‘This is Dr Theophilus Gwynne,’ said Foulnap, stepping in. ‘He was, until his tragic, untimely and very faked death three years ago, a junior member of HiberTech’s Sleep Sciences Division.’

‘Then you know all about Project Lazarus?’

‘Actually, I was very junior,’ he admitted, ‘logging data mostly, equipment maintenance, tea, bit of laundry, cooking, that sort of thing.’

‘We found out about Project Lazarus yesterday,’ said Foulnap, ‘and quite by chance.’

‘So, what is it?’

‘One moment,’ said Dr Gwynne, making safe a booby-trap detonation device on the door that was attached to not a single Golgotha but two. Unlike Fodder’s, these looked to be live.

Dr Gwynne and I Winter embraced; he smelled of burned-out electric motors, pear drops and solder. Once we’d parted I took a step inside the room and looked around. The ceiling was ornate plaster, and the wooden panelling and glass-fronted cabinets suggested use as a library in days gone by. There was a fireplace at one end, long disused, and most of the floor space was taken up by machines liberally festooned with blinking lights, knobs, dials and switches. Sitting on a bar stool in the middle of it all was a nightwalker doing probably the most complex tricks I’d ever seen with a yo-yo. She looked vacant enough, but was connected to the machine by a series of wires glued to pads on her head. When she yo-yoed, the trace on the oscilloscopes jumped and danced.

‘That’s Wendy,’ said Dr Gwynne, indicating the nightwalker. ‘She’s helping me with my nightwalker retrieval experiments.’

‘How’s that working out?’ I asked.

‘Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive,’ replied Dr Gwynne. ‘Have you met Josh? He’s a recent acquisition.’

I turned, and sitting on a wicker chair was the receptionist from HiberTech. He was reading a book and chuckling occasionally.

‘Josh defected from HiberTech,’ said Foulnap, ‘and brought Wendy with him. Coffee?’

I said that would be very welcome and he told me to have a look around, so I walked over to Josh.

‘Oh, hullo, Worthing,’ he said in a cheery manner. ‘How are things?’

‘Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass.’

He laughed, told me that weather forecasts were often wrong, and showed me a pencil that was sharpened on both ends.

‘I call it the “Twincil”,’ he said. ‘Always a problem breaking the lead, right? Now all you have to do is turn it around and – bam – keep on drawing.’

‘It’s kind of useful having an eraser on the other end.’

‘I thought of that too,’ he said, producing a pencil with the eraser on both ends. ‘This is the “Biraser”. You can make twice as many mistakes, and unlike a conventional pencil, it never gets any shorter. What do you think?’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just have two pencils?’