“I’m looking for outbreaks. Not sure what, or where, so I’m trying to spread the widest net that comes to hand. Anything peculiar. A rash of spontaneous human combustion in Stevenage, or rabies in Ravensthorpe; could be anything. The point is to try and build a tripwire for anomalies.”

“But the police already—” He stopped. I shook my head.

“Not the police. Sure they’ll be on the line as soon as they confirm a fire-breathing lizard has come ashore in Liverpool, but what about the other stuff? We live in dangerous times. What got me thinking was, how many of the sort of problems we get called in to piss on start out small and get treated by the wrong emergency services? Body snatchers in Bath, zombies in Z—Zurich.” My metaphor engine had just broken: I took another sip of whisky. “A lot of possession cases show up as anomalous behavior, and while the ambulance service often bring the police in, it’s frequently mis-categorized as a mental health issue. So I’m trying to work out how to mine the National Health Service data warehouses for early signs of demonic possession. That’s what the task was about. ‘Everybody knows vampires don’t exist,’ it said: ‘develop a data mining utility to provide three sigma confirmation of the null hypothesis based on evidence from the NHS Spine.’ I don’t know who put it on the stack but it’s inspired! I mean I couldn’t have come up with a better ten-percent project if I’d designed it myself.”

Andy stared at me slack-jawed for a couple of seconds, then raised his left hand and theatrically closed his mouth. “Refill time.” He shoved his glass across the desk, towards the bottle. “Then you’re going to tell me why you’re telling me this.”

“You haven’t guessed already?” It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

“You need a minion to run interference for you with the nice Data Protection Commissioner with the taser, right?”

“Right.” I topped up his tumbler.

He hesitated momentarily. “Deal. Because it’s crazy but it just might work, and it sounds a fuck of a lot less dangerous than what I was working on turned out to be. What could possibly go wrong?”

• • •

WHICH IS WHY, IN THE END, ANDY DIDN’T GET TO DEMONSTRATE his coding chops by summoning up an Eater.

And why I eventually sneaked my way into the clearances I needed to log onto the SUS Core Data Warehouse.

And, ultimately, why all the deaths happened.

2.

MEET THE SCRUM

HOW IT STARTED: ONE MONTH AGO.

“Hey, Alex, did you hear the one about the dyslexic sailor?”

“No—”

“He spent the night in a warehouse!”

Alex threw a bean bag at the joker—John—who caught it out of the air. Their supervisor was unamused: “Pigs!” said Mhari.

“It’s okay, hen, we’re committed,” said John.

Then she laughed. “You will be.”