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'In detail.'

'Just checking.'

They rinsed off and clambered out of the river, raiding what was left at the bottom of the picnic hamper for a makeshift breakfast. When the sun had dried them sufficiently they pulled their clothes off the tree and got dressed, as if their earlier naked intimacy were a scarce resource, something to be rationed out and made to last. FeLixi sat down against the trunk of the tree and put his arms around Roz, drawing her against his chest, amazed again by how small she felt when he held her.

She started talking, just as he had known she would, about the plantation at the Borodino Oasis on Skag and the young girl that she found floating face up amongst the yellow reeds that fringed the pool in the rocks.

'The funny thing was,' said Roz, 'that I was more excited than anything else. It was my chance to prove myself.' She chuckled. 'Squire Roslyn Forrester, ready to dispense justice to the high and the low without fear or favour.'

'You were an idealist,' said feLixi. 'I'm shocked.'

'Damn right I was an idealist,' said Roz.

She even had a suspect, Boss Shuster, the plantation overseer. His pheromone trace was all over the rocks that surrounded the pool. It seemed he went up there on a regular basis because that's where the Skag maidens washed themselves. 'You get a lot of alien races that are virtually pass-for-human,' said Roz. 'The Skags were one of them, except a bit skinnier and they had two thumbs. The way I reconstructed it was that Shuster was in the habit of picking out a girl that he liked and pulling her away for a bit of rough and ready romance, only one day one of them put up a fight.'

FeLixi had enough experience from the proxy wars to know how the story was going to end.

'The human colonists all closed ranks on me,' said Roz. 'As far as they were concerned, raping natives was all part of their jolly frontier lifestyle, a perk. Jig Jig Bunnies they called them. Boss Shuster had more alibis than a codpiece at a nudists' convention. But what got me was the way none of the Skags were willing to testify against him. If they had, I might have been able to break his alibi.'

'So you blamed the victim instead?'

'Yeah,' said Roz. 'The way I figured it was that with an attitude like that they deserved to be exploited.'

'And now?'

'And now I'm your Jig Jig Bunny,' said Roz. She reached upwards to touch his face. 'The primitive barbarian.'

'Is that what you really think?' he asked.

'Yep,' said Roz. 'Mind you, try and drag me behind a rock and I'll have your testicles off with a blunt spoon.'

'I'll bear that in mind,' said feLixi.

There was a smell to saRa!qava's kitchen: a residue odour of hot yeast and flour that leaked by osmosis through the semi-permeable force membranes of her ovens. There were other domestic smells, laid down as a microscopic patina of molecules and pheromones on the material fabric of the kitchen table, the work surface and the cool whitewashed walls: caramel, spilt coffee, the milk burp scent of the children. It was a cultivated thing. House being perfectly capable of scrubbing the air back to a pristine state and sterilizing every surface with a single twitch of its domestic force fields – she had only to ask.

It was not so easy to erase the patina of memory, the steady accretion of the decisions she'd made during her lifetime.

She breathed in the smell as she sat at the kitchen table in the half darkness. They would be waking up at the villa soon; at least Bernice would be. Rumour was that he never slept. She had half imagined/half dreamt of him during the night – perched on the roof of the villa like some awful nocturnal predator, like a bird that hunted only during night, circling high on the thermals, watching, always watching for the small furtive movements that would mark his prey.

That the Doctor would make the connection was beyond doubt, it was only a matter of time before Bernice and Chris added their pieces of the puzzle.