She'd pointed it out to the CSM, asked how on earth it could have got separated from its owner when to look at it there was no way it had just come apart from the body, not without some very particular injury, and if she had to take a guess those didn't look like fish bites but blade marks on the bones. And he'd said he couldn't possibly comment before the post-mortem, but wasn't she clever? Too clever by half to be spending her life under the water.

'Anyone spoken to the harbour master?' Flea asked now, as her surface attendant helped her off with her harness and cylinders. 'Asked what flow's been through here today?'

'Yes,' said Dundas, bending to coil away the jet-wash hose. She looked at the top of his head, at the vivid red beanie he always wore — otherwise, he said, he could heat a stadium with the warmth that came off his bald scalp. Under his fluorescent all-weather gear she knew he was tall and heftily built. Sometimes it was hard being a woman on her own, making decisions for nine men, half of them older than she was, but Dundas she never doubted. He was on her side through it all. A genius technician, he had a father's way with the staff and the gear, and, at times, a filthy, filthy mouth on him. Just now he was concentrating, and when he did that he was so good she could kiss him.

'There's been flow today, but not until after the sighting,' he said.

'The sluices?'

'Yeah. Open this afternoon for twenty minutes at fourteen hundred. The harbour master had the dredger come down from the feeder canal to offload for a bit.'

'And the call came in at?'

'Thirteen fifty-five. Just as they were opening the sluices. Otherwise the harbour master would've waited. In fact, I'm sure he'd have waited, when I think how much they love us down here. How they're always trying to bend over backwards for us.'

Flea hooked her fingers under the neoprene dry hood and rolled it up her neck, going gently over her face and head so it didn't snag too much, because whenever she inspected her hoods they always seemed to be full of hairs pulled out by the roots, little pearls of skin attached. Sometimes she wondered why she wasn't as bald as Dundas.