She studied him as if she had never seen him before.

"Oh, now I offended you again. So go to a bar, whatever: I can give you a list of nice ones, only don't get caught trying to have sex in the back lot."

"Thanks for that advice of yours," she said.

This amused him. "We're getting to know one another now," he acknowledged. He offered her the keys to the Cadillac. After the Semiramide Club raid, he had forbidden her to return there, or to the Cafe Surf, alone.

As soon as he left, she had the shadow operators open a pipe to his records. Unnerved by the inappropriateness of this, they fussed around, whispering, "Is there anything else we can bring you, dear?" while she sprawled in Aschemann's leather chair and stared into space like someone in the early stages of arousal, her lips moving gently as the raw data cascaded down the inside of her arm. There was an item about the death of his wife. She kept returning to it because although it seemed to hold the key to him, she had no idea how to turn it in the lock. "Are you sure you're comfortable?" the shadow operators asked. "It looks such an awkward way to sit."

"I'll be fine," she said. Later, she drove Aschemann's Cadillac down to the Corniche and parked facing out to sea.

It was a quiet night, with low cloud and a crack of greenish light just above the horizon. Onshore breezes whipped up the sand around the ragmop palms, hissed over the bodywork of the car. She walked down the access road to the bungalow where Aschemann's wife had lived. It was damper down there. Inside, the bungalow had a stale smell, not quite food or people. She stood in the kitchen, in the passageway, in the single reception room, in the cobalt dark and the shush of the sea, with her eyes closed, waiting for Aschemann and his wife to assemble themselves in front of her. Nothing like that happened. They were absent and dead respectively: they would never self-disclose. She would have to find them, in the old furniture, the stale carpets. She decided to begin with the bundles of letters piled in the fake bureau.

"To be as happy as this," the detective had written to his wife just after they met, "to be this open to someone else, is something I never expected." It was a prophetic failure of nerve. He never settled. He was unfaithful from the moment they married, in tourist hotels during the afternoon and the back lots of bars at night. She forgave him over the years but he could never forgive himself; suddenly you found him telling her, "Part of me has lost patience with both of us. It wants to fall back into life. In the end, one person always gives more than the other and is disappointed." He had left her because she couldn't defend herself against him, but this only made him, as miserable as she was. "Late afternoon it rained," he wrote, from an apartment on Third Street. "I felt completely lonely and upset without you. For a second all I wanted was to be at home, among the things I knew, as if this life I have here was just some visit I had made without you." Her name was Prima, but for reasons the assistant couldn't make out, he often called her Utz or Utzie. Dear Utz. Hello Utzie. After they separated, he stopped writing about himself and wrote to her about the city instead. He wrote to her about ordinary things. He wrote to her about his job. To catch the criminal, he said, you had to go down inside: that's where you would find him.

Throughout the correspondence, if that was what it could be called, he had favoured a flimsy, almost transparent paper, light blue, prefolded so that it could be made into its own envelope. The earliest letters, full of endearments and graphic descriptions of the sex they had (as if by reliving it, perhaps, he could prove to himself he was there), were brittle but intact; while the later ones, though cruel, fell apart at the folds, as if they had been handled every day since.

Why had he chosen to write letters to her, when they lived in the same city, the same house? Had Prima ever answered them? It was impossible to know. "I'm increasingly shortsighted," he had written, three days before her death, "yet my dreams are as compactly constructed as advertisements."

Aschemann's assistant reread all the letters, then stood at the window. Outside the bungalow it was the sound of waves on the beach, the smells of salt and marram, a blowing mist, all condensing into one substance like a block of smoky plastic. Nevertheless, she seemed to hear something out there: a cry or a laugh. As she trudged back to the car, a group of kids emerged from the darkness, hunched up in their shiny gun-punk rainwear, exchanging casual murmurs, jostling one another, eyeing her frankly. "Try me out," she invited them, her smile so accommodating that they slipped away into the mist shaking their heads. "You see?" she whispered. On the way home, she looked in the driving mirror, she looked in the wing mirrors, she shifted gears with care: a policewoman, practical and calm but never still. She wondered why she understood neither Aschemann nor his wife, who, aware of their disaster from the outset, had encouraged it to roll over them anyway. She wondered if only half of her was there.

Aschemann always described as equivocal his relationship with Edith Bonaventure. "What he means," Edith would say, "I don't like him." Aschemann and her father were friends and sparring partners from the very first days of artefact policing in Saudade. Almost as soon as Emil arrived on-planet, touching down at the noncorporate port with a Halo tan and a would-be accordion-star daughter, Aschemann was arresting him. "Those were the good old days," Bonaventure always reminded Edith, as if at thirteen years old she hadn't been mature enough to appreciate them for herself. "Things weren't so serious."

Even at thirteen Edith had had her doubts about that; but was never less than loyal. "I don't like a man who arrests my father," she told Aschemann now. "On any grounds."

The detective sat on a wooden chair in her room, smiling round at the holograms and trophies, the costumes pinned on the wall with their pretty skirts fanned out as if she was still in them. Accordions like old dogs, wind broken, teeth bared in rippling tango smiles, eyed him savagely from the shelves and glass-front cabinets. "Still," she said, offering the Black Heart, "have a drink before you go up. Vic Serotonin brought us this, just the other day." Aschemann, who had seen nanocam footage of Edith and Vic's ringside disagreement at Preter Coeur, didn't believe her; but it wasn't displeasing to have Vic's name come up so soon in the conversation.

"That Vic," he said with a smile. He shook his head, as if the travel agent's character was a burden they could share.

Edith regarded him equably.

"Vic's generous to his old friend, just like you."

"Everyone loves Emil," Aschemann said. "That's what you get for being famous in your day." He took a drink. "This is good rum of Vic's," he congratulated her.

"Have some more."

"I'm fine."

"After another glass perhaps you'll be brave enough to cuff Emil. He's upstairs like always. A little weaker today, he'll be no trouble."

Aschemann would not be distracted.

"A pity Vic is caught up in something bad," he offered.

"We're all caught up in something bad."

"Vic opened a door, I don't even know if he meant to. New sorts of artefacts are coming out of it."

Edith made a spoiled face. "What's new about new?"

"They walk about," Aschemann was surprised to hear himself say, "as if they own the place."

Edith was still thinking about new. Everything presented as new in those days; as a result, the argument went, nothing was. She had seen that written on a wall. Her philosophy: you had your time at being new.

"Maybe they do," she said.

"Another thing: Paulie DeRaad gets involved, suddenly we can't find Paulie. Our equipment doesn't see him. It's good equipment, perhaps a little old, but someone has talked to it in a language we can't afford. Perhaps this is a military language. Perhaps his friends from EMC will soon be asking questions we don't know how to answer." After all, Aschemann decided, he'd have another drink. While he was pouring it for himself, he said, "I daren't let Vic go into the site again until I know what's happening. Edith, what you know you should tell me, because this isn't just a little tourism. It isn't just a little thrill for the offworld girl with time on her hands."