‘You see?’ said Aurora. ‘This could all be so painless. And you know what? I don’t even need you to tell me where it is. All you have to do is think it. And you will, eventually. Room 106,’ she said to her monitor, ‘get the team over there.’

I concentrated hard on the first random thought that came into my head in order to block her out: the time Billy DeFroid found the nightwalker in the orchard back at the Pool. The apple trees were still without leaves, the dry-stone wall had partially collapsed under the weight of the drifts, and the remnants of snowmen, always the last to thaw, were still on the ground. The nightwalker was a man, middle-aged, close to starvation and mumbling.

‘Hidden up the chimney?’ said Aurora with a smile as the information popped annoyingly into my head. ‘Which side? Doesn’t matter, you’ve just thought it.’

She relayed the intel to her monitor: ‘Up the chimney, left—’

She stopped talking, looked at me, then took a step forwards and stared deeply into my eyes.

‘—cancel that. It’s in the ticket office to the funfair just behind the museum.’

A second later and we were in the ticket office, the dusty floor strewn with fliers from last year’s attractions, the temperature minus twenty and only a meagre light reaching us through the snow-covered windows.

‘Bottom drawer of the desk,’ said Aurora with a smirk. I leant against the wall near the door, then slid down until I was sitting on the floor, arms around head.

‘I could be bluffing,’ I said in a despondent tone, shivering in the cold, my breath showing white, ‘perhaps it’s not there at all.’

‘It was a good try,’ she conceded, ‘I almost went with your Cambrensis story. That’s when experience counts. To know instinctively when someone is lying.’

She laughed, relaxed, then sat on a handy chair. Out in the real world, HiberTech agents would be battling through the blizzard to converge on the ticket office.

She pulled a hip flask from her pocket and took a swig.

‘I don’t drink out there any more,’ she explained, ‘but in here I can do as I wish. You don’t get drunk in dreams, not properly, more’s the pity.’

She offered the flask to me but I shook my head and she replaced it in her pocket.

‘You’d have made a good dream analyst,’ she said in a quiet, conversational manner. ‘Your technique is clumsy and impetuous, but with a genuine flair.’

‘If I agree to work for you,’ I said, ‘will you retrieve Birgitta?’

‘I think that particular ship has sailed, Bucko. You should have negotiated when you had the chance. But heigh-ho, life’s full of disappointments. Or rather, your life is full of disappointments. Mine’s been unusually rich.’