“There is, of course, no formal link between these remarkable events and Rove Denton. Were I to openly suggest one, I’m not sure I’d retain my position in the department. I’ve already had something just shy of a direct instruction from the Home Office that these matters—including your ongoing interrogations—be placed in the hands of certain private contractors. These contractors are also, if you follow a trail of ownership, shareholdings and shell companies, within the control of Rove Denton subsidiaries…” Hind steepled her fingers and sat back in her chair. “I can stall these requests for the time being. And I don’t think the Home Secretary will quite dare to order the extraordinary rendition of two of my own staff. Especially as Daniel Rove himself seems to be unavailable for direct comment. But that is how matters stand. You may both thank me, now.”

Julian gabbled a few words and Alison nodded, watching warily over the lip of her coffee mug.

“Now the others,” Hind said, and more photos were laid out precisely across the table. Many were black and white; some were of poor quality. They showed…

There was a thing on an operating table—a great, segmented beast like a man-sized lobster, curled on its side in death. A thin lab-coated man with a face mask was using a cane to point past the rags the thing wore, indicating the clutch of pouches belted under its smaller limbs. There was a shot of a beach where something had washed up. A dozen men with rifles were standing around it, their uniforms dating the scene to before the Second World War. The stranded monster’s shell was half in the water still, and the body that projected from the wide end was a scavenger-stripped ruin of tentacle stumps. It must have been thirty feet long. There were more rat-weasels, pitiful, starved things in cages alongside mangy tigers and a moulting eagle. There was also the photo Alison had already seen, the Plug-ugly woman posing as a Belgian smuggler.