Luc looked over at her, frowned, looked at the wall again, then back at her with a disbelieving expression on his face. ‘You’re not bothered by this, are you?’

‘No,’ DeShelle told him. ‘I’m not sure that meal agreed with me.’ That was a lie, but Luc seemed to buy it, or at least was going to pretend that he did.

‘We’re in the right place,’ he said, inspecting the wall again and looking up and down the alley. ‘If Avomarr was going from Wexler’s to the Desert Rose then he’d have probably walked right past the entrance to this.’

‘A good place to snatch him,’ DeShelle agreed. Her nausea was subsiding now. ‘It’s a quieter street, the lighting out there isn’t too good either…’ She took a deep breath, ignoring the smell of putrid garbage.

‘We’ll have to get a gene-hound down here, see if this matches his,’ Luc said, jerking his thumb at the wall. It wouldn’t be hard to do, DeShelle knew: every Navigator house had the gene sequences of all their members thoroughly mapped out, to best identify the most bene­ficial reproductive pairings. ‘But if it’s his, then he was killed here. So what happened to the body?’

‘Dragged or carried back up the alley, then loaded into a transport?’ DeShelle suggested, but Luc shook his head and tracked his luminator back the way they’d come.

‘The ground’s clear. No trail of blood.’ He looked at the piles of refuse that took up the dead end of the alley, and his lip curled in distaste. ‘You don’t think…?’

DeShelle sighed, and rolled up her sleeves. ‘Only one way to find out.’

‘You’re not serious?’ Luc said in dismay. He clearly felt that the position of head of security did not warrant getting his hands dirty in rubbish.

‘Trust me,’ DeShelle said fervently, ‘I’ve been in worse. I spent a few hours in a sewer system, once.’ She plunged her hands into a pile of mouldering vegetable peels and other, more decayed and less identifiable debris.

‘You continue to surprise me,’ Luc muttered. He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head in resignation. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

DeShelle’s questing hands found innumerable putrid objects, but none of them were the flesh of Avomarr Du-Choi Brobantis. Her fingers did once close on a hard, slick object she recognised as bone, but when she pulled it out it clearly wasn’t human: the femur of some animal killed for meat, presumably.

‘Anything?’ she asked Luc, who glowered at her.

‘If I’d found anything, I’d have told you.’

He pulled a refuse sack aside and something leapt at his face as it was caught in the beam of his luminator – a rat, three feet long including its tail, with incisors the length of DeShelle’s little finger, and its dark fur sleek and wet with rancid fluids.

Luc snatched it out of the air with his free hand, and hurled it at the wall with a yell of disgust. It hit with a gruesome cracking noise, and dropped unmoving into a heap of old gutrot bottles.