Sally rolls her eyes. Basil has at least a decade on Bill. We’re into hearing-trumpet and bath chair territory now. But he has an opinion, and he wants us to add it to the minutes. “The original Romanian vampire legend is not what you think, young feller-me-lad. Forget those walking corpses, rising from their graves and sucking the life out of the living! That’s just a meta- meta- whatchewmacallit for tuberculosis. A refit. No, if you go back to the old days, vampirism was a curse. It’s all over the archives, you know.” (Basil works in the archives. He’s a key part of the oral history project. Otherwise they’d have made him retire decades ago.) “You’d get this cursed gift, like an axe or a fiddle or a loaf of bread or something, and the nature of the curse was that it would cause blood to be spilled until it was passed on. That’s all. You could catch it yourself—it’d turn you into a bloody-handed murderer—or it would stay on the axe blade—people would cut themselves on it, or murderers would use it—unless you pushed the curse onto something else. And literally anything could be a vampire. A monkey’s paw. Or a blancmange, for instance. That’s where the Pythons got the idea from, the Wimbledon sketch . . .” He looks around, bewildered. “Anyone else here a fan of Monty Python?”

“Vampire blancmange.” Sally makes a note about something on her pad, then visibly suppresses a sigh. “Noted. You were saying, Mr. Howard?”

“Bananas!” says Bill. “We couldn’t get bananas during the war for love nor money. Had to make do with blancmange instead!” He seems to find it all extraordinarily funny; he’s chortling so hard I expect him to cough his dentures across the room.

This is more than Sally can reasonably take. “Committee will adjourn for five minutes,” she announces. “Coffee and toilet break, not to mention sanity break. Bill, you can go home. In fact, please do go home. Your work here is done. I’ll minute you as attending if you just go home and leave us in peace. Is that what you want? Are you happy now?”

“Bananas!” Bill says happily as those of us with any sanity left (not to mention full bladders) break for the meeting room door.

A few minutes later I’m back in the meeting room, a fresh mug of coffee cooling slowly on my blotter. I’m leaning my head against the even cooler surface of the wall when Sally clears her throat behind me. “Mr. Howard,” she begins.

“Hi, Ms. Carlyle.” I stand up and turn around.

“I expect you’re wondering what this committee is all about,” she says hesitantly, “and why you’ve been seconded to it.”

“Yes, I was wondering that,” I begin.

“Well, it’s obviously a blind training scenario,” she says. “And I think you’re here as a counterweight for the ballast. I mean, Basil and Bill are not easy to handle, so the organizers wanted someone sensible to keep the process moving . . . Mr. Howard. What is it?”