There was a skinny kid on the sofa in the sitting room, with a laptop on his knees. From the laptop a wire snaked across the floor to a pair of speakers. The young lad looked at us and turned down the volume of the speakers, but he didn’t even say hello, which was really strange for an eastern boy. I scanned his aura too. Human.

“This way . . .”

We followed the woman through to the bedroom. She opened the door to let us go on in and, without speaking, closed it behind us, staying out in the hallway.

Oh, something bad was going on around here . . .

Bisat Iskenderov was lying on the made-up bed in just his shorts and singlet, watching the TV hanging on the wall facing the bed. Everything in the place was in average Moscow style, with almost no national character at all, absolutely no personal touch: furniture from IKEA, a carpet at the head of the bed (I thought they didn’t hang them up like that any longer, that the tradition had died out with the old, stagnant Brezhnev days), a women’s magazine on one of the night tables, an anthology of detective stories on the other. A bedroom like that could have been in any Russian town or city. The man lying on the bed could have been Ivan the manager or Rinat the builder.

I don’t like flats that don’t bear the stamp of their owner.

“Hello, Bisat,” I said. “We’re from the department. What happened to you? Are you ill?”

Bisat looked at me and shifted his gaze back to the screen. It was showing a popular program—a young female doctor with kind eyes was telling people about periproctitis. “And now we’ll ask someone wearing a T-shirt or a shirt without a collar to come up onstage from the audience . . .”

“Hello,” Bisat replied. “Nothing happened. I’m fine.”

“But you abandoned your watch . . .” I said.

And I looked at him through the Twilight.

At first I thought there must be something wrong with me.

Then I realized it wasn’t me. But that wasn’t reassuring at all.

“Las, take a peek at his aura . . .” I said quietly.

Las wrinkled up his forehead and answered: “I can’t seem to see it . . .”

“That’s because it isn’t there,” I confirmed.

Bisat waited patiently while we talked. Then he answered: “I abandoned the watch because there was no point in staying on duty.”

“Tell me about the man you talked to before you left,” I said.

“I don’t get this,” Las said thoughtfully. “Are there really people who don’t have any aura?”

“Now, imagine that the neck of the T-shirt is really . . .” the female presenter told us from the screen.

“Before I left I talked to Dima Pastukhov,” said Bisat. “He’s a decent man . . .”

“Before that!” I told him. “Before Dima!”