Speaking of her profession: Neith finds a comfortable position in her chair. She taps gently with one knuckle, glances—as she always does—at the identifying tag at the top of the screen: NEITH, M., DETECTIVE INSPECTOR (GRADE A). She has no idea what possessed her mother to give her a Finnish name, except perhaps a deep and abiding admiration for the champion of cross-country skiing who carried it to two Winter Olympic seasons and came away with nine gold medals. The more important part is DETECTIVE , which means she has a professional heritage to draw on as well as a personal one, an identity as strong and old as the Real Life sign’s bright promise of middle-class housing, good schools and a sheepdog. She went to the new Metropolitan Witness Academy in Hoxton, qualified for the fast track and was coached through three years on the beat. She was peed on by drunks, wept on by widows, whistled at by builders. She graduated to Serious Crimes, arrested drug importers and corrupt bankers, and caught the eye of the System and the nation when she scooped a minor clue from the wastebasket and followed it all the way to what became known as the Cartier Smash and Grab. On the same day Neith picked up the thread, a high-technology criminal gang based in France ram-raided a jewellery vault and tried to fly back across the Channel using microlight aircraft. With Neith’s information in its electronic hand, the System’s active countermeasures aspect was able to penetrate their navigation software and land the gang at a military airfield for convenient arrest. Only one member escaped the net: a secure intrusion specialist and counter-surveillance expert known internationally as the Waxman, who had chosen a separate exit strategy, and took refuge in the embassy of a friendly foreign power. The incompleteness has always annoyed her, and the Waxman, with nothing else to do, occasionally sends her taunting messages.