The discovery was not especially pleasing: she had wasted time looking in the wrong place, and Special Operations had beaten her to the prize. She had no doubt that they also had visited the railhead near the border with bear country where the line that ran north from Pleasant Bay terminated, but she knew that she had to go there anyway. It was the nearest railhead to the camp, the place which had aroused Goodwill’s suspicions when he had discovered that it been receiving shipments long after its business of dispatching captured bears into bear country had ended. Ysbel wanted to ask about those shipments and discover, if anyone had passed through the railhead after the camp had closed, where they had been heading. Any people, and any bears, too.

She bedded down under the flitter and was woken in the middle of the night by a light shining in her face and a voice behind it asking her with patient politeness if she required any assistance. The voice belonged to a young bailiff, who told her that it would be better if she spent the rest of the night with her own people. When she asked him if it was illegal to sleep near the beach he told her that of course it was not, carters who brought in goods often did, as she could see by the campfires, but it was unusual for one of her people to do so, and perhaps a little unwise, too.

‘There are some who do not hold you in the esteem that you might believe you deserve,’ he said, and Ysbel wondered if he was one of them. A couple of years ago no native lawkeeper would have challenged her like this.

She tried to turn it to her advantage, asked him about the godown which had recently been of interest to some of her people. Did he know anything about the group which had rented it?

‘I regret that I do not,’ the bailiff said. ‘They left before I started work here.’

‘Perhaps someone more senior than yourself could enlighten me.’

‘Perhaps, if they were not on leave, or busy elsewhere.’

Ysbel could have challenged this plain untruth, being a rude human who scorned custom and law, but suspected that the bailiff’s attitude would be shared by his fellows, and assured him that she would be on her way first thing tomorrow, and meanwhile, not wishing to disturb anyone at this late hour, she would sleep inside her vehicle.