‘It would have to be something more than a quick visit – you need heavy-duty hardware to excavate a site at the bottom of the sea. And any kind of on-site work, even a casual visit, has to be cleared with the natives, as well as with the department. And all of that would be in the site’s master file,’ Ilan said, with a touch of impatience. ‘And it wasn’t.’

A trace of the headache from last night’s wine, which Ysbel thought she’d sluiced away with the shower’s cold water, began to throb behind her eyes. She said, ‘Perhaps the reports were filed somewhere else. And if there aren’t any reports, there might be logs of visits, flight plans …’

‘It sounds as if this is something more than tying up a loose end,’ Ilan said. ‘What is this really about, Ysbel?’

‘I told you: something that’s probably nothing. Information from a reliable source I’d like to follow up. If you can’t or won’t do it, maybe you could point me towards someone who can help. Or give me access to the files so I can do it myself.’

‘I’ll take a look,’ Ilan said. ‘Only because it won’t take long, since there’s nothing to find. And that’ll be the end of it.’

It hadn’t been an argument, exactly, but when they reached the runabout their farewells were perfunctory. Ysbel knew, as she plodded back up the hill, abandoning all thought of going for a run, that she should call Ilan and apologise for being obtuse and difficult, but instead she slapped on a patch to fix her headache and opened her little box of accountancy tools and spent the rest of the day ploughing through archives. She finished her examination of records lodged by the Ogres Grave station around the time of Seven’s birth, finding nothing out of place, and started in on more recent records. Taking a break when she felt her concentration beginning to blur, distracting herself with small domestic tasks before diving back in. Working like that for three days, seeing no one but the natives who owned the land she rented, the one time she walked down to their farm to buy fresh vegetables and fruit. She found nothing in the Ogres Grave records, moved on to records lodged by stations responsible for the other regions of the Outer Territories, and in the end had tallied only overlooked errors and a few instances of what might be trivial pilfering. She flagged them up for Mitkos – another gift to acknowledge his help – and contemplated the archives of records covering the United Territories, vaster than those of the New Territories by a factor of ten.