"Hey, Edith," he said.

"Funny you should say that, Vic," she replied, and closed the pipe.

When Vic came on again and asked how Emil was, which she had known he would, she answered, "He's fine. He's happy. You can always see what Emil's thinking, through the holes in his head." There was an ominous rhythmic croaking sound in the pipe, along with a common type of visual interference which made things spin out sideways from under her gaze. She felt fine with her eyes closed; but when she tried to look at things, they slipped away from her. It was the story of her life. "Why'd you call me, I wonder?" she said. And before Vic could reply, "Well, you just want to say you're sorry. You're going into the site tomorrow. Maybe I would change my mind about the book."

"Edith-"

"But who's there with you, Vic? You see, you don't answer that one."

This time it was him who broke the connection.

"So no diary for you, then, my boy," Edith whispered. She waited a little, as much to give him the benefit of the doubt as to clear her head. Inshore winds drove the rain down the street towards the corporate port. A smaller ship left the ground on a line of light like a crack across things. The world stopped spinning. When he didn't get back to her she opened a new pipe and said to the voice at the other end:

"I want to report a site crime."

Upstairs, Emil Bonaventure was propped upright against the pillows like a corpse, his skin yellow in the streetlight from the window, his old ribs slatted with shadows. The energy had drained out of his smart tattoos and he was breathing ever so lightly. Edith watched the pulse in his neck. She could almost see the life through the skin, the thoughts in his head, and what were they but the dreams he couldn't any longer have? Shallow water over cracked chequerboard tiles and cast-off domestic objects, books, plates, magazines, empty tunnels smelling of chemicals, a black dog trotting aimlessly round him in his sleep on some dirty waterlogged ground neither in nor out of anything you could think of as the world, while a woman's voice mourned open-throat from a house not far enough in the distance.

"Emil," she whispered. She meant: I'm here. She meant: It's OK. She meant: Don't go. After a moment he opened his eyes and smiled.

"Where's Vic?" he asked.

"Vic won't be coming to see us any more," Edith said.

Later that night, down by the seafront, the wind dropped. The rain turned to drizzle and then stopped; in its place, fog stole in across the Corniche, muffling the sounds of merriment from the Cafe Surf. A man who looked like the older Albert Einstein sat on the cold seawall for a while, content, it seemed, to watch the rickshaws come and go in the oystershell lot, or exchange scraps of talk with the Monas in their lime-green tube skirts and orange fake-fur boleros. He liked them to flirt with him, and in return showed them pictures of someone they took to be his granddaughter. The limits of visibility fell, give or take, at a pleasant twenty or thirty yards, describing a comfortable, colourful space lit from within by flocks of smart ads. Everyone, really, was having fun, when into the lot wheeled a pink 1952 Cadillac custom roadster, blessed or cursed, according to where you stood on the subject, with the low skirts and frenched tail lights of a later, impure aesthetic, a giant vehicle which blunt-nosed its way between the rickshaws, scattered the ads and see-sawed to a halt on its real mechanical suspension, while from an unimpeachable white leather interior the sounds of WDIA, Radio Retro, Station to the Stars, thugged their way in solid blocks across the voice of some hysterical commentator at Preter Coeur.

"Very impressive," Lens Aschemann congratulated his assistant. "I'll just fold my wet raincoat before I get in, if you don't mind, and put it in the back here."

"Those Monas seem to know you well," the assistant said.

"It's charity work. Let's drive a little before you take me in." He fastened his seatbelt. "Go anywhere you like since we'll only be killing time. By the way," he said, "are you back at Sport Crime? If not, you needn't listen to this indifferent music the fighters like." He leaned across and switched off the radio. "Later we can have a proper breakfast, maybe you'd like to go to Pellici's, which I know you enjoyed before. Then I'll let you do what you always wanted: arrest Vic Serotonin."

He chuckled. "That Vic," he said, "Betrayed three times in the same night. It's hard not to laugh."

They took the coast road. At first, when the assistant looked up into the driving mirror all she could see was the nacre reflection of her own headlights diffused around the car; further along, though, the fog, stirred up by temperature differentials out at sea, broke into patches. As soon as Aschemann saw where she was taking him, his mood changed. He folded his arms and stared ahead. "You drive too fast," he complained. "How can anyone enjoy themselves?" About fifteen miles out, they got perfect visibility. Shortly afterwards, the assistant pulled into a headland viewpoint and stopped the car facing out to sea.

"It's a long time since I sat here," Aschemann said.

Cold air filled the Cadillac, but he wouldn't allow her to close the roof. Instead, he stood up with his hands on the top edge of the windscreen and watched the big ocean waves shovelling the remains of themselves into the bay. Far out, the assistant could see the single, desolate fluttering blue light of some lost rickshaw advertisement: otherwise, the headland was black, the sky and the sea different shades of grey. "Was this place on the record?" he said eventually. "I'm surprised. It was never part of the investigation."

"You're thorough," she said. "Everyone says that. You came here the day they found her, so you had it recorded."

"It looks nicer in daylight."

There he stuck, staring out over the sea.

Alerted by neighbours, the uniform branch had found the body of his wife, six o'clock on a hot summer evening, sprawled among the broken furniture, boxes of clothes, the piles of local dope-sheets, fashion magazines and old record albums which had divided the floor of the bungalow into narrow waist-high alleys, filled at that time of day with the rich yellow light filtering between the mille-feuille slats of the wooden blinds.

"They called me immediately," Aschemann said. "It was hot in there." Up from all the yellowed pages, stronger than the smell of the corpse, came a stifling odour of dust and salt. "It got in your mouth as well as your nose." She had fallen awkwardly, wedged sideways with one arm trapped beneath her and the other draped across a copy of Harpers amp; Queen, her left hand clutching an empty tumbler, her cheap sun-faded print dress disarranged to show a yellow thigh: but not one of those piles of repro-shop junk, the uniformed men remarked, had been disturbed by her fall. There were no signs of a struggle. It was as if her murderer had been as constrained in here as anyone else. Tattooed in her armpit were the lines: Send me a neon heart/Send it with love/Seek me inside.

When they turned her over, she proved to be holding in her other hand a letter Aschemann had sent her when they were still young. Invited reluctantly to the scene by an investigator several years his junior, Aschemann examined this for a moment-giving less attention, it seemed, to what he had written than to the thin blue paper he had written it on all that time ago-then went and stood puzzledly in the centre of the maze. The assembled uniforms spoke in low voices and avoided his eyes. He understood all this but it was as if he was seeing it for the first time. If he peered between the slats of the blind, he knew, he would be able to see Carmody, Moneytown, the Harbour Mole, the whole city tattooed stark and clear in strong violet light into the armpit of the bay.