to feel down for more than a few moments, told me she loved filing owing to its ‘simple elegance’ and instructed me, with a worryingly high level of enthusiasm, how things should be done. Not the best or most logical way, but the SkillZero way – simple enough for everyone to use, yet complex enough to function efficiently as a usable database – and easily understandable by anyone with a pass in General Skills.

‘Shamanic Bob mentioned something called Active Control Dreaming,’ I said while we were laboriously updating minor details to the individual cards, and by a complicated series of notches and holes, allowing them to be cross-referenced in an ingenious manner.

‘Active Control is like Zebricorns and the missing 14th Ottoman,’ said Laura. ‘Myths with their roots in reality. Sure, Don Hector and HiberTech were looking into dreams you can control, but it’s difficult to gauge what success they had. After all, it’s possible you only dreamed you were controlling them.’

‘And Dreamspace?’ I asked.

‘Meeting inside dreams? Even more far-fetched. Anecdotally there were a few successes mixed heavily with an abundance of failure, but it’s a difficult area of research. Messing around with the hibernatory subconscious was never a risk-free occupation. There were stories of psychotic episodes, spontaneous sleepdeath, people supposedly trapped in the Dreamstate, stuff like that. Fortean Times talked about little else in the seventies.’