“The past month?” She shakes her head. “Then it can’t be K syndrome, Mr. Howard. We get regular updates from the NHS epidemiological tracking database, part of the Secondary Usage Service. K syndrome is rather distinctive. Your typical patient exhibits the symptoms of nvCJD; it’s a strikingly early onset dementia with non-standard signs and presentation, and it’s progressive. More to the point, the patients are also distinctive: mathematicians, philosophers, occultists. Also, they test negative for PrP variants. What you’re talking about is something else—diagnosed only after death, which means the patients went downhill much too rapidly for K syndrome or any prion disease we know about. Do you have any more information about them?”

I finally get to open my briefcase. “This is the output of a query I ran on data extracted from the SUS data warehouse.” I shove the screen shot I took of the geographical scatter plot across her desk. “Twelve cases were diagnosed at post-mortem, all in the past four weeks. The factor they’ve got in common—at least, what I’ve established so far—is that they all worked for an office cleaning agency in Tower Hamlets. I don’t have the individual patient records, but I suspect the shit is going to hit the fan really soon, and I’d like to have some answers to send up the line.” I shove the printout of the spreadsheet summary at her: ages, postcodes, other basic anonymized information.

Her eyes flicker across the papers. “This is—I—”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” I suggest.

“No! But it’s something new. Hmm. How did you find this?”

I hesitate for a couple of seconds. “I don’t think I can tell you,” I finally say. “Not without prior authorization.”

“Well, if it’s not Krantzberg-Gödel syndrome that makes it even worse.” She shakes her head in unconscious distress. “Mr. Howard, I’m going to have to go and do some digging in order to de-anonymize these patients and confirm that what you’ve found actually exists. Data warehouses tend to accumulate rubbish in the corners . . . I can’t just go pulling these records without justification: there are issues of medical confidentiality here, and respect for the relatives, and so on. On the other hand, I can’t write this off either. Um.” She stares at me until I make eye contact. “I may need some arms discreetly twisted, and unlike you, I don’t have one of those special badges.”