He rummaged around. No signs of disturbance, everything tidy. If someone had looked the place over before him, they’d been careful. The wardrobes were full, the cold-storage was stacked with jeneza-canisters and ready-to-heat paraja rolls. There was no sign of a hurried getaway. It felt as if Adeard might stumble back in at any moment from a heavy night, his breath stinking of alcohol and a young chit on either arm.

Zidarov stored some static picts on his iris, checked for clandest­ine electronics, made sure no anachronisms such as handwritten notes or stored vox-messages were secreted anywhere. Then he moved on, placing a detector on the doorlock to let him know if anyone came back.

After that he tracked down a few of the names Udmil had given him – friends, mostly. He’d put out a summons to a couple of them on the journey back from the mansion, the ones that had hab-units in nearby towers, and he now went to call them in. The first was a woman. She met him in an apartment very similar to Adeard’s, and had deeply sunken cheeks and dull eyes. Her hair was gold, and shimmered like scatter-crystal as she moved. She smoked cotin the whole time he spoke to her, and looked like she took on harder stuff whenever she could.

‘No idea, probator,’ she told him, looking only mildly interested. ‘No idea.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Um. Three weeks ago.’

‘How was he then? Anything unusual?’

‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

They all said the same things, the dreary procession of the young, all with the same dull sense of vague boredom that they seemed to wrap around themselves like a comfort blanket. No, no, probator. Nothing unusual. No reason to suspect anything. Anything else, probator? I really have to go, probator, if there’s nothing else. Zidarov found himself thinking that, with friends like these, he might have gone into hiding himself. They were all rich beyond belief, these slips – scions of big trade dynasties and political families, raised in a world of suffocating security laced with bouts of wild hedonism. They looked at him, these mere boys, these mere girls, like he was some washed-up slob, some warning about failure from their futures. Perhaps they were right about that.

He recorded it all. He took down anything that gave him a lead – which was nothing – and nodded at them, and pretended to ignore the way they looked at him, their lids weighed down by all that slate they’d never be able to spend.

By the time he was done, it was the middle of the day, and the sun was big and red in the sky. It was getting hot. He needed to eat.