Three hundred metres and ten minutes later Greg cleared the market and turned right into Church Street, parking outside a little bakery shop.

On the other side of the road was a head-high stone wall, rapidly disappearing under an avalanche of dark waxy-leafed ivy. There was a raised garden behind it, enclosed by buildings on two sides and a chapel on the third. He went through the open wooden gate and took the steps two at a time.

The garden and buildings used to be part of the Oakham School campus, but private education hadn't lasted six months after the PSP came to power, swept away in the card carriers' Equalisation crusade. And after that the refugees had hit town demanding somewhere to live. The campus was requisitioned as fast as the shops, playing fields given over to allotments.

The school's Round House was a plain circular building sitting on the south side of the raised garden, three storeys high, and built from pale Stamford brick, Its door was closed and locked. Greg stood in front of it, motionless, waiting. It was a game he and Gabriel played. After half a minute he admitted defeat once again and turned to the small touchpanel set into the brick. He started pecking out the six-digit code for room seventeen.

"Come on up," Gabriel's voice chimed out of the intercom before he'd finished. The lock buzzed like an enraged hornet.

Gabriel Thompson had been a major in the Mindstar Brigade, possessed of the most reliable precognition faculty ever recorded. She was thirty-nine; only two years older than Greg, but judging from physical appearance alone he would've said it was closer to twenty. Her fair hair had already faded to a maidenly pearl-white, flab was accumulating all over her body. She wore a fawn-coloured woollen cardigan and tweed skirt, making her broad and shapeless, a half-hearted attempt to disguise her physical deterioration.

It pained him to see her this way, a prematurely middle-aged spinster. Especially as his mind insisted on remembering her as that neat, efficient young officer in Turkey. A fine-looking woman in her day, idolised like an elder sister.

He was given a moody stare as he entered her room on the second floor; it was one of thirty in the Round House, originally intended to sleep two girl boarders. As a permanent bedsit it was terribly cramped.

"Typical," she said. "Only ever visit when you want something." Badly applied dabs of make-up made her face shine in the golden afternoon sunlight filtering through the net curtain.

"Not true. Oh, Eleanor says hello."

"I doubt it." Gabriel began pouring tea from a silver pot into two bone china cups, all neatly laid out ready.

Rock music from one of the other rooms thumped out a soft bass rhythm in the background, echoing down the stairwell.

"So what have you come for this time?" she asked.

"Philip Evans."

"He's dead," She paused for a moment, then her eyes widened in surprise. "Christ!"