Cool. Calm. And in control. Dragging a cloud of bees behind her.

The elevator doors slid open on the forty-seventh floor of Sherman House. There was a faint, lingering smell of burned bacon as they walked up the scorched corridor. Fresh graffiti marked the wall in shiny red paint where Stein had caught fire: ‘ONE-NIL!’

Allan Brown’s stinking nest had been boarded up since they were last there; large plasticboard sheets welded over the entrance. Two doors down, flat one twenty-two was safely locked. Will punched in the entry code and scowled as the lock went ‘clunk’ at him.

‘Problems?’

‘Code’s been changed…Hope they haven’t assigned the place to new tenants.’

He knocked and they waited. Then knocked again.

No answer.

Will popped the cover off the lock and thirty seconds later they were standing in the empty flat. The place was exactly as he’d remembered it: tidy, but shabby.

Emily stared at the faded yellow-and-green wallpaper. ‘This isn’t the place on the recording. It can’t be.’

‘It is. I double, triple and quadruple checked. And then I got Brian to do the same. This is where Kevin McEwen slaughtered his family.’ Will walked from room to room, retracing his steps. There was no sign of blood anywhere.

‘If the place’s been cleaned, how come it looks so tatty?’

‘Exactly.’ Will rubbed a hand across the wall nearest the kitchen. ‘Scrub that much blood off the walls and you’ll take half the wallpaper with it. I wonder if they’ve…’ He took a step back. Frowned. That couldn’t be right. There was no way that could be right.

‘What? What have you found?’

He pointed at a shadow on the wall-ingrained dust showing where a picture had hung for years. The grime framing the rectangular silhouette was made up of tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

‘The dirt’s not real, it’s been printed on…’ He lurched to the other side of the room. There was a little stick-figure family scribbled on the wall in red crayon. The smiling figures were made up of the same magenta and yellow spots. Everywhere he looked, he found more and more counterfeit squalor.

Emily announced that the kitchen was full of the same fake grime, but Will wasn’t really listening. He’d positioned himself in the middle of the room, just where the SOC team’s scanning equipment would have sat. The computer reconstruction was full of holes, blobs of no data, and as he stood there he got the nasty feeling he knew why. The blobs hid the upper corners of the room, just where you’d put surveillance equipment if you wanted to keep an eye on the flat’s occupants.

‘This gets weirder,’ said Emily emerging from the kitchen, ‘there are damp patches under the sink and they’ve been printed on too. Inside a cupboard! Who in their right minds…What are you doing?’

‘Give me a leg up.’

Emily braced herself into the corner, hoisting him up as if he was barely there.

Will peered at the join between the walls and the ceiling. It looked normal enough, but then it would, wouldn’t it? Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out Brian’s Palm Thrummer, twisted the little canister open, and set it on minimum. It burred in his hand, numbing his fingertips as he carefully stripped the upper layers of wallpaper and plasticboard away, turning them into a cloud of grey dust that billowed out into the room.

There was something in there…

Will took a deep breath and blew, clearing the fog away. Two sonic probes and a small jammer were bolted into a little metal box, mounted behind the plasticboard. The whole array was lit up: the probes grumbling away to themselves as they recorded him and everything else in the room.

‘Shit!’ Will leapt to the ground. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Now!’ He grabbed Emily and hauled her towards the door.

‘What the hell’s got into you?’

‘How long have we been in here?’ He pulled back his tatty rag sleeve and glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes. Shit, shit, shit!’

Will slammed the door of the apartment behind them, and hurried down the corridor, back towards the lifts, muttering all the way. ‘Come on, come on…’

‘Where are we going?’

They rounded the corner just as the lift doors pinged opening. The car was full, and standing right at the front was the big-boned woman with the red hair and tribal scars.

‘Fuck!’ Will snatched at Emily’s sleeve, stopping her in her tracks. ‘When I say, run for it.’ Two steps back and the lifts were hidden from view. ‘Run!’

They almost made it.

There’s no sign of the man whose name adorns the diplomas on the office wall, but just in case he turns up she locks the door before powering up the terminal on his desk. The same code that worked on the storeroom door gets her through the system’s security check.

She calls up the hospital’s patient database and punches in the reference code the reader gave her: SH-O/D-10286.

The machine chugs away to itself for almost three minutes, searching through the millions of people held on the system. And then the result comes back. ‘ACCESS RESTRICTED. FOR MORE DETAILS CONTACT SERVICES-OFFENDER MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT’

She has an almost overwhelming urge to grab the monitor and smash it against the wall. And then she realizes that this is how the system is supposed to work. Halfheads are non-people. Nothing is allowed to connect the lobotomized slave to the crimes they committed. Nothing for anyone to idolize or respect.

She sits back in the doctor’s mock-leather chair and scowls at the screen.

But it’s her name.

HER FUCKING NAME.

If anyone has the right to know what it is, it’s her.

Deep-calming-breaths.

They haven’t deleted her user ID from the system, maybe there’s another way to find out who she is…?

She calls up the email program and enters the same pass-code again.

‘WELCOME DOCTOR FIONA WESTFIELD. YOU HAVE NO NEW MESSAGES.’

Doctor Fiona Westfield.

She frowns. She’d expected everything to come flooding back, but it doesn’t.

She puts the name into the patient database and this time the screen fills with information. Everything is here. The details of her halfheading: the attendees, the surgeon-just reading his name makes her shudder-case notes on the bladder infection she’d contracted as a result of a poorly sterilized catheter.

And a photograph: her at a conference receiving an award. She reaches out and caresses the screen. Long blonde hair, little button nose, sparkly blue eyes. Her face. She wants her face back so badly it hurts.

The hospital system has been a busy little bee, automatic ally finding links to a potted biography, cross-references to her trial, post mortems on her victims…

Beautiful, beautiful pictures of torn abdomens and ragged flesh.

The images spark things inside her head: memories and thoughts from a time when she was a real person. Before they hacked her jaw away. Before she became a monster.

But as she reads she knows that’s not true.

She has always been a monster.