‘There’s been killing, you know?’ the driver mentioned, conversationally.

‘I had heard something to that effect.’

The driver nodded. Tiny threads of static were playing across his knuckles as he nudged the wheel.

‘Four dead,’ he said.

I can honestly say that I quite admired Jared Commissioner Maldar Zelwyn. What he lacked in almost everything he made up for in sheer optimism. He showed me around Jared County Town personally, and made it clear he was tremendously proud of it.

The town straddled twelve river threads, and it seemed to be all bridges and decking and cantilevered platforms. Habs stacked up high above the steep, rain-river chutes. Water throbbed and rattled and chugged down the channels through the town on its journey from the hills to the sea. As he drove me across the New Bridge, Zelwyn proudly explained how he had seen to its construction five years earlier, for the benefit of the community. It was a large metal structure connecting the Commercia quarter to the merchantman residences, and was evidently a boon to working practices. Before the bridge, the merchants had been obliged to take taxi boats from their homes to the Commercia every day. The river it crossed was one of the largest and most powerful bisecting Jared County Town, and the New Bridge was equipped with elevating sections so it could lift to admit the passage of trade ships and other water traffic coming inshore from the coast to the warehouse docks. It was an impressive piece of engineering, lit up, as we rode across it, by the unending light-show of the Cackle. Zelwyn clearly worked hard to support and improve his community, at the back end of all creation though it was.

We drew up on the glistening wharfs of the Commercia, and got out of the bulky land car. Zelwyn was a stocky man in his late forties with thinning hair and a heavy, bushy moustache. He took a data-slate out of his overcoat pocket.

‘All the victims were discovered in the Commercia district,’ he told me. ‘Here’s a plan of the locations. It seems arbitrary to me.’

I agreed, but I didn’t say so. ‘Is there crime scene data? Forensic material?’

‘I’m having it processed for you,’ he replied.

‘And you’ve got four now?’

‘Two more since I sent my message,’ he confirmed.

‘Is there a pattern?’

‘Apart from the way they were killed?’ he asked, and shook his head. ‘There’s no connection between the victims, except for the area they worked in – a trolley pusher, a warehouseman, a junior mercantile clerk, and a whore. We haven’t been able to connect any variables. As far as we know, they didn’t know each other.’

‘But you have a theory?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘The killer lives somewhere in the Commercia.’

‘Because?’