‘Sagittar thirteenth is just shy of the solstice, but I can’t make any meaning out of that. The Purge of the Sarpetal Hives is usually commemorated by upswings of cult activity in the subsector, but that’s six weeks away. The only other thing I can find is that this Sagittar fifth was the twenty-first anniversary of the Battle of Klodeshi Heights.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘The sixth of seven full-scale engagements during the sixteen-month Imperial campaign on Surealis Six.’

‘Surealis... that’s in the next damn subsector! Aemos, every day of the year is the anniversary of an Imperial action somewhere. What connection are you making?’

‘The Ninth Sameter Infantry saw service in the war on Surealis.’

Fischig and Wrex had joined us from their prowl around the upper stages of the scaffolding. Wrex was talking on her own vox-set.

She signed off and looked at me, rain drizzling off her visor.

‘They’ve found another one, inquisitor,’ she said.

It wasn’t one. It was three, and their discovery threw the affair wide open. An old warehouse in the mill zone, ten streets away from Fasple’s hab, had been damaged by fire two months before, and municipal work-crews had moved in to tear it down and reuse the lot as a site for cheap, prefab habitat blocks. They’d found the bodies behind the wall insulation in a mouldering section untouched by the fire. A woman and two men, systematically mutilated in the manner of the other victims.

But these were much older. I could tell that even at a glance.

I crunched across the debris littering the floorspace of the warehouse shell. Rain streamed in through the roof holes, illuminated as a blizzard of white specks by the cold blue beams of the Arbites’ floodlights shining into the place.

Arbites officers were all around, but they hadn’t touched the discovery itself.

Mummified and shrivelled, these foetally curled, pitiful husks had been in the wall a long time.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Fischig leaned forwards for a closer look. ‘Adhesive tape, wrapped around them to hold them against the partition. Old. The gum’s decayed.’

‘That pattern on it. The silver flecks.’

‘I think it’s military-issue stuff. Matt-silver coating, you know the sort? The coating’s coming off with age.’

‘These bodies are different ages,’ I said.

‘I thought so too,’ said Fischig.

We had to wait six hours for a preliminary report from the district Examiner Medicae, but it confirmed our guess. All three bodies had been in the wall for at least eight years, and then for different lengths of time. Decompositional anomalies showed that one of the males had been in position for as much as twelve years, the other two added subsequently, at different occasions. No identifications had yet been made.

‘The warehouse was last used six years ago,’ Wrex told me.

‘I want a roster of workers employed there before it went out of business.’