But the Council members weren’t particularly interested in loss of human life. They were more concerned with loss of fairy gold. And according to them, Holly had cost them a fair chunk from the Recon ransom fund. Holly was quite prepared to fly above ground and wring Artemis Fowl’s neck until he returned the gold, but that wasn’t the way it worked: the Book, the fairy bible, stated that once a human managed to separate a fairy from his gold, then that gold was his to keep.

So, instead of confiscating her badge, Internal Affairs had insisted Holly handle grunt work — somewhere that she couldn’t do any harm. Stakeout was the obvious choice. Holly was farmed out to Customs and Excise, stuck in a Cham pod and suckered to the rock face overlooking a pressure-elevator chute. Dead-end duty.

That said, smuggling was a serious concern for the Lower Elements Police. It wasn’t the contraband itself, which was generally harmless junk — designer sunglasses, DVDs, cappuccino machines and such. It was the method of acquiring these items.

The B’wa Kell goblin triad had cornered the smuggling market and was becoming increasingly brazen in its overground excursions. It was even rumoured that the goblins had constructed their own cargo shuttle to make their expeditions more economically viable.

The main problem was that goblins were dim-witted creatures. All it would take was for one of them to forget to shield and goblin photos would be bouncing from satellites to news stations around the world. Then the Lower

Elements, the last Mud-Man-free zone on the planet, would be discovered.

When that happened, human nature being what it was, pollution, strip-mining and exploitation were sure to follow.

This meant that whichever poor souls were in the Department’s bad books got to spend months at a time on surveillance duty, which is why Holly was now anchored to the rock face outside a little-used chute’s entrance.