His name was Mark Hambidge.  He was a teacher in a small girls' school near Darlington in Durham.  He was twenty-eight, married with a young son of two.  His wife was Alyson, and she was a social worker.  Mark was tall, dark-haired, clean-shaven, with thin metal-rimmed circular glasses and a slight scar under his lower lip.  The area around his eyes suggested he laughed a lot.

Or cried.

But more likely the former - his face had that look about it.  He had been photographed alongside his wife six months ago by the Yorkshire Post.  He'd won a national competition to identify six still images of festive television advertisements.  And his prize had been £5,000 and a year's supply of chocolate.  The reporter had wondered what Mark would spend the money on.

My Brother's Death Was a Government Cover-Up was the headline.  It transpired that four-and-a-half years previously Mark's brother Joseph had been killed in some bungled government operation to close down a terrorist organisation based in West Sussex.  Mark had explained to the reporter that he and his parents had never had a satisfactory answer to their questions about Joseph's death, or been told why his brother had even been connected with the police investigation.  Nor had a body been returned for burial.  Mark Hambidge was proposing to use the money to fund a new helpline that would assist bereaved families to find out the truth behind the deaths of their loved ones in government 'incidents'.

That particular issue of the newspaper had been used to wrap some spare parts for the Halcham school heating system, which had been shipped over from Doncaster.  The Only reason the report of the interview with Mark Hambidge had been neatly torn out and squirrelled away for posterity was because Mrs Morley at the school had cornered Ashley one afternoon when he was getting supplies from the Wavy Line.

'I don't suppose any of you know anything about heating systems?' she had asked.

Ash had shrugged and said he'd find out.

When he returned to the cottage by the cavern mouth he mentioned this.  Ciara and Cellian had instantly taken out their SéneNet-produced laptop computer with its state-of-the-art-plus serial port, modem and software and downloaded, from a site in Australia, the specifications of forty-eight possible heating systems of the sort the village school was likely to use.  Once the information had been burned on to a CD-ROM, again with technology that most of the population could only dream of, Ciara had asked who would do the job.

'I will,' he had said, pulling his right ear slightly forward and revealing a minute USB port embedded in his skull.  Without waiting, he plugged the CD-ROM's lead into the port and Ciara activated the device, sending gigabytes of densely packed information straight into his brain.

Within eighty-three seconds, he was the western world's authority on heating systems and set off down the cliff towards Mrs Morley's tiny home.