‘He hid all this because he was trying to protect Chloe,’ I explained. ‘He was afraid to tell her the truth about his investigation, in case the Patriots found out about it. He thought if that happened, they’d interrogate her the way they did Wallace. He wrote up everything he knew because he was convinced something might happen to him, and he left clues in his diary that would lead her to the statues if that day ever came.’

Chloe looked pale and dazed. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid,’ she said, staring at the words. ‘If I’d just read that damn diary, I could have figured all of this out by now.’

‘There’s no point beating yourself up,’ said Rozalia. ‘You’d have got round to it eventually.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Listen to this.’ I began to read from some of the rest of the pages.

If you’re reading this, it began, it means something’s happened to me.

You know there’ve been a lot of problems recently, what with Mort Bramnik and some other people nearly getting themselves killed when a mission went wrong. Just after that Bramnik himself came to me in confidence and asked if I’d take a look into all these incidents that have been piling up.

‘Why me?’ I asked him, and he said it was because he trusted me the most out of all the Pathfinders.

I’ll admit I was wary, particularly when he said he wanted to do it in strict secrecy. He was sure, he said, that what happened to him out on that alternate we had visited was no accident.

I looked up at Rozalia. ‘You told me how the other Jerry got killed,’ I said. ‘But exactly what happened on the expedition Bramnik was part of?’

She shuddered. ‘To be honest, I’ve tried quite hard to forget it.’

‘It was that bad?’

‘They were hunted,’ said Chloe, ‘by werewolves.’

Rozalia twisted around to look at her. ‘Do not,’ she said, ‘use that word.’

‘Well, I saw the drone footage from that mission,’ said Chloe, ‘and that’s what they looked like to me.’

‘So what were they, then?’ I asked Rozalia.

‘Lab-bred mutants that bust out of some military lab,’ Rozalia explained. ‘Isn’t that always the way? We called them Howlers. Imagine something the size of a bear, but ten times as smart, and fast as all hell. I once saw one rip open an abandoned truck like it was made of confetti.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘The humans on their alternate were mostly wiped out after a nuclear war. There were survivors, but after the Howlers broke out of whatever lab they were invented in, they bred fast and got busy hunting the survivors down to the very last person alive.’

‘Nice,’ I said. ‘But why did Bramnik decide to visit somewhere with so much potential for danger?’