I could feel it too, a dull ache that gnawed in my joints, and the deep-seated sense of nausea that belongs only with consciously delaying hibernation.

The coffees arrived. The proprietress scowled at me, stared daggers at the dead woman, then departed again.

‘I had this call last week,’ said Foulnap, stirring his coffee, ‘from a woman who was going to go deep in the family’s traditional sleep-spot, up in the hills beyond Abergavenny. Family farm or something, near Cwmyoy. Anyway, she’d packed the car, but the duvet was sticking out and jammed the boot lid. You know what she did?’

‘What did she do?’

‘She set fire to the duvet.’

‘Did that work?’

‘Worked really well. By the time I arrived, the car was completely burned out. All her food, her bedding, Morphenox – all gone. I had to resource everything.’

‘How did you resource her Morphenox?’

‘Let’s just say I know a girl who knows a guy who knows a person who knows a girl.’

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like last season’s acorns seared with a paraffin blowtorch.

‘This coffee’s terrible,’ I said.

‘Welcome to the Winter.’

We chatted some more. He told me an amusing story about how hibernating mammoths near Treherbert had been false-dawned by the encroaching underground fires, and how they had been herded out through the snow and up and over the mountain to Hirwauna in a Hannibalesque adventure that had been the subject of a best-selling book and was soon to be a musical, using the puppeteers from Warphant.

‘Actually, the mammoths sort of did it on their own,’ said Foulnap, ‘nose to tail, like some great big shaggy-haired pachydermical charm bracelet.’

We chatted politics as the clock wound round to our departure time. I asked Foulnap where the restrooms were and after he’d told me, suggested I left Mrs Tiffen with him.

I thanked him, left the tearooms and walked down the platform to the toilets. Once I’d had a pee, I washed my hands and then soaked my face in cold water and stared in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and seemed sunken into my head, my pallor grey. My ears had started ringing, my fingers and hands felt oddly large and I’d had several hot sweats. I’d been told to expect any or all of these symptoms as indications of Sleep Deprivation Narcosis, but as with altitude sickness, there was no good indication of who would get it, who would not, and to what degree of severity. But the thing I feared most was hallucinations. Had them once during a bad fever, and imagined myself playing pass-the-parcel – but no matter how much paper I tore off, the parcel never got any smaller.