“Is it alive?”

“No one knows.” There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that I liked her better for. “On Mars they grow to be a hundred metres tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometres. The perfume carries as well. From the erosion patterns, we think that most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might only have been around since the founding of the Roman empire.”

“Must have been expensive. To bring it back to Earth, I mean.”

“Money wasn’t an object, Mr. Kovacs.” The mask was back in place. Time to move on.

We made double time down the left-hand corridor, perhaps to make up for our unscheduled stop. With each step Mrs. Bancroft’s breasts jiggled under the thin material of the leotard and I took a morose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor. More Empathist work, Angin Chandra with her slender hand resting on a thrusting phallus of a rocket. Not much help.

The seaward lounge was built on the end of the house’s west wing. Mrs. Bancroft took me into it through an unobtrusive wooden door and the sun hit us in the eyes as soon as we entered.

“Laurens. This is Mr. Kovacs.”

I lifted a hand to shade my eyes and saw that the seaward lounge had an upper level with sliding glass doors that accessed a balcony. Leaning on the balcony was a man. He must have heard us come in; come to that, he must have heard the police cruiser arrive and known what it signified, but still he stayed where he was, staring out to sea. Coming back from the dead sometimes makes you feel that way. Or maybe it was just arrogance. Mrs. Bancroft nodded me forward and we went up a set of stairs made from the same wood as the door. For the first time I noticed that the walls of the room were shelved from top to bottom with books. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.