"He missed a meeting this morning. I went to look in on him—he wasn't in his office. A couple of hours later I ran into Sally Alvarez from Accounting, and she said he'd missed a meeting, too. So I began asking around, and it transpires that he didn't check in this morning. Nobody's seen him since he went home yesterday evening." Andy's bright and brittle tone reminds me of a thin layer of paint applied to cover the ominous cracks in the plaster that widen and shift over time . . .

"Why didn't you phone him at home?" asks Mo.

"Because there's no home phone number on file for him!" Andy grins manically. "No address, for that matter, would you believe it? HR don't have any contact details at all! Just a bank account and a PO Box for correspondence."

"But that's—"

"Ridiculous?" Andy's smile slips. "Yes, I'd have said so, but remember this is Angleton we're talking about. Did either of you see him yesterday?"

The phrase "Yes, I did" escapes before I can press my lips together. Mo gives me a withering look. "I'm not concealing anything," I tell her: "Nothing to hide!"

Andy goes for the jugular. "Tell me. Everything."

"Not much to tell." I slump back on my chair. "I was on my way home, but I figured I'd drop in on him on the way." I frown, then wince as the butterfly stitches on my forehead tell me not to be an idiot. "Thing is, the other day—he sent me to Cosford to see something in a hangar—"

"The exorcism that went wrong," Andy interrupts.

"No, not the exorcism—something else, something in the museum. It's his usual showing-not-telling thing: he wanted me to see it before he explained. So I dropped in to talk to him because I didn't manage to get to Hangar 12B in the end. He spun me some kind of line about an RAF squadron that was decommissioned in 1964, some photoreconnaissance unit or other, and gave me some file references to follow up next week. Squadron 666, he said. Yes, it was tangentially connected, but there's no bloody way of knowing what he's got in mind until you follow the trail of bread crumbs he lays out for you—you know how he is, mind as twisty as a derivatives trader. Then he said something about wanting me to deputize for him on a codeword committee, something like BLOODY BARON."

"Damn. What time was this?"

"About twelve, twelve fifteen, I think. It was right after my session with Iris and Jo Sullivan. Why?"

"Because he was in the Ways and Means monthly breakout session on pandemic suppression systems that ran from two to four, according to at least six eyewitnesses." Andy looks gloomy. "Whatever happened, it wasn't you." He glances at Mo. "What time did Boris call you?"

She jerks upright and pulls her hand away from me. "Around noon. Why?"