Ten hours were left on the clock by the time the winch brought us back level with the door. We trooped through to the vault, pleased when we met up with Prozor and Strambli. They’d spent their time profitably, going through more of the boxes and sorting the loot into rough categories. They’d found five of the suits of armour, and they were laid out onto the floor now, a blurry presence that you had to not look at to stand any chance of seeing. They made me think of those dead cells that float through the liquid of the eye, those swimmy seahorses you can barely see unless it’s bright – except instead of seahorses these were shaped into breastplates and gauntlets and so on. Next to the armour they’d organised some detachable items; visors, helmets, knives and pistols. ‘Be careful with the sharp things,’ Prozor said. ‘Just ’cause you can’t see ’em, don’t mean they can’t take a piece off you.’ She held up her gauntlet, wiggling the fingers. There was a deep gash in the material of her palm, almost enough to break all the way through and allow the lungstuff out.

‘You’ve done us proud,’ Trusko said, surveying the spoils. ‘We’ll be up and down that shaft more times than we can count, but it still makes me shudder to think what we’ll need to leave behind. If I had atomic munitions I’d think of collapsing the shaft itself!’

Someone else flooding the market with Ghostie stuff wasn’t going to be the cove’s most immediate and pressing problem, I thought. But I kept my trap shut.

The armour was light, so we didn’t need to leave anyone behind in the vault on the next trip up. Prozor would have found a reason to come up anyway, knowing as she did that we were down to our last ten hours, but at least she was spared the strain of coming up with something.

By the time we got to the bucket Trusko was still drunk on the idea of his fortunes taking a swerve. ‘We’ll need to act with the utmost discretion,’ he was saying, his mind racing ahead to wealth and fame. ‘Even the small amount that we’ll take back with us on the Queenie, it’s no good trying to get a price for all that in one go. We’ll maximise our gains by selling on one item at a time, never hinting at the true haul . . .’

‘They’ll get a whiff of it as soon as we sell two bits of Ghostie stuff,’ Strambli said, folding up the bucket’s connecting bridge.

‘Then we’ll need to be even more discreet. Secrecy clauses. Never dealing with the same broker twice. No one allowed to speak of what they’ve bought off us, for a year or three . . .’