The visitor turned out to be of the clueful-evil variety – a scientist turned administrative bean-counter. Luck had it that the lash-up experiment was buried under a pile of other equipment I’d just moved into the lab. I was honestly able to say I was working on sorting everything out.
There was a brief discussion regarding the future direction of the project and I showed him the results that had been emailed to me, deflecting his questions due to lack of knowledge of how the results were gained. The next (first?) milestone to hit is verified results by early September. I’m going to be very busy for a few weeks…