‘I want a word with her,’ said Quill. ‘She’s experienced that thing close up, and it let her off. And she saw fit to run, immediately, through more trouble.’

‘The bloke who was with her too,’ said Costain. ‘Would you walk out into what was going on outside that bar?’

‘I would need,’ said Ross, biting her bottom lip, deep in thought, ‘a reason.’

*   *   *

The team circulated the description of the woman and her companion among the witnesses. A few people had seen them, but nobody knew who they were. They weren’t going to be able to get the main inquiry to put pictures of them onto the news, Ross realized. All Forrest would see on this CCTV footage was the sort of headache-inducing visual lie that she and her colleagues had experienced during the Losley operation before they’d got the Sight. To see even as much as he had – a young woman being thrown against the wall by something invisible – their witness must be somewhere on the lower end of the Sighted spectrum. Most of those working the main inquiry would interpret the same scene as her being thrown to the floor, or something like that.

Ross wished she could feel comfortable around Costain. His expression when he glanced in her direction, that shared secret, made her wince inwardly. She wished they could have had that kiss without having the prospect of the auction hanging over them. That look on his face, if she could ever think of any expression of his as genuine, said he wasn’t feeling comfortable either, that maybe he was as vulnerable as she was. Yeah, maybe.

They found the woman’s original companion, the balding guy, on CCTV camera footage from outside as he left the bar, skirting the edges of the clash between protestors, and then they managed to follow him, camera to camera, to Old Street, where he’d caught a taxi heading towards town. Ross noted down the registration number. Checking earlier CCTV footage from the bar, the man had paid only with cash, damn it, and not a card they could check for at the bar. They’d at least have a record of where he’d got out of the taxi. The woman’s path from the bar was caught on a couple of cameras, but then she’d vanished into the backstreets. Ross knew from previous experience that the CCTV footage wouldn’t be good enough for the facial recognition software used by the Photographic Intelligence team to be any use, but she sent images of both patrons to them anyway.