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in my mind’s eye and it still gives me the shivers. He was tall and heavily built and he had thinning hair, pepper and salt. He had sunglasses that he never took off, so I couldn’t say what colour his eyes were. He had jowls, I remember, like a bulldog. I didn’t like him. He frightened me, and Alex as well, I think, telling us how important it was that nobody, not even our best friends, should get to hear about what Dad was doing, and he went on and on about animal rights activists and how dangerous they could be. He spoke to us as if we were mentally deficient, but it was clear that he was doing his best to be nice. It didn’t work, though. We just felt threatened.
    When Dad came back with the papers, Mr Davenport took them and left immediately, ignoring the offer of tea and sandwiches. The rest of us sat for a long time in a kind of daze, like mice crouching among the weeds long after the shadow of the hawk has gone. It was creepy.
    Mr Davenport had insisted that absolutely nothing pertaining to him or to the project should remain at our house once the lab complex was ready. So Dad took Alex and me along to help him move the computer and all the other stuff that had been delivered to the house by the office suppliers. He had to make three trips because there was no way it would all fit in the car.
    After a couple of miles we entered a network of tiny, leafy lanes, and it seemed to me so unlikely that there was a lab down there that I began to think Dad was pulling our legs. I had done a lot of cycling on the country roads around Worcester but I’d never discovered this area before. There were very few houses, and those we did see blended into the countryside as though they were still part of it. It felt like a real backwater. Eventually we stopped at a pair of old gates that looked as though they led into the farmyard of some ramshackle old estate. Which was, in fact, exactly what they did. Now we were convinced that Dad was having us on, and Alex told him so. The gates looked as if it would take a weight-lifter to open them, but Dad showed us the keypad ingeniously concealed in an old wooden post beside the entrance. He punched in the number and the huge gates swung open on oiled hinges and then closed silently behind us. Round the corner of the gravelled driveway was a range of old brick outbuildings. The ones at the front were decaying, their slate roofs collapsing and their windows fallen out. Inside them old wooden mangers dangled from rusting nails and the black sludge of ancient manure covered the floors. But behind them was a second yard and here the buildings were in far better condition.
    Dad parked his car round the back, beneath the cover of an old Dutch barn. It was hidden there and wouldn’t be seen by anyone if they came snooping around. We walked back to the better of the two yards. The windows and most of the doors were firmly boarded up. The buildings still looked like farm outhouses, but in the dark corner of a lean-to hayshed was a discreet but very solid wooden door, and beside it, blending ingeniously into the brickwork, was a card slot and a fingerprint recognition pad.
    Inside, there was a whole complex of rooms. The first one was huge; a long hall lined with sturdy metal cages, ready and waiting for the arrival of the squirrels. Beyond that was an office, which was where the computer and all the other stuff was going to go, and beside it a kitchen and a bathroom. None of the rooms had any natural light because windows, even skylights, would allow a curious passer-by to look in and they had all been boarded up. So once you were inside you might have been anywhere. The walls were freshly painted and plasterboard ceilings concealed the wooden beams of the old buildings. The built-in desks and work units were brand new and the whole place was clean and sparkling. Further on again we came to the quarantine room with its showers and decontamination chambers. Only one of its doors would open at a