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your people to take a statement from Citizen Drem here. Everything he knows about the dead man, when he last saw him, any visitors to his  . . .”
    â€œI know the procedure, citizen,” the auxiliary interrupted, leading the citizen away.
    â€œWhat have we got then?” asked a cool voice from behind me.
    I turned to find the medical guardian kneeling on the other side of the body.
    â€œSophia,” I said, unable to keep the surprise from my voice. “I didn’t expect to see you down here.”
    If she was unimpressed by my use of her name in front of auxiliaries, she didn’t show it. “You know how it is. There are so few sudden deaths in the city  . . .”
    Not so few during the Big Heat that the medical guardian checks each one out personally, I thought.
    â€œAlso,” she said, head bent over the corpse, “I was informed that both the public order guardian and you were attending. That piqued my curiosity.”
    I still wasn’t convinced. Maybe she’d just wanted some fresh air – in which case she was in the wrong place. Frankie Thomson was in need of cold storage.
    â€œHave the scene-of-crime people finished with the body?” she asked.
    I looked round at the auxiliary in white plastic who was hovering behind us. He nodded.
    â€œSo it seems. What do you think then?”
    Sophia lifted the dead man’s head and examined the mouth and nostrils. “No sign of the foam that drowning would produce, but then the flow of water would have washed that away. Flesh beginning to whiten. The goose bumps on his cheeks show the onset of cutis anserina.” She felt the limbs. “Rigor mortis is under way in the arms and legs but he hasn’t been here for too long. Twelve hours maximum, I’d say provisionally, though the high ambient temperature complicates things.” Now she was at the lower half of the body. “Curious angle of the legs, don’t you think?”
    I nodded.
    She leaned closer and sniffed. “I can smell faecal matter. He lost control of his bowels.”
    I looked closer. The dead man’s trousers had a stain on the backside which the sun had dried. “Significant?” I asked.
    â€œMaybe. Don’t get your hopes up though. He may just have eaten something bad.”
    â€œNever. Your directorate’s dietary planning doesn’t allow for that.”
    Sophia ignored my sarcasm. “Abrasions on the sole of the foot but not elsewhere. So he walked here, he wasn’t dragged.”
    â€œCan we get his head out of the water now?” I asked.
    â€œWhy not?” Sophia stood up and wiped sweat from her brow. Even the Ice Queen must have been boiling in the protective suit she was wearing over her clothes.
    Scene-of-crime personnel lifted the body away from the water. Sophia signalled to them to turn it over on its back. Then she kneeled down by the upper abdomen and undid the buttons of the citizen-issue shirt.
    â€œNo signs of any bruising or abrasions here.” She looked at the fabric of the shirt.
    â€œWhat is it?” I asked.
    â€œLook at these patches.” She put her nose up to them and inhaled. “Vomit. He definitely had something that didn’t agree with him.”
    â€œFor example?”
    She shrugged. “There are plenty of possibilities.”
    â€œBut you’ll narrow them down in the post-mortem?”
    She gave me the hint of a smile. “We’ll narrow them down all right, citizen,” she replied in a cold voice, glancing up at Lewis Hamilton who’d just joined us.
    I swallowed a bitter laugh. I’d been in bed with her a few hours ago, but as far as she was concerned I was nothing more than a demoted auxiliary on special investigation duties.
    â€œWhat next?” the public order guardian asked.
    â€œThe medical guardian takes the body to the morgue,” I said. “And we stick our noses into Frankie Thomson’s