I had memorized the route from a map of the estate, but I still felt like we were lost the moment we stepped away from the car. Dusk was closing in: the day’s clouds had blown away and the sky was a deep blue-green, with a faint white glow over the rooftops where the moon was rising, but the streets were dark, chunks of garden wall and unlit street lamps and sagging chicken wire looming out of nowhere and gone a few steps later. When our shadows showed faintly they were twisted and unfamiliar, turned hunchbacked by the holdalls slung over our shoulders. Our footsteps came back to us like followers’, bouncing off bare walls and across stretches of churned mud. We didn’t talk: the dusk that was helping to cover us could be covering someone else, anywhere.

In the near-darkness the sound of the sea was bigger, stronger, disorienting, rising up at us from every direction at once. The patrol floaters’ old dark-blue Peugeot materialized behind us like a ghost car, so close that we both jumped, its engine noise hidden in that long dull roar. By the time we realized who it was, they were gone, slipping away between houses that showed stars through their window-holes.

Down Ocean View Rise, rectangles of light fell across the road. One of them lit up a yellow Fiat parked outside the Spains’ house: our fake Fiona was in place. At the top of Ocean View Walk, I moved Richie into the shadow of the corner house, put my mouth close to his ear and whispered, “Goggles.”

He squatted over his holdall and pulled out a pair of thermal-imaging goggles. Supplies had given him the good ones, newbie or no. The stars vanished and the dark street leaped into ghostly half life, creepers hanging pale on tall blocks of gray wall, wild plants crisscrossing white and lacy where the pavements should have been. In a couple of the gardens, small glowing shapes crouched in corners or scurried through the weeds, and three phantom wood doves slept high in a tree, heads tucked under their wings; no warm thing bigger than that, anywhere in sight. The street was silent, just sea-sounds and wind fingering through the creepers and a lone bird crying out on the beach, over the wall. “Looks clear,” I said, into Richie’s ear. “Let’s go. Carefully.”

The goggles said nothing was alive in our man’s lair, at least not in the corners I could see. The scaffolding was rough with rust, and I felt it shake under our weight. Upstairs, the moon blazed in through a window-hole where the plastic was pinned back like a curtain. The room had been stripped bare; the Bureau had taken everything, to test for prints, fibers, hairs, body fluids. There were black swipes of print dust on the walls and the windowsills.

Every light in the Spains’ house was on, turning the place into a great beacon signaling to our man. Our fake Fiona was in the kitchen, still wrapped in her red duffle coat; she had filled the Spains’ kettle and was leaning against the counter waiting for it to boil, cupping her mug in both hands and staring blankly at the finger paintings stuck to the fridge. In the garden, moonlight caught on glossy leaves, turned them white and shivering so that it looked like all the trees and hedges had burst into flower at once.