Glad to have a few moments free of the relentless plucking of the bouzouki, I wandered absently onto the station concourse. It was a large, airy chamber with a glass ceiling now covered in snow, the light soft and directionless, the interior dim. The ticket office was still open but unmanned, and Welsh Tourist Office posters covered the walls.

I heard a shout from somewhere outside and I frowned. It sounded a lot like ‘Lobster’, but there was only one person who might be saying things like that, and they shouldn’t be anywhere but safely in Mrs Nesbit’s.

Mrs Tiffen.

With a sudden sense of foreboding I ran as fast as I could to the front entrance and pushed the heavy door open, the sharp air outside hitting me like a wall of ice. The light was failing and the wind was blowing the snow into rotating eddies among the buildings. There was no one to be seen, but I noted fresh tracks in the snow running out from the cab rank.

‘The taxi before you,’ I said to the driver of the remaining cab, an old man with a face so full of soft pendulous folds I don’t think he’d seen the Summer, ever, ‘who was in it?’

He stared at the Consul’s badge I was showing him.

‘I didn’t see the man but the woman looked kind of  . . . ’

‘ . . . dead?’

‘Yeah.’

After asking him to find out where the cab had gone and then to stand by to take me there, I ran back towards Mrs Nesbit’s, almost slipping and falling as I trod the snow onto the marble floor. The bouzouki was still lying on the table with our half-finished plates.

I felt a nasty, hollow, sinking feeling. I’d liked Foulnap and, foolishly, trusted him. Footmen move with the prevailing cashflow, and nightwalkers can be monetarised in a number of ways. Given the dead woman’s relative youth, parting her out on the underground transplant market could be a possibility, but add her potential fertility and there was another cash possibility: he was going to farm her. I looked up as the proprietress approached.

‘Lose your date?’ she asked in a mocking tone.

‘Where will he have taken her?’

She furrowed her brow and stared at me, unsure quite what I was suggesting.

‘Wait – you’re going to try and get her back?’

‘Yes.’

‘How, exactly?’

It was a very good question. Taking on a seasoned Footman would be at best extremely foolhardy, and at worst suicidal – and in the current time frame and with my level of expertise, well on the other side of impossible.

‘I’m not sure.’

She stared at me for a moment, her anger mellowing to an attitude, I think, of motherly concern. She suddenly reminded me of Sister Zygotia.

‘What made you become a Consul?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

‘I needed a job that would grant me Morphenox.’