Ever since humankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don’t need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on. The more diverse the functions performed by an organisation, the more complex the interlocking systems and subsystems become. If you are responsible, as the Metropolitan Police are, for preventing terrorist attacks, sorting out domestic rows and keeping motorists from killing random strangers, then your systems are very complex indeed.

One part of the system is the requirement that every OCU, that’s Operational Command Unit, has access to the HOLMES2 and CRIMINT databases either through a dedicated HOLMES suite or via specialised software installed on an authorised laptop. This is handled by the Directorate of Information who, because their responsibility is only to their bit of the system, don’t make a distinction between the Serious and Organised Crime Group (OCU) and the Folly, which was made an OCU only because nobody knew how else to drop it into the Met’s organisational chart. Now, this meant nothing to Inspector Nightingale, but to yours truly it meant that not only could I install a legal copy of the HOLMES2 interface into my laptop, but I was also provided with the same access privileges as the head of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

Which was just as well, because one of my suspects was Chief Inspector Seawoll, and that’s a target you don’t take aim at unless you’re certain it’s going to go down on the first hit. DS Stephanopoulos, who’d also known about the operation in advance, was an equally hard target, unless I wanted to be joke number two – Do you know what happened to the DC who accused Stephanopoulos of being the unwitting tool of a malicious revenant spirit? Dr Walid was suspect number four, which was why I didn’t tell him what I was up to; Lesley was suspect number five and suspect number six, the one that frightened me the most, was of course myself. There was no way of proving it, but I was reasonably certain that between killing William Skirmish and throwing his child out of the window, Brendan Coopertown had had no inkling that he was anything other than the same man he’d always been.