“You have been retained to discover who killed Laurens Bancroft,” she said intensely, without looking round. “You wish to know the truth of what transpired the night he died. Is this not so?”

“You don’t think it was suicide, then?”

“Do you?”

“I asked first.”

I saw a faint smile cross her lips. “No. I don’t.”

“Let me guess. You’re pinning it on Miriam Bancroft.”

Leila Begin stopped and turned on one of her ornate heels. “Are you mocking me, Mr. Kovacs?”

There was something in her eyes that drained the irritable amusement out of me on the spot. I shook my head.

“No, I’m not mocking you. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Have you met Miriam Bancroft?”

“Briefly, yes.”

“You found her charming, no doubt.”

I shrugged evasively. “A bit abrasive at times, but generally, yes. Charming would do it.”

Begin looked me in the eyes. “She is a psychopath,” she said seriously.

She resumed walking. After a moment I followed her.

“Psychopath’s not a narrow term any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It’s even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”

“Mr. Kovacs.” There was an impatient note in the woman’s voice now. “Miriam Bancroft assaulted me when I was pregnant and murdered my unborn child. She was aware that I was pregnant. She acted with intention. Have you ever been seven months pregnant?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“That is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at least once.”

“Kind of hard to legislate.”

Begin looked at me sidelong. “In that sleeve, you look like a man acquainted with loss, but that’s the surface. Are you what you appear, Mr. Kovacs? Are you acquainted with loss? Irretrievable loss, we’re discussing. Are you acquainted with that?”

“I think so,” I said, more stiffly than I’d intended.

“Then you will understand my feelings about Miriam Bancroft. On Earth, cortical stacks are fitted after birth.”

“Where I come from too.”

“I lost that child. No amount of technology will bring it back.”

I couldn’t tell if the rising tide of emotion in Leila Begin’s voice was real or contrived, but I was losing focus. I cut back to start.

“That doesn’t give Miriam Bancroft a motive for killing her husband.”

“Of course it does.” Begin favoured me with the sidelong glance again, and there was another bitter smile on her face. “I was not an isolated incident in Laurens Bancroft’s life. How do you think he met me?”

“In Oakland, I heard.”

The smile blossomed into a hard laugh. “Very euphemistic. Yes, he certainly met me in Oakland. He met me at what they used to call the Meat Rack. Not a very classy place. Laurens needed to degrade, Mr. Kovacs. That’s what made him hard. He’d been doing it for decades before me, and I don’t see why he would have stopped afterwards.”

“So Miriam decides, suddenly, enough’s enough and ventilates him?”

“She’s capable of it.”

“I’m sure she is.” Begin’s theory was as full of holes as a captured Sharyan deserter, but I wasn’t about to elaborate the details of what I knew to this woman. “You harbour no feelings about Bancroft himself, I suppose? Good or bad.”

The smile again. “I was a whore, Mr. Kovacs. A good one. A good whore feels what the client wants them to feel. There’s no room for anything else.”

“You telling me you can shut your feelings down just like that?”

“You telling me you can’t?” she retorted.

“All right, what did Laurens Bancroft want you to feel?”

She stopped and faced me slowly. I felt uncomfortably as if I had just slapped her. Her face had gone mask-like with remembrance.

“Animal abandonment,” she said finally. “And then abject gratitude. And I stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.”

“And what do you feel now?”

“Now?” Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze against what was inside her. “Now I feel nothing, Mr. Kovacs.”

“You agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.”

Begin made a dismissive gesture. “The lieutenant asked me to.”

“Very public-spirited of you.”

The woman’s gaze came back to me. “You know what happened after my miscarriage?”

“I heard you were paid off.”

“Yes. Unpleasant-sounding, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. I took Bancroft’s money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn’t forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a year, I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some favours.”

“And revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn’t come into it?”

“What revenge?” Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. “I am giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won’t be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is untouchable.”

“No one’s untouchable. Not even Meths.”

Begin looked at me sadly.

“You are not from here,” she said. “And it shows.”

Begin’s call had been routed through a Caribbean linkage broker, and the virtual time rented out of a Chinatown forum provider. Cheap, Ortega told me on the way in, and probably as secure as anywhere. Bancroft wants privacy, he spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no one’s listening.

It was also cramped. Slotted in between a pagoda-shaped bank and a steamy-windowed restaurant frontage, space was at a premium. The reception area was reached by filing up a narrow steel staircase and along a gantry pinned to one wing of the pagoda’s middle tier. A lavish seven or eight square metres of fused sand flooring under a cheap glass viewdome provided prospective clients with a waiting area, natural light and two pairs of seats that looked as if they had been torn out of a decommissioned jetliner. Adjacent to the seats, an ancient Asian woman sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment, most of which appeared to be switched off, and guarded a flight of access steps into the bowels of the building. Down below, it was all hairpin corridors racked with cable conduits and piping. Each length of corridor was lined with the doors of the service cubicles. The trode couches were set into the cubicles at a sharp upright angle to economise on floor space and surrounded on all sides by blinking, dusty-faced instrument panels. You strapped yourself in, traded up and then tapped the code number given to you at reception into the arm of the couch. Then the machine came and got your mind.

Returning from the wide open horizon of the beach virtuality was a shock. Opening my eyes on the banks of instrumentation just above my head, I suffered a momentary flashback to Harlan’s World. Thirteen years old and waking up in a virtual arcade after my first porn format. A low-ratio forum where two minutes of real time got me an experiential hour and a half in the company of two pneumatically-breasted playmates whose bodies bore more resemblance to cartoons than real women. The scenario had been a candy-scented room of pink cushions and fake fur rugs with windows that gave poor resolution onto a night-time cityscape. When I started running with the gangs and making more money, the ratio and resolution went up, and the scenarios got more imaginative, but the thing that never changed was the stale smell and the tackiness of the trodes on your skin when you surfaced afterwards between the cramped walls of the coffin.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked and reached for the straps. Shouldering my way out of the cubicle, I found Ortega already waiting in the pipe-lined corridor.

“So what do you think?”