Sitting at the bar in the Mason's Arms is less of an experience and more of a hypothesis — the mirror behind the optics simply refuses to resolve you, confirming nothing, denying nothing, performing a third expression that has no name for it. Outside, the murk presses against the windows with what I can only describe as patient enthusiasm. There is, apparently, also a funfair somewhere in there. I have not found it.

Tom Calver's housing assessments have taught him to categorise what he finds, but Hellsborough keeps producing categories he can't file — like the handprint in the damp of a back bedroom wall, warm-soft, five fingers spread, pressing from the other side, and slightly larger by the time he left than when he'd entered. His notebook says "non-standard damp pattern." The wobble in the pen line says something else.

Van's preferred method of entering a guarded building — drainpipe, rooftop traverse, grappling hook, and if the hook slips while you're a thousand feet above the pavement, that's just one of those things — remains a source of what I can only call professional admiration. He threw the roof sentry over the eaves with the practised economy of someone returning a library book, then had the audacity to pour me a rhum while I was still processing the anecdote.

Thomas Bean and Dani Hinchcliffe surfaced from the River Dun bedraggled, half-naked, and with no memory of how they'd arrived — the last thing either recalled was accepting an inoculation against a ripperthroat airborne virus that came, as a sweetener, with a hit of rockcrust. That sweetener is now a primary item of suspicion. The murk, for once, was not the problem.