The uniforms banged on a door until someone let them in. It was a four-floor walk-up designed to have an ambience of shiny brown paintwork and roach smells in passageways. West of Tupolev, over as far as Radia Marelli, all the buildings were like this: warrens falling into the ramified tunnels and flooded cellars underneath, patrolled by crime tourists enjoying an economy of low-rent donkey parlours, futurology joints and tank farms where you could get the bootlegged experience of being a plant from a distant world. The assistant went up to the second floor and opened a window so she could look down on the corpse.

‘What do you notice?’ she said.

There was a flicker in the air immediately above Toni Reno, a very pale blue illumination like neon seen at night from the next street along. The Sadie Barnham jacket had fallen away to reveal his ribcage, emphasising its curve up out of the diaphragm. Say what you like, Toni kept himself in shape. His face was waxy, his expression one of surprise. There was no clue to how he was hanging there like that.

‘I notice the rain falling off him,’ Epstein said, ‘but not on to him.’

The assistant smiled briefly. ‘That was Toni’s ambition all his short life,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it gives us a clue to the type of crime we have here.’ As if thinking about this, she stared down at the corpse a minute or two more. Eventually she said:

‘Pull him down if you can. If you can’t, leave someone to watch what happens. I’ll send a SiteCrime team over. Maybe an operator.’

The thought of working with an operator dampened Epstein’s spirits. The uniforms nodded to one another, they had guessed all along it would play this way. Halfway down the street stairs the assistant stopped as if she had forgotten something. ‘You go on,’ she told Epstein. She waited until the uniforms were out of the building then entered the first room she found, where an alien of some kind, bipedal, its strigiform skull drilled for electrical access, lay on a pallet surrounded by drifts of its own feathers. Several small objects – including a pair of Entreflex dice turned up to display the ‘Tower of Cloud’ face; a cheap hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract; and a handful of intricately etched wide-bore titanium needles – were arranged on the nightstand. Two or three weeks ago, the assistant estimated, someone had begun recording these things through the alien’s sensorium, then lost interest. There was a mouldy smell in the room, like pigeons under a bridge. The assistant made two or three dial-up calls, spoke briefly to her office, then stood the way people do when they are waiting for someone to talk to them by holographic fetch. Nothing happened, although for a moment a half-formed shape seemed to flicker in an upper corner of the room.

‘Are you there?’ she said encouragingly.