(That's the trouble with this job. Sometimes it chews you up and spits you out—literally.)

Mo came back the next weekend, too. She says she's trying to get a week's compassionate leave, but the fallout from Iris's actions has been beyond earthshaking. We'll see.

I'VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS REPORT FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS now.

This being the Village, and an internet-free zone, I'm allowed to use a computer and dictation software—although it's had its CD drive and wifi chipset removed, the case is welded shut, and it's padlocked to an oak desk that weighs approximately half as much again as Angleton's Memex. It beats the manual typewriter hands down, but when I asked if I could take it home with me, the security officer barely managed to conceal his sneer.

I suppose there are some loose ends I should tie up, so here goes:

We never did find out exactly what happened to any of Panin's men apart from Alexei, or to Panin himself: you should read my speculations with more than a pinch of salt. I can't even be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Panin was behind the theft of the violin report, although theft of state secrets is the sort of thing that the Thirteenth Directorate's parent agency traditionally excelled at. I'm assuming that the elite Spetsnaz infiltration troops assigned to an occult warfare department probably stood more of a chance of escaping alive than the cultists: but we didn't account for all of them, either. The scene at Brookwood the next morning was indescribable. I've seen the pictures. It was easy enough to close down the cemetery—police roadblocks, reports about an illegal rave and graveyard vandalism, a handful of D-notices to gag the more annoying local reporters—but then they had to do something with the bodies. The feeders raised just about everything that wasn't totally dismembered and disarticulated. In the end, they had to bring in bulldozers and dig trenches. They identified some of the cultists—but not Jonquil the Sloane Ranger, or her boyfriend Julian.

I don't think Brookwood will reopen for a long time.