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’

‘Is this a joke?’ I was starting to feel like I’d stepped into a parallel universe – one where Frank Spencer was God, and lifts only went down. ‘I’m Castor, yes, but I’m nobody’s wheel – big, small or indifferent. Who’s been feeding you this garbage?’

‘The lieutenant-’ the other guy said, but Bass cut him off with a brusque gesture.

‘We had a meeting,’ he said. ‘You don’t know it, but the Breath of Life have been keeping tabs on you for ages. We had an operative at that funeral, watching you from undercover. She’s from Ke&#hav our underground task force.

And afterwards she made contact with us and told us to keep you under surveillance. And that’s what we’ve done. Wherever you go, we’ll be with you. Whoever you see, we’ll see them too, and we’ll take all their details down and circulate them to everyone in the movement. You’re ours, Castor, whenever we want to take you.’

A secret operative? A Breather working undercover among the London ghostbreakers? I tried that on for size: then I turned it upside down and discovered that if fitted a lot better that way.

Dana McClennan. Dana McClennan stopping to talk to the pickets as she walked away from John Gittings’s funeral. ‘You see that man over there? Well, he’s not a man at all. He’s the big bad wolf.’

‘You fucking berk,’ I said sternly. ‘This secret operative – this sweet, blonde, sexy, plausible secret operative, who let you in on the big secret and made you feel so important – her name is Dana McClennan, and she’s not even in your sodding organisation.

She was just using you to bust my balls.’

Bass gave me a pitying look. ‘You can’t trick me into giving away the names of our people. Your sort are finished, Castor. You just don’t know it yet.’

I walked towards him and he flinched. But I wasn’t interested in fighting any more. I carried on past him, grabbed the handle of the fire extinguisher and jerked it free from the remains of the windshield, which fell like rice at a wedding onto the van’s front seats. Bass gave an anguished wail.

I hefted the extinguisher onto my shoulder and turned to face him and his blue-balled friend.

‘Stephen Bass,’ I said. ‘UCL, wasn’t it? I don’t know which faculty, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. If I so much as see your sodding face again, I’ll come round to your hall of residence with some friends of mine, and we’ll whistle your soul right out of your body. You’ll be like a zombie, only with less personality.’

Bass almost swallowed his tongue.