‘Never mind that,’ said Lesley and tried to get her hand inside my fly.

I jumped back and she started to sag slowly into the snow. I had to throw both my arms around her to try to hoist her back up, but all I managed to do was half pull both her jumper and blouse off.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘I’m up for it if you are.’

The back door opened to reveal Molly, who looked at me, then at Lesley and then back at me.

‘It’s not what you think it is,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’ asked Lesley as she staggered upright. ‘Shit.’

‘Let us in, Molly I want to get her into bed,’ I said.

Molly gave me a poisonous look as I half dragged Lesley inside.

‘Well, you put her to bed then,’ I said.

So she did. Molly just reached out and plucked Lesley from my arms and slung her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, only with much less effort than I’d have had to use on a sack of potatoes. Then she slowly turned on the spot and went gliding off into the long shadows of the atrium.

Toby, who’d obviously been waiting until the coast was clear, bounced out of the door to see if I’d brought him a present.

I headed back to the coach house to do some police work – which is, trust me, better than a cold shower.

First thing, I took the image of the Elvish script from the demon trap and ran it through Photoshop, using contrast and edge finding to clarify the letters and more importantly disguise where they came from. Then I put it out onto the great and varied social media sea with a request for a translation. While I waited, I wrote the formal action plan for Seawoll, no doubt snoring boozily in his bed by now, and emailed it to the Inside Inquiry Team.

The Tolkien scholars were obviously slow off the mark that night so I did a preliminary search on Empire Ware and Empire Pottery and got a lot of links to the Empire Porcelain Company of the North Staffordshire potteries. It was nice enough stuff but not only was it from the wrong end of the country, it had ceased trading in the late 1960s – yet was nonetheless considered eminently collectible. It wasn’t until I got past page 36 that I caught a glimpse of what I was looking for: The Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company, established 1865. I changed my search but all I got was a paragraph from an expired Ebay auction. Further research was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way – by sending an email to the SO11 and requesting an Integrated Intelligence Platform check. I referenced OPERATION MATCHBOX and gave my warrant number, making it all slick and official. By the time I’d finished that there were three translations of the Elvish in my inbox.