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‘Hey man, cool. This is like Zen! Maybe he was Wilde, or maybe he was a perfect master.’

He catches her hand and starts her walking again. She complies, searching her brain for some referent to ‘perfect master’. Scientist has a disdainful account, and its sneer is just fading from her mind as Ax asks excitedly:

‘Do you know how to draw?’

‘I can make pictures,’ Dee says. ‘But I don’t think he was a perfect master. The girl with him sure didn’t look like she needed enlightenment.’

‘Zen,’ Ax nods to himself. ‘Definitely.’

In the lower floor of the house there’s a big room with a kitchen-range and sink, sofas and chairs and a heavy, scrubbed wooden table. Books and papers and kit are piled in corners, and on the table. Dee sits down at the table, clearing a space between cups and tools. Ax rummages up some sheets of paper and a steel ballpoint pen. He gives them to her.

‘So make a picture,’ he says.

‘OK,’ says Dee. She takes the pen in her right hand and steadies the paper with her left. A quick jiggle at the top right of the paper tells her the ink is black, and running smoothly. Closing her eyes, she calls up the image of the man in the truck. She ignores the girl for the moment (though there’s something there, something about her eyes, that Dee thinks odd and in need of further investigation – more research is necessary, OK, over to Scientist)…now. Yes. Tab to Printer Control: a little routine in Secretary’s repertoire.

Start. She hears the skittering sound of the pen on the paper for a minute, as her right hand moves back and forth horizontally, very fast, with tiny vertical movements lifting the pen on to and off the paper; and her left hand moves the paper away from her, very slowly. Finish.

She opens her eyes. ‘There,’ she says. She rubs her wrist.

Ax is looking at her, open-mouthed. He closes his mouth and shakes his head.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a look.’

Even Dee is a little surprised to see what a good picture she’s made out of the skips and breaks in a few hundred straight lines ruled across the paper; almost like a black-and-white photograph, it shows the man’s face and some of his surroundings: the seat-back behind him, the scored panelling of the rear wall of the cab, the coiled cable of the hanging microphone he’s holding in front of him, the girl’s shoulder.

‘I don’t believe it,’ says Ax. ‘That’s him. That’s the guy I was telling you about: Jonathan Wilde.’

‘Well,’ says Dee, ‘I told you he wasn’t a perfect master.’

Ax grins at her as if even he is surprised at this level of wit from her (and oh, how those little surprises smart!) and drags an old book out of a drift in one of the corners. It’s a leather binder holding an algae-cellulose paper print-out. Dee hefts it in her hand and leafs through it. The first page that falls open is near the end, and it’s a photograph of the same man as she’s just drawn. Even the pose and expression are similar – he’s leaning forward, talking earnestly to camera.

‘That’s one of the last pictures of Wilde that ever became public,’ Ax explains. ‘It’s lifted from a television interview with him in February 2046.’

Dee feels the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she studies this image, from a past almost incalculably remote (but only in real time, Scientist reminds her, not in ship time; and it’s going on about the Malley Mile again – the real thing, the one the pub is named for. She shuts it off).

‘That’s him all right,’ she says. She glances at the picture she made, then at the one in the book; runs a transform. ‘Every line maps exactly.’

She looks at it again. Something’s bugging her.

‘Well, yes,’ Ax says.

Dee continues to leaf backwards through the book. The pictures get fewer as she gets closer to the beginning, Wilde gets younger; most of them are obviously not posed, but snatched on the fly: clipped blow-ups from surveillance systems, a calm face in angry crowds…

‘What is this, exactly?’

‘It’s a dossier on Wilde,’ Ax tells her. ‘Notes for a biography.’

She stops at another picture, a low-angle shot, blurry. It’s labelled ‘FOI(PrevGovts)/SB/08