Ysbel had got up a composite image of Kirder Halmasdaughter, but when she showed the printout to the foreman he spat a thin stream of black juice and said that she must forgive him for his ignorance, but as far as he was concerned all her people looked alike. According to him, the people who rented the godown had left a little over a year ago. He said there’d been four of them. Four that he’d seen on the regular, at any rate. He didn’t know where they had come from or where they had gone. They seemed to have been running a small import business – mixed goods, food, construction supplies and the like – but he didn’t know where any of it had been sent to. Somewhere inland, he guessed – there had been wagons coming and going. Ysbel asked if the goods had been taken to the railway station, but the foreman didn’t know. They kept themselves to themselves, he said. You only saw them when a shipment came in. They didn’t eat at any of the local food stalls, or take part in morning or evening invocations. A friend of his had offered them a good deal on a load of seasoned timber once but had been swiftly rebuffed.

It was early in the evening, now. Too late to head further north. There was no compound at Pleasant Bay, very little human presence beyond a small station shared by Management and Supply and a wellbeing clinic. Ysbel walked back to the flitter and along the way stopped at a stall and bought a rolled grape leaf stuffed with shrimp and slices of pickled lime, and ate it while watching the sun wester over steep dry hills on the northern side of the narrows that linked the bay with the ocean. She reckoned that it was no coincidence that the import business had shut down at around the same time as the camp had been abandoned, and suspected that she hadn’t been able to discover any evidence of diversion of supplies to the camp because everything had been washed through businesses like this one, so that its final destination couldn’t be traced by human agencies. She wondered if Joyous Hightower’s syndicate had organised and funded the scheme, thought that Goodwill might be able to find out.