“I was on a flight from Tehran to Istanbul at, let’s see, five o’clock this morning? Which would be one-thirty over here. I’ve been up since before midnight, in other words.” She comes in, pulls out a chair from the kitchen table, and drops into it like a sack of spuds. Her cheeks are jowly and loose with fatigue, her eyelids bruised by dehydration. “I hate this job.”

I’m still processing. “You were in Tehran?” Adding a hearty what the fuck? is unnecessary: that’s a bit far out of our usual stomping grounds to say the least.

She nods, begins to droop, then raises the violin case and plants it on the kitchen table right between the bowl with the browning fair trade bananas and the heatproof mat I was going to put the teapot on. “Usual guarantees apply.”

Despite all the shouting about nuclear reprocessing, and the saber-rattling about aircraft carriers and the Strait of Hormuz, it turns out that almost everyone is on the same side with respect to the Axis of Ancient, Undying, and Truly Inhuman Evil. So from time to time the Laundry gets strangely phrased requests for assistance from a rather obscure corner of VEVAK, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. (They almost always ask too late, especially in view of the number of permits and authorizations required before we can agree to send someone, because they seem to think we’re fiendish hyper-competent Svengalis of the Supernatural. They have always had an unrealistically high opinion of the British secret intelligence services. It’s nice to be wanted, even if they’d die of shame rather than admit it in public.)

“So the thing on Monday, that was Iran?”

“Yes.” She nods. The kettle comes to a rolling boil and switches itself off; I busy myself filling a pot with loose-leaf Darjeeling. “I need tea. And a bath. Then dinner. Then someone to keep me from falling asleep.”

“Is the jet lag particularly bad?”

“No, but I’m going to have bad dreams.” She shudders slightly and pulls her shawl tight around her shoulders. It’s silk, and looks as if it’s probably very fashionable, not to say expensive. She notices my gaze. “Isn’t it nice? I bought it at the airport duty-free, on the way out. The VEVAK people I was working with kept trying to impress me with how Anglophile and welcoming they were, but going without a head covering there is like wandering around London topless, so I thought I should buy something I can use as a scarf when winter starts to bite.” She lets it fall from her shoulders and shakes it out, then begins to carefully fold it. Her hands are shaking slightly, and I can see the veins and tendons through the pale, almost translucent skin behind her knuckles. They’re more visible than when we first met: a side effect of growing older together.