03.00 The Right Honourable Councillor Peter Hendricks, in his office in the Palace of Councils building (Interior Ministry)

In the mist and dusk Hendricks can just about make out the shape of the cathedral tower on the other side of the Palace of Councils’ plaza [?]. The cathedral bells’ three o’clock chimes are shuffling their muffled way through the damp air. He presses his face against the window glass, filling his visual field with the mists and with the reflection of his own eye sockets.

In the brightly lit office behind him the three civil servants rest their plump, besuited buttocks on the plump, shiny leather armchairs, and plentiful firelight glints and winks on the chandelier and on the facets of the large brandy glasses that all three men are balancing on top of their laptop stacks of papers.

Councillor Hendricks’ office is renowned for its comfort and high quality comestibles as well as for its professionalism, rigour, and for the councillor’s penetrating questioning style. His intimidating, unblinking silences are also legendary, silences into which the nervous, the inexperienced and the under-prepared or soon-to-be-dismissed gabble unintended revelations, awkward truths, or confused, self-contradictory rationalisations of things done or left undone. It won’t happen again, Councillor. And it usually doesn’t, since Hendricks most often consciously employs his silences against the fast-learning tyro in need of a career-stiffening lesson, the over-promoted incompetent who’s on their final warning, or the politically naïve or expendable who’re about to be sacrificed to the press for the good of the department or the Council.