She sipped her coffee thoughtfully, somehow managing to stare at them both without dividing her focus. Her secretary opened up a file and began laying out photographs, making a mosaic of bleak images across the tabletop. Mostly they were corpses, and not all the corpses were human. He saw several of the human gunmen though, both in situ on the museum floor and later, on slabs at the morgue. There were four Plug-uglies, and one at least was not from the museum, to judge from the ground she’d died on.

The uniformed rat-weasel creatures were also in the ranks of the dead. With their masks off, they inhabited some uncanny territory between hideous and cartoon cute, with big round eyes and short, whiskery muzzles. Julian could entirely have seen them teaching children about the alphabet with a bouncy, catchy theme song. As it was, they were dead and ghastly.

“In the tunnels beneath the Mount Pleasant sorting office,” Hind recounted, “this woman, and seven of these creatures, were found dead. Her thin finger picked out more images. “In the main hall of the Natural History Museum, for God’s sake, three dead men. Also three more of these individuals who, I think we can agree, are not necessarily people. Plus five of those same…entities.” She indicated various post-mortem close-ups of rodent physiology: their jaws, their weird two-thumbed little hands, the head of one with callipers measuring the braincase. Numbers written on a piece of paper had been nudged into shot. Julian wondered who the hell you went to for that kind of autopsy work.

“These three.” Hind moved the three human casualties to the fore. “Two of them could be professionals, as they took care to carry no identification. The third, one Dane Vellotti, has been placed as an Italian national with a somewhat aged criminal record. He’s not been on anyone’s radar for the last eight years. We’re talking to Interpol and the AISI, but nothing useful as yet. However, this gentleman’s face is known to us.” They saw a photograph of a clean-shaven man with a receding hairline, looking in death less like a gunman and more like a bank manager about to refuse someone a loan. “I doubt he’s officially on any books, but he was working for Rove Denton two years ago. He wasn’t guilty of anything that we could definitely pass to the police, certainly nothing I was allowed to investigate. But I kept a note. I always do.” There was a slight quirk at the corner of her mouth, and Julian wondered just how much dirt on Rove she had.