‘Yes, I think so too,’ she said with a sigh. ‘The maker’s name is stamped on the inside. Look.’

She showed me, then repacked the hat and placed it back in her bag.

‘It’s important to collect evidence,’ she said, ‘even if disproved. That’s how science works. Being proved wrong and then advancing. If I’m proved wrong a lot, I must be making headway, right?’

‘Works for me,’ I said, ‘but the Wintervolk are just stories, right? To frighten children into good behaviour and the sleep-shy into bedding down?’

‘I’m taking a broader approach to the traditional definition of “existence” or even “proof”,’ she said, ‘but I may have more luck here than anywhere else: the Gronk, Thermalovaur and Gizmo are pretty much only ever connected to Mid-Wales, and of those, the Gronk is pretty much brand new – the first mention of it was only twenty years ago, over near Rhayder.’

‘Ichabod and the cold water tank?’

‘That’s the one.’

I told her that Moody had said the area was known as the cradle of fable.

‘With good reason,’ she replied, ‘and I think the Gronk is due to return – to feed on the shame of the unworthy.’

‘Rich pickings here, I take it?’

She rolled her eyes.

‘She’ll be totally spoiled for choice in the Twelve. Bondsmen and part-time Consul Jim Treacle is my choice if the Big G comes to call, but on the Burden of Guilt stakes, he probably doesn’t even come close to some of the oddballs kicking around. There’s Jonesy, who lost sixty soldiers under her command, Toccata who is barely herself half the time, Fodder is definitely hiding something and most of the porters here have suffered fatal losses, probably through boredom or incompetence. But my money’s on the Twelve’s very own one-man obnoxs-a-thon, Deputy Hooke. I’m Laura Strowger, by the way.’

‘Charlie Worthing,’ I said.

We shook hands rather than Winter embraced; you don’t with kids unless they’re family.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘good luck on your hunt for the Gronk.’

She thanked me and returned to her work, and I walked through to the Mrs Nesbit’s café, a good-sized room of plain rustic decor: oak beams, half-panelled walls, antique copper pans and with two large windows that looked out on to the square. There was a drowsy and a potential client sitting in a cosy alcove near the crackling log fire, discussing Impressionist painters, the usual precursor to assisted slumber. From there she might move on to literature, poetry, the lute, and – failing all that – more intimate means. Few needed to. Given the traditionally high level of drowsying skill, most clients were unconscious somewhere between Dylan Thomas and Longfellow with a few lasting as far as W. H. Auden. Lutes rarely even came out of their cases.