Spooky has also developed a bad habit of waking up in the middle of the night and screaming that she’s being attacked by an axe murderer (“Help! I’m all alone in the dark! Where are you?”), then haughtily ignoring me when I go downstairs to see what all the fuss is about.

And don’t get me started on vet bills. Let’s just say that civil service salaries and pet ownership are two lifestyle flavors that really do not go well together.

The following Monday I get up at my accustomed time to find Mo is in the kitchen, suited and booted and double-checking her go-bag. “Jesus, what is it now?” I ask. “I thought we were supposed to be looking for a spa break?”

“Got an email this morning,” she tells me. “Actually Gerry Lockhart forwarded it on Friday evening but we’d already left the office and Facilities were taking the mail server down for maintenance.” I startle guiltily: that was probably me, going through the server logs with fire and the sword in search of Pete’s joker. “Calm down, Bob, it’s not OpExec this time. Turns out the negotiation team for BLUE HADES—it’s the once-a-decade Benthic Treaty renewal fish-fest—are down one sorcerer: Julie Warren’s got pneumonia, so Gerry asked me if I could go along to bulk up the front-facing team. You know how They get if They think we aren’t taking Them seriously.”

They are the Deep Ones, the ancient alien water-world types who own about 70 percent of the planet’s usable surface area (the bits that are below the crush depth of our nuclear-powered submarines). We have an agreement with them: we agree not to piss them off (by, for example, building the Underwater City of Tomorrow! or otherwise intruding on their territory without prior arrangement) and they agree not to exterminate us. The bilateral agreements need to be renewed regularly by just about every nation with a coastline and a submarine, and BLUE HADES tend to get stroppy if they think we’re taking the piss or getting blasé about them. So every decade a bunch of our more powerful occult offensive operatives get to hole up on a disused North Sea accommodation rig and play bodyguard to the folks from the Foreign Office (Non-human Affairs Department).

“How long are you going to be gone this time?” I ask, relaxing slightly.

“I have to be on a chopper out of RAF Lossiemouth at about six o’clock tomorrow morning, which means catching the morning flight to Aberdeen, then an onward flight this afternoon. Then I’ll be with the negotiating team for, hopefully, a day or two, and back home again. Don’t worry, love, I just have to hang around and look professionally formidable.”

“But if things go wrong—”

“I said don’t worry, dear. Nothing is going to go wrong.” She smiles at me, a trifle sadly.

“But—” I shut up.