This is the Laundry. We are part of the secret side of the civil service, so naturally we do committees. Did I say we do committees? We probably invented the damned idea, sometime between the Roman invasion and King Canute’s unfortunate intertidal dilemma. We’re good at them, with the kind of polish and proficiency that only arrives after four hundred years of diligent practice. We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty. We also use them for fact-finding, pooling of knowledge about best working practices, and determining policy.

It’s the latter wheeze that concerns me right now.

We’re less than half an hour into the first meeting of the DRESDEN RICE committee, and I am already getting a very bad feeling about the direction we have been channeled in.

Firstly there’s the what. From the moment it popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus, I realized there was something wrong with it. “Working group to produce recommendations on the employment requirements and retention of staff exhibiting PHANG syndrome characteristics,” it said, and I’ve been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, the remit is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.

Secondly, there’s the who. Because it has been designed as a cuddly-wuddly touchy-feely care-and-feeding committee, fully half our membership consists of paired buttocks from Human Resources, Health and Safety, Building Services, and IT Support. I’m there not in my capacity as Bob Howard, Vampire Hunter Extraordinaire, or Bob Howard, Deputy Eater of Souls, but as Bob Howard, Technical Networking Manager (in other words, cable-crimper-in-chief for the New Annex). We are overstaffed (there are twelve bodies here), flabby (at least three each are from HR and H&S), and indecisive.

Finally, to make matters exponentially worse . . . nobody actually made it a requirement for membership of this committee that members have to be cleared for OPERA CAPE.

So:

“Don’t be silly!” Doris Greene from Health and Safety announces: “Everybody knows vampires don’t exist!”

She looks round the table, her stare challenging any of us to gainsay her. Middle-aged, plump, and gallus in twinset and pearls, Doris is one of the H&S types who seems to have had her sense of humor surgically shrunken and her perm prematurely grayed by exposure to one too many inquests into bizarre workplace accidents that involve cordless hammer drills, sex toys, and the phrase “Watch this!” Her broiler-hen impersonation would be met with fond affection in most situations where she didn’t also have the authority to shut everything down on a whim or call on the Spanish Inquisition for fire support, but it loses some of its charm when there’s actual work to be done.