They all looked across at the Boss’s secretary, Heather. She smiled sweetly upon them without slowing her typing for a moment. Heather (if she had a last name no-one knew it, for all sorts of security reasons) was the perfect secretary. Knew everything, said nothing; or at least, nothing that mattered. Calm, professional, and pleasantly pretty, in a blonde curly-haired round-faced sort of way, Heather dressed neatly rather than fashionably; and as the Boss’s last line of defence, she was probably the most-heavily-armed person in Buck House. Supposedly, Heather was equipped to take down a whole army of terrorists, if necessary, and certainly no-one felt like testing the rumour. You had to get past Heather to get to the Boss, and unless you had exactly the right kind of paperwork, signed and countersigned in all the right places, that wasn’t going to happen. JC once saw Heather kick an overpresumptuous Parliamentary UnderSecretary so hard in the balls that half the faces in the portraits winced.

That JC was still prepared to try to charm and wheedle information out of her showed how nervous he really was.

“Heather, my darling . . . looking ravishing as always, of course; might I inquire . . . ?”

“No, JC, my darling, you might not,” said Heather, kindly but immovably. “The Boss will see you when she is ready to see you and not one moment before. All I can tell you . . . is that the Boss is really not a happy bunny this morning.”

JC raised an eyebrow. “Is she ever?”

“Sorry,” said Heather. “That falls under Classified Information.”

“Come on, Heather,” said Happy, giving his best shot at an ingratiating smile. “Can’t you at least tell us what we’ve done wrong this time? I mean, how deep in it are we?”

Heather smiled sweetly at him. “Do you possess a pair of waders? Or perhaps scuba gear?”

“Situation normal, then,” said Melody, going back to her game.

“Oh God,” said Happy, burying his face in his hands.

“Told you not to shoot that albatross,” said JC. “Now brace up, man. We’ve been here before and made it out the other side. If we were in serious trouble, Heather would have shot us the moment we walked through the door.”

“You might think that;” Heather murmured, “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Happy moaned briefly, then produced half a dozen bottles of pills from various pockets. He rolled them back and forth in his hands, considering the multi-coloured contents, and squinting at the handwritten labels.

“Now . . . These yellow ones are to remind me to take these red ones . . . And the blue ones are only for use in cases of possession. These stripey ones are for radiation exposure, the hundreds and thousands are for my mood swings, and these chequered ones . . . are to give me a better outlook on life.”