The man glanced up at it and looked abruptly worried. ‘What is it, citizen?’

English, then. Saul raised a finger to his lips, then turned to watch the woman climb into her van and close the door. The van’s turbine quickly wound up to speed and she reversed out onto the road with a horrible grating of the transmission, spun bald tyres on the macadam and headed off. Saul turned back to the man and stepped closer.

‘The cam system here,’ he began, moving closer, dipping his head conspiratorially.

In that moment, as a calm readiness suffused him, Saul felt sure he must have received training somewhere before ending up in that crate. But, oddly, it felt to him that only during the few minutes since his incinerator rebirth had he acquired a sudden capacity for such ruthlessness. His covered foot slammed up into the man’s testicles, bending him forward, and Saul moved in, hook fist into the gut, retracted then up, heel of the hand smashing nose. The man went down like a sack of offal. Saul stooped and turned him over onto his face, took his stunner away, jammed his arm up behind his back and drove a knee down behind it.

‘You just delivered a crate to the incinerator,’ he said. ‘Where did it come from?’

After sneezing blood for a moment, the man managed, ‘Head . . . quarters.’

‘Be specific.’

‘In . . . spectorate . . . London . . . Adjustment Cell Complex.’

‘Why all the way across the Channel?’

‘It’s just always been that way.’

Saul integrated that and blinked. He just knew that the trash-trains had been running rubbish out of London to the Calais incinerator for nearly a hundred years. Somewhere, he surmised, some bureaucrat had chosen the same destination for what needed to be disposed of from the adjustment cells, probably because procedure declared that all government waste should go for green disposal. It was horribly funny, in its way.

‘You know what’s in those crates, don’t you?’ he said.

The van driver went still for a moment, then, ‘No . . . fuck no. I’m just a driver!’

Saul wondered how many crates the man had brought over here, and how often those inside them had woken up, if they were still capable. ‘Just a driver’ didn’t have much need for an ionic stunner, and he guessed the man used it when his cargo got a little too noisy. Saul released him to step back, and the man rolled over to wipe blood and snot from his face.

‘You’re a fucking liar,’ Saul said fatly, pointing the stunner at him. ‘And I was in that last crate.’

‘I’m only doing a job!’

‘Who gave the disposal order?’

‘I don’t know!’