‘If you have a spare board I just might try that tomorrow,’ Landers said, and told a couple of his favourite stories about his exploits. How he liked to go wingsuit flying up in the mountains with a gang of his pals, for instance, dropping from a flitter and skimming close to cliffs, shooting through clefts, swooping low above the floors of ravines … He conjured the video of one his flights Ysbel had seen more times than she cared to count, and after running it a couple of times, once with commentary, once without, he told his little audience about the time he had won permission from the natives to accompany a trapper in the edgelands of the north, and how a bear had surprised him while he had been taking a piss in a clump of juniper scrub.

‘I did what you are supposed to do, which is stay absolutely still and avoid meeting its eyes. I didn’t even shake myself off and tuck myself in, and believe me, I wanted to do that more than I wanted to run. The bear sniffed around while I stood there with my dick literally in my hand, and in the end it gave me a playful little cuff and ambled off. Took twelve stitches to sew up that love tap,’ he said, running a finger down the fine white line on his cheek, ‘but I was lucky. Trapper I was with, sturdy old fellow, said it probably hadn’t seen a human before, and reckoned I was some kind of diseased bear that was no good for fighting, fucking or feeding.’

His little audience laughed, fresh drinks were poured and Landers asked Ysbel to tell her story about the speedboat race and the wrongful deaths and the mysterious map.

‘That’s about all there was to it,’ Ysbel said.

‘No need to be so modest,’ Landers said. ‘It’s a good yarn.’

Ysbel knew that he wasn’t going to let it go, so she gave a brief summary of how competition for a copy of an old bear carving had ended in a race between a wealthy native and a Survey and Surveillance agent which caused the deaths of two fisherfolk.

‘It was the native’s speedboat which collided with the fisherfolk’s skiff,’ she said. ‘The agent spotted it just in time and sheared away. But she shared the blame, especially as the race had been her idea, which was why I was sent to assist the local bailiff’s investigation.’

‘You omitted the best part,’ Landers said.

‘That I never found out if S and S properly disciplined their agent?’

‘That you never found out why she was so keen to get hold of that old map.’

‘What mattered was the deaths of the two fisherfolk,’ Ysbel said, knowing that she sounded like a high-minded prig but not caring. Landers sometimes brought out the worst in her.