In the following days, the assistant tried to forget what she had seen. Routine being as important  to her as ever, she sat in her car, she sat in her office, she sat upright  in the immersion  tank  on C-Street watching herself come. Everywhere the job took her, she thought  up names for herself. She tried Ysabeau, Mirabelle, she tried Rosy Glo. She tried Sweet Thing and Pak 43. She was a police detective, in the street and in her car, looking in the wing mirror, signalling left or right. Day and night the town surrounded  her with all the elements of her profession: gun kiddies cruising the shadows, cutters up to their elbows in the black heart of humanity, trade goods smuggled down from the stars; soft intuitions, sneaking suspicions. She was taking  notes,  making  reports.  She was sitting at her desk while shadow operators crawled about among the papers like old cobwebs and dusty, unfinished hands. She tried Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire;  Stormo!  and  Te Faaturuma.  She dialled up the uniform branch and asked for Epstein.

‘That haulier  you boarded,’ he informed  her: ‘It’s long gone from Carver Field.’

She opened the Nova Swing paperwork across one wall. A picture of Epstein’s face appeared on another. ‘What’s a “mortsafe’? It says here they took on a “mortsafe”.’

‘You’re the educated one,’ Epstein’s face said.

He’d been at the Port Authority all morning, drinking java from a paper cup; then in the port itself. ‘Enka Mercury’s still here,’ he said. She was high in the warehouse ceiling now, the colour of oily smoke and tars, as transparent  as soap. She was still hanging open under one arm. Still dead. From a distance the flap of skin resembled  torn  cloth. ‘Get alongside Enka in the cherrypicker, you’ll detect what I’d call a faint but definite smell.’

‘She’s still rotating?’

‘Toni Reno too,’ the cop confirmed. ‘Although Toni seems a little slower today. I can provide footage of that.’