At that the situation changed rapidly. The assistant’s tailoring came up and took control of the space, carefully inhibiting any electromagnetic activity except its own. The lights went out. The wire jockey’s signal went bottom-up. The agents found that their tailoring had quit. Six and a half thousand resident nanocameras, drifting in the air like fish semen, all burned out at once. What would they have recorded? Some silvery, mucoid blurs connecting different parts of the room, which, upon analysis, would turn out to be the signature of a single woman moving at abnormal speeds. Each contact she made slowed her down for a fraction of a second, partly resolving this image, freezing her in a curious half-turn; or looking over her shoulder into the upper corner of the room; or with her head at an inhuman angle, face transfigured by a radiant smile.

Fifteen seconds after it had initiated the engagement, her tailoring stood down. The agents lay in opposite corners. The wire jockey sat puffing and blowing on the floor, his back against the wall, his legs stuck out stiffly in front of him. One eyepiece hung on its flex, the other seemed to have been driven into his skull. The body of the New Man rolled slowly off the table and on to the floor at the assistant’s feet. She stared down at it as if waiting for something else to happen, then left. The nanocameras came back on. The holding cell was silent for a while, then you got a small sigh as of final bowel sounds, which was the wire jockey giving up.

Heavy rain fell vertically into the alley off Tupolev, where a man named Toni Reno could be found performing slow fishlike movements eight feet above the pavement in a dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket. Toni was dead. The uniform branch was already on scene, under the supervision of a thin cop called Epstein. Toni faced away from them, up into the weather, his back arched, his arms and legs dangling bonelessly. Water poured off each limb; shaking it off their faces like a cluster of big shapeless animals, the cops in their slickers peered up.

‘This is how you found him,’ the assistant suggested.

‘He started lower down.’

‘You couldn’t start much lower than Toni.’

Epstein ignored this. ‘When I get here,’ he explained, ‘the guy is on the floor like any other dead guy. Then he floats up. Not so quick that you can see it: but when you turn away, next time you look he’s a little higher. It takes maybe twenty minutes.’ The assistant regarded him with not much expression on her face.

He shrugged. ‘Thirty at the outside.’

She said, ‘Get me into one of these houses.’

‘Dead guys don’t float,’ Epstein said.