AT TWELVE THIRTY EXACTLY I FIND MYSELF STANDING ALONE in the middle of a concrete emptiness, the blurred ghosts of shoppers darting around me like shadows beneath a pitiless sun. I can't remember how I came to this place. My hands are shaking and I can't see the future. All I can see is gray. The sun is beating down but I'm cold inside. I keep seeing a purple flash, the old woman's face rotting and flaking and shrinking around her skull before me; the thing on the bike path, growling deep in its throat.

(They took my pistol. "Don't want you to go carrying that around when you're all depressed, sir," the blue-suiter told me.) I'd phone Mo and ask her to pick up another ward if I wasn't feeling so frustrated and ineffectual.

Everything's fallen apart at the very worst time, and it's all my fault.

Item: There is a security breach. The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom—hereafter and forevermore to be known as the Goatfuckers, because that's the least of what they get up to and I don't want to think about them eating the blonde teacher's face—have got an informer inside the Laundry.

I walk past a bus stop and an overflowing litter bin, the ashtray on its lid smoking and fulminating. There's a disgusting stench of cheap tobacco and smoldering filter wadding. A convoy of buses rumbles past slowly, like a troupe of implausibly red elephants walking trunk-to-tail.

Item: They followed Mo home and they're following me, and unless I'm very much mistaken they want the key that binds the Eater of Souls, which is probably one of our most powerful weapons. (Disguised as a public school master indeed!)

There's a rundown concrete suburban shopping mall here, a brutalist plaza surrounded by walkways overlooking cheap supermarkets, an off-license, and a shuttered chemist's. Abandoned disposable carrier bags clog the gutters. I walk beneath a bridge between two piers, and up an arcade walled by the display windows of empty shop units, as grimy as my sense of self-worth.

Item: The Goatfuckers aren't the only people who are into the Laundry; Panin and the Thirteenth Directorate clearly know a lot more than I do about the CODICIL BLACK SKULL flights, Triple-six Squadron, and the Eater of Souls (who keeps cropping up in this mess like a bad penny). And anything that worries the KGB ought to worry the hell out of me, too.

I come out of the arcade in a wide alley lined with loading bays, rusting metal shutters drawn down across concrete slabs. Overflowing dumpsters redolent with the sweet fetor of dead rats lean between scraped and battered steel bollards, huddling together like school kids sharing a fag behind the bike shed. The sky is clouding over, the merciless sun shrouded by dirty clouds of doubtful provenance. I keep walking.