‘The food’s better, I grant you, but it’s the fringe unbenefits that make this place so hideous. I’ve experienced almost every terror in the last four years. A run-in with Lucky Ned’s gang, near-starvation, frostbite, irate debtors, Toccata in a rage, and a massed nightwalker attack.’

‘That’s only frightening in a languid sort of way, you big baby,’ put in Aurora. ‘They don’t move so fast, and if they’re well fed, not dangerous at all.’

‘It’s the look they give you,’ he said, with a shiver, ‘full of vacant malevolence.’

‘I heard you have a wager going with Laura,’ I said.

‘Yes indeed,’ he replied with an unpleasant smirk, ‘on the existence of the Gronk.’

‘The wager is as good as won,’ said Aurora. ‘There is no Gronk; the Wintervolk are merely myths – stories for children and idiots.’

‘I think something weird is going on,’ I said, as I’d heard a few Gronk stories over the years. ‘Six years ago on the line just south of the Torpantu, a four-man maintenance crew were taken on a moonless night without a button or a zip being undone. No one saw hide nor hair of them again. Their underclothes, shirts, belts and fleeces were still inside their overalls – and folded.’

‘The clothes in my bureau are folded,’ said Treacle. ‘It doesn’t mean the Gronk lives in the utilities.’

They’d been taken, the story went, because they were unworthy. All four had been found guilty of physical trespass and were freeworking until prison at Springrise.

‘I heard,’ I said, ‘the Gronk teases the shame from you, and then, right at the moment when you realise the crushing enormity of your actions and how nothing could ever be right again, she draws out your soul. They say that when you expire your shame and guilt are expunged and the burden of your sins is removed. You go to your maker forgiven, and pure.’

‘What a load of old tosh,’ said Treacle.

‘I concur,’ said Aurora with a laugh. ‘You shouldn’t waste your thoughts on spooks and ghoulies, Charlie.’

I suddenly felt slightly foolish, but there was no TV at the Pool, and stories had made up a fair proportion of our entertainment.

‘You must give the legend some credence, Mr Treacle,’ I said, ‘or why stop at fifty thousand for your wager? Why not a million?’

‘Because any wager has to be able to be met by both sides.’

Aurora and I exchanged glances. Laura didn’t look like she had anything near that sort of cash.

‘Jim,’ said Aurora, suddenly intrigued, ‘what actually was her side of the bet?’

‘Her secondborn in the fullness of womanhood.’

There was a sudden shocked silence.

‘For God’s sake, Jim,’ said Aurora, ‘she’s only sixteen. That makes you less of a bondsman and something closer to a trafficker, doesn’t it?’