Isn’t it?

The point where I usually slam into shuddering wakefulness with my pulse hammering and the sheet clinging to the small of my back is the bit where I dream that I sit up and look towards the crib, with a choking sense of dread at what I’m going to see when I look through the hanging veil that shrouds the bars. But this time the dream is a doozie: it lets me sit up and look and yes, there in the crib is a baby, and look at its little metatarsals and vertebrae and the jawbone gaping in an eternal silent howl. And then I get to look round and see Mo playing the violin, but her face is skeletonized, eye sockets empty and glowing faintly in the light cast by the slowly turning wormlike feeders that possess her, and the violin—

I actually get to see the violin this time, in this particular dream. And that’s when I wake up screaming to find that it’s five in the morning and Mo is still away on whatever job they’ve sent her on this time, so I don’t even have a shoulder to cling to. Bad dream: brrr! You want to know how bad it is? It’s exactly bad enough that rather than trying to go back to sleep, I go downstairs to make coffee and try to work out what the hell I’m going to tell the committee in a few hours’ time.

• • •

I GO INTO THE OFFICE AND HEAD FOR THE BRIEFING ROOM AT 9 a.m., clutching a mug of coffee as if it’s the handle of an umbrella that can protect me from the incoming storm-front of blame. If you start out by expecting them to fire you, or at least ream you out for someone else’s fuck-up, it’s hard to see how the day can get any worse. Isn’t it?

Bad mistake, Bob.

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up. And we are now entering stage three.

The first meeting actually goes a lot better than I have any right to expect. First I give my version of events, while Jez scrawls it on the board at the front of the room, compiling a timeline. Lockhart is chairing. “You can sit down now, Bob,” he says. Then he looks at Andy. “You got the file I asked for?”

“Yes, of course.” Andy appears to have had no more sleep than me. He hauls up an ancient leather attaché file with a padlock and the EIIR crest branded into it: one of the secure wallets we use for shuffling paper files back and forth from the stacks. (The padlock is the least of the security measures attached to it: open it without permission—or try remote viewing the contents—and you’ll be lucky if you don’t spend the rest of your days drooling in a wheelchair.) “I see the privacy light is lit?”

“Witnessed,” Jez echoes.