I looked around them all before continuing. ‘I took a trip with Nadia to an alternate Iceland with no sun, and she told me that the Authority wanted to find research connected to a prototype transfer stage someone there had tried to build. I asked her, at the time, what possible reason the Authority could have for wanting to find that research, when they already had transfer stages. Well, now we know. They wanted it because they were hoping it could tell them how their own stages worked.’

‘Then . . . where did the transfer stages come from, if not the Authority?’ asked Oskar. ‘And how did Wallace find all this out?’

‘Wallace and Casey set up that Howler so they could engineer the theft of a briefcase containing access keys to a bunch of encrypted files on the Authority’s hard drives. Wallace subsequently learned that when the Authority first came here, they found the main transfer stages just as they are, along with a bunch of computers and stuff apparently deliberately smashed to pieces. I can’t tell you why whoever built the stages smashed their own stuff – maybe they were afraid of something, or maybe it was something else, something we can’t even imagine. The evidence points to them at least being human. But the one thing I can tell you for definite is that every transfer coordinate the Authority possess came from a single computer that wasn’t smashed thoroughly enough.’

‘I helped pull Wallace out of that fire,’ said Selwyn. ‘Isn’t it at least possible all this is some wild confabulation on his part? I mean, doesn’t it seem likely he hallucinated at least some of this because he was in so much pain and—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Winifred snapped at him. ‘It’s all true, every last word. I can tell you that for a fact.’

It was my turn to stare open-mouthed as Winifred looked around at us with something approaching pity.

‘How . . . ?’ I asked.

‘Me and Wallace had a thing going,’ she said. ‘For a little while, anyway.’

I tried to picture Wallace and Winifred in some kind of a romantic relationship, but it was like trying to fit together two pieces from different puzzles. Wallace was smart, and a motormouth, while Winifred by contrast was buttoned-up, her face seemingly permanently set in a disapproving scowl. I could think of no more unlikely couple.

‘Well,’ Chloe muttered. ‘You sure as hell kept that under your hats.’

‘I ended it because of his drinking,’ Winifred explained, ‘although we remained on good terms. I always thought his alcoholism was because of his ordeal with the Patriots too, but then he told me something that made me think otherwise.’