“I’m really sorry”—something’s about to happen, something bad, it’s not safe—“a work thing’s come up, you know how it is.” She was trying to keep her voice steady; thank God Derek had never really picked up on subtext. “All-hands-to-the-pumps urgent. They’re old enough to look after themselves—or I’ll pay for a minder if you want”—but something terrible is rushing towards me from 4D space and you can’t bring them anywhere near me—“sorry, can’t be helped. I’ll make it up to you, to them, sorry, bye.”

She cut the call and dialled Julian, even though she’d say…what? That she had a bad feeling? She had gone beyond, to a place she couldn’t even tell her closest friend about without convincing him she was mad.

“Matchbox?” he said.

“Spiker, I may have a problem.”

“Tell me.”

“I…may have come to the attention of a hostile foreign power,” she said, admirably steady. And true, save that she was pushing the definition of foreign.

Julian digested this, then said, “Come to the office. Bring a bag. You can tell me the whole business and we’ll sort it out.”

“Yes, good idea. Be with you in…” Her voice trailed off.

One of the Plug-uglies was standing inside her flat, and she hadn’t heard the door go. He looked destitute, wearing stained, torn clothes, a big coat and a woollen beanie. She recognized him abruptly. His profile had been in the camera footage, next to Elsinore Mallory.

“Julian,” she whispered, but what she heard from the phone’s speaker might have been static or the reverberation of some vast space where the cold wind moaned distantly and forever.

The Plug-ugly stepped forwards, and Alison bolted into the kitchenette to grab a knife, four inches of serrated steel. The man was still just standing there. He was huge, no taller than she was but with massive shoulders, a keg of a body and slightly bandy legs. His brute visage was…smiling. Under other circumstances, and possibly on an entirely different face, it might even have been a pleasant smile.

“You won’t be harmed,” he said, with the careful diction of someone speaking a second language. His accent was weird, adding extra consonants and glottal stops where they didn’t belong. “But you will come with us.”

She jabbed the knife at him to make it clear that getting too close was going to be a mutual problem. Then: Wait, “us”?