Unable to feign the curious eye movements of her previously split personality, Toccata had taken to wearing an eyepatch that she simply switched when she took on a different persona.

‘Do you think anyone suspects anything?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘Too much going on. And although it could be beneficial for me to stay on at HiberTech from a RealSleep espionage point of view, I have no recollection of anything Aurora got up to, so it would only be a matter of time before I was rumbled. I’m putting it about that I need to retire on mental health grounds. I don’t think anyone’s surprised, and quite a few people are actually quite relieved.’

Shamanic Bob brought our coffees and we waited until he had departed before continuing our conversation. Toccata had woken that night over at HiberTech, and while feigning to be Aurora, specifically ordered that I not be killed as I had ‘helped out considerably’ and that the nightwalkers were no longer scheduled for retirement. She got me out of HiberTech the following morning when the storm had abated, but not before I had gone to sleep again – and dreamed, big time.

The thing is, you don’t need a Somnagraph when you have a helpful entity like the Gronk to take you into the deep dreams of nightwalkers, don’t need a cylinder from Don Hector when you came second in the Swansea Town Memory Bee with six hundred and forty-eight random words – taking precisely six minutes to recite – memorised after only two readings. Back in the Cambrensis, before I went to see Foulnap in the museum, I played the cylinder twelve times to memorise it, each time with the nightwalkers gathering behind the door. I kind of figured HiberTech would squeeze the location of the cylinder out of me, and it’s always good to have a back-up, just in case. I’ll never know for sure, but I think Jack Logan had planned something like this all along. Perhaps not with the Gronk, but certainly regarding my memory.

‘Where will you go?’ I asked Toccata. ‘In retirement, I mean.’

‘I have a house on the Gower,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to visit me every year. Last two weeks in August. I don’t have many friends.’

‘Neither do I.’

So I did, every year until she died eighteen years later, of natural causes. Sometimes we walked to the abandoned lighthouse at the end of Whiteford Sands, sometimes to Oxwich Point, where we paused at the oddly shaped tree before we made our way down to the sea and then along the coastal path to Port Eynon for fish and chips. On the last day I spent with her every year we made a point of going to the Mumbles Pier for cockles and laver bread on toast with thick-cut bacon and a large mug of tea, all consumed outside, the gulls scavenging for scraps.

*   *   *