The garden itself, the spectacular architecture beyond, were bloodied by the volcanic sky above, a dismal crimson glow that covered the stars all the way to the zenith. It was the curse of the Scots, he thought gloomily, entirely typical that their passing should be marked in such a melodramatic style, by the banishing of true midnight for everybody else.

The Big Ben clock tower looked full of air and light, he mused, as if it was some immense Gothic spaceship, fuelled and ready to go, ready to lift off from this sorry old world, and he wished it bloody well would, and take him with it.

He coughed and walked forward.

Fames didn’t turn. “Hello, David. Do you think—”

“What?”

“Do you think there’s a glow up there? To the north?”

Holland looked out over Whitehall, the Foreign Office and Treasury and Home Office: the great houses of the state, pompous as wedding cakes, and, as events had proved, just about as powerless.

Fames stared past it all, to the far north, looking for the glow.

The light of Scotland burning, Holland thought bleakly.

“No, I bloody well can’t see any such thing, Bob,” he said bluntly, “and even if I could it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“No,” Fames said. “I suppose not.”

Holland tried his best to project the bluff boyishness that — even if fake — had got him so far in life.

“Now then, Bob. The preparations are going well. We’re gearing up to receive a flood of evacuees in the south, from the most threatened areas. All the emergency powers are in place now, and the police and the military are being briefed on various contingencies. We’ve got the Green Goddesses out.” A fleet of emergency fire engines, dating from the war. “Those bloody things. We only have a thousand or so left operational. And they are so old now you can’t get spares, and the rubber parts have perished… Well. There’ve been a few oddities. The police have had to assign men to patrol church services, would you believe. Riots, by people locked out. They say it’s like managing football matches used to be.”

Fames didn’t react.

“Further out — well, the scientists are floundering, I think,” Holland said. “They don’t agree on what this Moonseed bugger is, or how fast it will spread, or whether it can be stopped. In the best case, perhaps we can contain it in Scotland. Perhaps it’s already contained, in fact. Somehow exhausted.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose the next few days or weeks will tell. But if it can’t be contained, if it’s going to spread further—”

“Then what if it does? What do we do then?”

“Then we continue to make plans.”

“Plans?”