Then she had reached out and torn open his shirt with one effortless motion, so that he was aware of her sheer physical power, like a bear in human skin. If she decided to make his last minutes that much more painful, there would be nothing he could do to stop her. But the Plug-ugly never touched him. Her hands hovered over his blood-slick abdomen, and he saw glints and structures in the air, blue-white, seeming to arrive from a great distance without ever travelling. Then the cold came, and he screamed and screamed, thrashing as Alison tried to hold him down. The Plug-ugly woman put one massive hand on his chest and crushed him to the hard stone of the museum floor. He looked up at the hanging whale ribcage above, big enough to hold a dinner party in, and fought with all the accumulated instincts of his ancestors, sure he was being killed.

In the end—surely no longer than a minute, although it had felt like ninety-seven years—he had a whorled, cancerous-looking blemish where the bullet had gone in. His insides felt like they were full of broken glass, but the real pain had ebbed away. And, most importantly, he wasn’t dying any more.

Armed police had kicked in the door then. Simultaneously, they’d appeared at the head of the stairs, under the benign gaze of the stone Darwin. He had expected the Plug-uglies to vanish, one more conjuring trick in the interminable string of scarves this night had been pulling from its sleeve. They had stood there instead, lumpen and awkward—never putting their hands up, nor getting on the floor, nor making any sudden moves.

The police had put handcuffs on everyone, read rights and recoiled from the rodent bodies. They’d gathered briefly to examine the other dead: the gunmen, the Plug-uglies who had fallen. It had been a bloodbath. The museum wasn’t going to be open to the public come morning. Twenty minutes into this, a trio of half-undressed security men burst in like extras in a farce, having been released from a broom cupboard. Julian had viewed their arrival with a disproportionate stab of relief. Nice that someone had come out of that night unexpectedly well.

The door opened, snapping Julian from his recollections. In strode his boss, Leslie Hind, with a face like iced-over thunder. Being summarily fired and possibly detained went right back on the table. In response to a gesture, their minders left without a word. There was one of those weird pauses then, as Hind’s secretary entered to pour them coffee from the department’s cheap plastic cafetière.

“I’d say you have a lot of explaining to do,” Hind said brightly when the door had closed. “But you’ve been explaining yourselves ever since you were recovered and nobody’s any the wiser.”