Then she said: ‘Ninety per cent of what we see every day is an artefact of some other process. Of the things that are really going on.’ Epstein didn’t know how to reply to that. ‘Don’t you think?’ she said. Then: ‘The investigator must always take account of that.’

She stood companionably next to him for a moment, hands on hips, looking around the mostly empty space as if oil-stained floors and fluorescent warning stripes held an innate interest for her. Epstein didn’t like the way she relaxed. He found her as disturbing at close quarters as the operator had been. She was too hard to avoid. Her tailoring occupied the warehouse like another personality: everything interested it, from a momentary change in Epstein’s breathing to the sound of footsteps half a mile away. Every time its attention shifted, he caught the rank, exciting smell of hormonal gradients. She would smile at you behind that as if remembering something sexual you had enjoyed together, while pictographs ran chaos patterns down the inside of her forearm, from elbow to wrist like print from the historical times. She was some cheap cutter’s idea of the future.

‘I want to know when Enka disappears,’ she told him.

For the same reason, she explained, she would recommend they keep an eye on Toni Reno. In her judgement, she said, they were at a weird place with this. ‘But we won’t know how weird until the next thing happens.’ There wasn’t much else they could do unless The Sea had discovered something. She enquired of her office if Reno had any kind of Port Authority paperwork in process at the time of his death, and, learning that he did, went off to investigate. Epstein watched her leave, asking himself all the same questions her colleagues asked about her in the building at Uniment & Poe. The difference? Epstein’s perspective on it was not SiteCrime perspective. It was cop perspective, and to him she resembled nothing more than some toxic one-shot personality the kids download in Carmody on a Saturday night.

Unaware of these harsh judgements, the assistant made her way across the rainy cement of the noncorporate port.