To be fair, we could also contribute to the suggestions box from which a committee selected the suitable candidates for working time. If you really worked hard to engineer it, you could probably run your own project—just as long as you could sneak it past the committee without one of the jobsworths shooting it down. Anyway, the Creative and Innovative self-directed work inflicted upon us from above now needed to be done—and with no hours allocated to it during the working day, it had perforce to be done at night.

• • •

I WASN’T THE ONLY NIGHT OWL WORKING IN THE DEPARTMENT tonight; the Laundry is eccentric by civil service standards, and although the fax machines and telephone switchboards were all switched off at night to stop employees abusing the facilities (per some ancient directive issued in 1972), the coffee machine and the network remain accessible. Quite a few employees choose to work outside core business hours to minimize the risk of being disturbed.

Tonight, the red NO ENTRY light above Andy’s office was lit, suggesting that my years-ago former manager was burning the midnight oil; our current departmental admin asset—Trish: twenty-something, plump, amiably inquisitive in an utterly inappropriate way—was nose down in a book at her desk in the middle of the open-plan area.

“Bob? Oh, hi!” She deftly shuffled the book out of sight beneath a lever arch file full of forms, but not before I spotted the cover of The Hunger Games. “Can I sign you in?” I nodded, as she logged my badge and photographed me (duplicating a process that had certainly already happened before the front door closed behind me). “What brings you back to the office?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” I lied. “Also, got to finish writing up a report for the Auditors.” The document in question was my report on GOD GAME RAINBOW—the apocalyptic clusterfuck in Colorado Springs a couple of months ago—but Trish didn’t need to know that: mentioning the Auditors would put her off asking any more questions. (Our audits are not strictly confined to the realm of the financial, and the people who administer them are deeply scary.) “Is anyone else around?”

“Andy’s up to something: he said he wasn’t to be disturbed.” Trish’s expression of mildly affronted disapproval nailed it: she was bored. “But he requested night service because of some regulation or other about not working solo, and I’m top of the on-call rota, so it’s overtime for me . . .” She mimed covering her mouth for a theatrical yawn.