It felt like I was in front of Mother Fallopia, being harangued about some dumb prank we’d played back at the Pool. I knew one thing, though: I couldn’t tell them I’d seen it all in a dream.

‘Because,’ I began, ‘Birgitta had said she was married to someone named Charlie and I was trying to figure out  . . . figure out  . . . think, think  . . . probate.’

‘Probate?’

‘Yes, probate. Who to give all her paintings to when she died.’

Toccata stared at me, her one eye unblinking. It was a heavy stare like treacle, which seemed to pour heavily down my neck and pool in my armpits.

‘What are you, her executor or something?’

‘It’s a hobby,’ I said, ‘sort of like that TV programme where they look for relatives who have been left stuff. What’s it called?’

‘Heir Hunters?’

‘That’s the one. Heir Hunters.’

‘You’re lying again,’ said Toccata, ‘but I’ve no idea why. Birgitta married to Webster, you say?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, flushing a deep shade of crimson.

Jonesy had pulled her file as I had been stammering out my pathetic attempt to extricate myself from the jam.

‘If they were,’ she said, ‘it was off grid – which might point towards her being Campaign for Real Sleep, too. He must have been made of pretty stern stuff to not give her up, and Hooke must have gone seriously to town to reduce him to little more than a nightwalker.’

‘Hooke’s an animal,’ agreed Toccata. ‘No one I know has ever withstood a prolonged Dreamspace attack.’

I think I knew that, too, through the memory I shared with Webster: that Birgitta had been RealSleep too, and that, yes, Webster didn’t give her up and instead of legging it off-sector she had stayed, her cover burned, in a scuzzy out-of-the-way corner of nowhere, waiting for an instruction that might never come out of loyalty to the cause she loved. Hoping, perhaps, to make a difference if the need arose.

‘Okay, then,’ said Jonesy, turning to Toccata, ‘but what do we do?’

Toccata sucked her lip and tapped the fax that had just come in.

‘They’ll probably have cc-ed this to HiberTech Security,’ she said, ‘but unlike us, they don’t know Webster’s connection to Birgitta.’

‘We should check her room,’ said Jonesy, ‘in case there is anything incriminating to be found there.’

The words didn’t register at first. I had to ask her to say them again.

‘I said,’ she repeated in a testy fashion, ‘that we should check Birgitta’s room. It might throw up something of interest.’

It would throw up a lot more than just something of interest. It would throw up Birgitta, exactly where I’d left her: clean and tidy and fed and oh-so-obviously harboured.

‘Any objections, Wonky?’

I tried to look like the sort of person who wasn’t about to be professionally, legally and socially destroyed before the hour was out.