“Gentlemen,” began the Baron to his two companions, faces flickering in the guttering coals, “I beg your indulgence on a very peculiar matter, and I would ask you not to mock me, nor worse, to think me quite mad, until you have considered fully the whole of my sorry tale. For if what I am about to say is true, then I am of the mind that it has the capacity to be the ruination of all of us.”
It was the evening of the winter solstice, and time once more for the quarterly meeting of three somewhat awkward acquaintances, bound by shared shame to a secrecy they regularly reassembled to reaffirm. Before falling upwards, as men of his birth do, their host Lord James, the 5th Baron of his line, had managed a nightspot in the stews south of the river named the Ministry of Sound, in a foreshadowing of his belatedly discovered vocation. For during the Great Pandemic, the Baron was to be appointed minister for a short-lived medical novelty called Test and Trace, by the then prime minister, Letterbox Turds of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, himself also present, tousled-haired and trousers stained as usual.
