This wasn't the room with the Lowry and the smell of polish. It was originally a dormitory, I suppose, right under the mansard roof, the kind of place where the little frilled domestics had hacked at their lungspots through the winters of the nineteenth century. There hadn't been much progress: Egerton was rubbing chilblain ointment into his raw blue hands when I came in, and looked up rather guiltily as if discovered in the enactment of a mystic rite.

'Ah yes,' he said vaguely, and fitted the lid back on to the tin.

An opaque grey panel showed where the window was, its grime and the fog outside filtering whatever daylight was still in the sky; a single bulb in a white porcelain shade dangled from a flex looped in paper-clips to keep it out of the way: we might have been at the bottom of a mine shaft.

Egerton gestured to the only chair for visitors, an incongruous Louis Quinze with little yellow puffs of stuffing exposed to the wan light. I'd only seen Egerton twice before, on any kind of real business, and each time it had been in this room. He was a thin and tired-looking man, his eyes weathered by too many winters of inclement thought, his mouth still slightly twisted from the shock of his first disillusionment, whenever that had come; it was said his wife had committed suicide during one of their seaside holidays at Frinton, and that the smell of a certain suntan oil made him physically sick; but then he might always have looked like this, a vessel of despair, and that might be why she'd done it. Facts are short at the Bureau, where nobody's meant to exist, so rumours are a prime necessity of the resident staff.

'How was Norfolk?'

'Foggy.'

He smiled thinly. 'We always consider we have a monopoly, here. Sorry to have fetched you away.' His voice was beautifully modulated, an actor's voice. 'I expect you've heard what happened in Gaza.'