Whatever it was they were doing, Kimberley didn’t think it was very successful because their contract was terminated in 2009 with two years left to run. Given the low, low standards for success applied to private military contractors in Iraq, the fuck-up that got them fired must have been spectacular. Not that Kimberley used the words fuck-up, you understand.

She didn’t seem surprised that they were still tangled up in the byzantine coils of the American intelligence establishment.

‘People still know people who know people,’ she said. ‘You should know that.’

I asked what she thought had triggered the cubicle jockey to contact them in the first place – what had brought Alderman Technical Solutions across the pond.

‘Your late friend Christina Chorley tried to sell something called The Wild Ledger on eBay with a reserve price of twenty grand,’ she said.

‘We knew they were after that,’ I said, and wondered why Crew Cut hadn’t just paid for it – probably cheaper than flying all his guys over and smuggling their guns in, not to mention hiring the SUVs with the suitably sinister tinted windows.

‘Ah, but did you know about something called the Mary Engine?’ said Kimberley. ‘She was selling that on eBay too.’

She showed me a picture taken from eBay on her tablet – a dense cube of steel and brass gears.

‘A difference engine?’ I asked.

‘That’s the advantage of having the NSA looking at something like this,’ said Kimberley. ‘Those guys know the difference between their difference- and analytical-engines, and apparently this is neither.’

I asked what they thought it was.

‘They couldn’t lift enough detail from the photographs to determine what it was supposed to do, but they think it’s genuinely Victorian. Mid 1840s they reckon. In fact, if you run it down and you want to generate some good will with the NSA you might want to send it over as a gift.’

‘You think I’m going to need goodwill at the NSA?’

‘Peter,’ said Kimberley, ‘the way your life is going you’re going to need all the goodwill you can get.’

There were other items of interest, too. A 1920s anthology of Victor Bartholomew’s work on spirits which I recognised from a particularly tedious Latin lesson, and a Genuine Wizard’s Staff that had, according to Kimberley, a British Army serial number stencilled along its length.

The attached NSA report indicated that there was no coherence to the collection and posited a high probability that it was just that – a collection. Items acquired by an individual who had a high degree of access but limited understanding.

‘Access to what?’ I asked.

‘They didn’t know,’ said Kimberley.

And where it all came from was a mystery, I thought. Like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

Kimberley and the security arm of the American military industrial complex might not know, but I thought I knew a fox who might.