I was taken aback by her directness, and put out a hand to touch the right side of my face, which bowed inwards and had a left-handed twist to it, which caused my right eye to sit lower than my left by about the width of an eyeball-and-a-half. To me and my friends and the sisters it was just me and unworthy of comment – indeed, not even noticed – but from the general public’s reactions I could gauge the societal view was somewhere between intriguing and what the physiotypical term ‘unsightly’.

‘It’s a congenital skull deformity,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said dismissively, making me think her interest was entirely from a medical curiosity point of view. ‘Not calcitic, then?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Bad luck on you,’ she said. ‘We’ve been working on reducing and even reversing the effects of calcium migration.’

‘I don’t see this as bad luck,’ I said.

‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I’m really not interested.’

And without warning she stuck an open safety pin into Mrs Tiffen’s forearm. A spot of crimson welled up. I was the only one that flinched; the dead woman didn’t even blink.

‘The sight of blood upset you, Consul?’ asked Goodnight. ‘Misplaced empathy will get you killed.’

‘With the greatest respect, ma’am, I thought that was curiosity.’

‘Maybe that’s what killed the cat,’ said Goodnight after a moment’s thought. ‘Curiosity  . . . about empathy.’

She looked at Lucy, hoping for semantic assistance, but Lucy just shrugged.

‘Okay, then,’ said The Notable Goodnight, passing me her clipboard. ‘Sign on the dotted line.’

‘Do you get many?’ I asked, taking the clipboard. ‘Vacants that do really good tricks, I mean?’

The Notable Goodnight looked at me suspiciously.

‘We don’t give out stats,’ said Lucy.

‘Long-time company policy,’ said The Notable Goodnight as I signed the custody form. ‘RealSleep like to use our own stats to hang us, so we don’t release them – facts can really confuse people. But in answer to your question, we had a Tricksy once named Dorothy who could translate anything you said into Morse code. We renamed her “Dot the dash”. We redeployed her as a switchboard operator and in tests she could work seven-day, sixteen-hour shifts with only one break for toilet and dinner of thirty minutes. Now that’s productivity for you – don’t you agree?’

In truth, I found it all a little creepy.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘remarkable.’

‘Remarkable?’ she echoed disdainfully. ‘Beetles, trapeze artists, Rodin, hydrofoils and anything by Brunel are remarkable. What we do here is beyond remarkable.’

‘Inspiring?’ I suggested.

‘Unprecedented,’ said Goodnight, then took the clipboard, signed her name below mine, and my responsibility for Mrs Tiffen was over.

‘Here’s your bounty,’ said Lucy, passing me a five-hundred-euro voucher redeemable at Mrs Nesbit’s.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I know it’s usually cash, but HiberTech have got some sort of promotion going.’