Gavin held out surrendering hands. ‘I know, I know.’ He tapped a few keys on his computer and the monitor came to life. The screen had a thick coating of dust over it. He clicked a few things and gestured to Andy and me to look. He’d brought up an Excel spreadsheet. For a second I thought Aunt Katherine had invited him to the reunion, but I’ll chalk that up to PTSD: Post Traumatic Spreadsheet Disorder. ‘There’s the room list,’ he said to me. ‘You’ve got internet too. Five minutes?’ This last part was appealed back to Juliette; he wanted her attention. He was offering Andy and me his computer to occupy us the same way you’d give a videogame to a child. ‘It’s worth your time.’

‘I already told you. It’s not about the money.’ Juliette marched to the door, held it open. ‘Let’s talk out here.’

Gavin’s grin exploded. Andy surrendered and took a guilty sip of his beer.

I turned to the computer screen. The Excel spreadsheet was, in contrast to the rest of SuperShred, quite organised. There was one tab labelled Room List and another labelled Room Check. I was keen to read through it, but the ability to use the internet indoors for once was too tempting, so I opened a browser.

If Ronald Knox had been born one hundred years later, I’m sure his eleventh commandment would have forbade any Google searching. But what can I say: he’s long dead and I was trying not to join him. The more information I had the better.

I understand googling news articles is not quite the high drama one reads books for. I’ll save you the scene of me clicking and scrolling as I googled ‘the Black Tongue’ and ‘the Black Tongue victims’, and I hate it when news articles are reprinted verbatim in books. And, look, it’s the twenty-first century and I hadn’t had internet for two days, so forgive a bit of extra surfing. Here is what I learned: