Alison was on a tea break when it happened again. She had spent all morning and then two solid hours after lunch going through more old case files for Mouser, to trawl for other occurrences of the Plug-uglies. So far she’d rejected almost everything that had turned up. After a frustrating day, she had one tentative addition to the rogue’s gallery, in the shape of a report from the early nineties. A surveillance operation on a suspected terrorist cell in Birmingham had ended up watching the wrong house for a week. A young field agent had written up the business in great detail, possibly trying to avoid the inevitable repercussions of screwing up. And he’d found something odd: a house where the people who went in the door didn’t seem to map to the people who went out, where several were described as weirdly, similarly ugly: broad noses and heavy brows. No photographs, apparently. Or they’d mysteriously vanished, leaving no trace they ever existed, but Alison couldn’t afford to think like that.

She sat on the couch and stroked Simms, trying to work out where this was going. She felt as though her head was full of pieces from different jigsaws and she had the job of making them into a seamless whole.

Movement tugged at her attention. On the monitor…most likely an update starting, or…

A new window had popped up on the leftmost screen, where she had been looking into the history of the Birmingham property. It had been held by a shell company for three decades, and other searches suggested it was mostly derelict. It was a former mill, converted into flats by a developer who’d gone into liquidation so hard they were probably still finding the splash marks. But now there was an image there. She turfed Simms off and rushed over.

It was a photograph, showing the front of a building that might be the Birmingham property. Three people stood outside it, wearing heavy coats against a Brum winter: two men, one woman. The woman was holding up…something. It looked like a rod with something affixed to the top end. A fan? Or maybe it was some odd kind of aerial. There was a strange sense of ritual in the way the three stood. They were all Plug-uglies, without a doubt. Seeing them together, she was even more struck by the idea that they represented an ethnicity she had never met before, the people of a remote island or mountain range.

She moved the mouse to drag the image and it was gone instantly. A quick search showed no trace of it ever having been there. Alison stared murderously at the screens, checking the documents saved on the case file. Needless to say, no such image.