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‘Everything that matters,’ said the machine.

‘But that’s insane. It’s worse than wrong – it’s mistaken.’

‘I expected you to think that,’ said Jay-Dub, a note of complacency in its tone. ‘That way, whether you identify yourself with the original Jonathan Wilde or not, you’ll probably want to do what I want you to do.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You said Reid killed you – me, us, whatever. At the very least he was responsible. Sue the bastard for murder.’

Wilde laughed. ‘Sue, not charge? You have that too?’ It sounded like his interest in his own case had been diverted by curiosity about the law.

‘That too,’ Jay-Dub said heavily. ‘Polycentric legal system, we got.’

‘Whatever the legal system,’ Wilde said, ‘for a living man to stand up in court and claim he was murdered is, well, pushing it.’

‘Exactly,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘And I want to push it till it falls.’

Wilde scratched in the dust some more.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Very neat. All the answers are wrong. Like a koan.’

He looked up.

‘Why,’ he added, ‘couldn’t you sue Reid on your own account?’

Jay-Dub stood up, straightening and extending its legs. ‘Look around you,’ it said, flailing its arms about at the busy quay. ‘Every jumped-up monkey here has rights that a court will recognise. I don’t. I’m instrumentum vocale: a tool that talks.’

‘So what about this distinction you make so much of, between human equivalent and just a fucking machine?’

‘“Human equivalent”,’ the robot said with some bitterness, ‘is a marketing term. It has no legal standing whatsoever, except with the abolitionists, and nobody gives a fuck about them.’

‘Oh?’ Wilde looked interested. ‘That’s the people the…gynoid went off with?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to talk to them. They sound like my kind of people.’

‘I assure you they’re not,’ the robot said. ‘They’re the kind of moralistic, dogmatic, self-righteous purists that you despised all your life.’

‘Fine,’ the man said. ‘I said my kind of people, not Wilde’s.’

He got to his feet. ‘I’m going to see them.’

‘That would be a mistake.’

Wilde set off briskly along the quay. ‘It’s the kind of mistake,’ he said, as Jay-Dub rose and followed, ‘that I died not making. Not many people get the chance to learn from that.’

Reid’s office is large. The walls are curved, made from a plain grey cement that gives an unexpected atmosphere of warmth. The window’s view adds a good percentage to the room’s price. The morning sunlight slants through it. On the desk, of solid wood polished so that it looks almost like plastic, there’s a standard keyboard and screen. Reid has contacts, which he seldom uses, on his eyes.

He’s sitting on the desk, leaning across it, paging through a search. The search is fast, and the scenes flash by in reverse order. Days of recorded phone-calls jabber and gesticulate backwards.

He stops, slows, pages forward. Freezes the scene.

He looks up. ‘C’mere,’ he says.

Collins and Stigler step over and peer at the screen. It shows the interior of the cab of some big powerful haulage vehicle. The details are quaint: a dangling mike, a peeling motto, padded polyethylene seats. A man with a lined, leathery face is looking into the camera. Beside him is a young woman with very dark eyes, very black hair, a tight tee-shirt and cropped denim shorts. She has the look of an intelligent and wary slut.

Reid fingers a key and the picture moves. There’s a flicker of interference that makes all three men blink and shake their heads slightly. As they open their eyes the screen clears.

‘Forget it,’ the man’s saying. ‘Wrong number.’

His hand moves out of frame and the screen blanks. Another recorded call begins. Reid stops and scrolls back. He pauses at the interference, runs it past again slowly.

‘Oh, shit,’ he says.

He clicks on another screen icon and pulls in some analysis software. The flicker suddenly becomes a page of symbols. Reid clicks again. The symbols expand into screens and screens of text. Reid runs his finger down the monitor, his frown deepening.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he says, sitting back.

Stigler is twitching. ‘That guy,’ he says excitedly.