I had other things on my mind. These included enquiring into the state of financial health of my bank, to me an urgent matter. I still had only a few thalers in my pocket until Jo came home. The bank’s website had not been refreshed since I last looked. I turned to the local news: nothing had developed there either, from what I could tell. No new financial corporations had declared imminent bankruptcy overnight, but the general sense of malaise amongst the people who lived in Ocean Domaisne remained high and all-consuming. It depressed me simply to listen to those interviews, even with people whose obsession with wealth was alien to me.

I tried to contact Jo, but she was not online.

I felt the day starting to slip past me, with nothing achieved. I took a break and walked across to the beach, stood by the shallows and stared out to sea. This was not Salay’s central sea lagoon, but the Midway Sea itself. Our view of the open ocean created a constant temptation to travel, to follow the apparently close allure of the horizon, to discover and explore the subtropical islands to the north of us, and east and west. Jo had suggested a holiday at the end of the summer – perhaps it was time I took her up on that. By then my new novel should be finished and delivered, and I would have no more literary commitments for a while.

Back at the house I tried again to contact Jo, but she had left a message for me saying she had to be offline for a few hours. I knew it was her last full day at the theatre. Her plan was to pack up her stuff in the evening and catch the red-eye flight from Muriseay to Ewwel, the first, which took off after midnight. I would drive to Raba airport and meet her from the inter-island shuttle during the morning.

In the afternoon I settled down to a series of detailed searches of the social records of both Dearth and Salay Hames, the fifth. It had not occurred to me that the murdered twins were relatives of the other people. The revelation that Lew and Dever were the sons of Enver Jeksid had come as a significant surprise, something which seemed both to explain and obscure a great deal.

The registry data available about births and deaths, and so on, became more inconsistent and unreliable the further back I looked. The file storage formats and general organization of the records created puzzles I had to keep working at.

I could turn up no birth records for the twin boys, either in the Dearth social archives, or in Salay Hames. Frejah had said they were Dearth citizens: I searched the serf, villein and vassal categories from both islands.