Sabina’s photos looked like a series of promising leads when he started working on them, but after half a dozen calls and the same number of in-person visits, it looked like the cupboard was bare. No one at any of the venues in the photos had seen her since they were taken, if they even remembered her at all. The best ones had booking calendars that confirmed Cally had played there, but not one of them had booked her since her disappearance.

He looked down at the picture on his phone. It was the last one Sabina had taken of her friend playing her guitar - later ones just showed them hanging out at home and it was already clear that Cally was becoming increasingly uncomfortable having her photo taken at all. But in this photo, she had her eyes closed and her mouth wide open. The mini speaker was at her feet in a shallow tray of some sort, that was full of change and even notes.

It was the same street corner where she had been busking in the last YouTube video. And it was the same street corner that Butcher was standing across from, right now, looking at the last place where Cally Cuttler had been seen singing.

Today, there’s a man there. He’s OK. He reminds Butcher of Craig. Skinny and unshaven, with a floppy toque and an ironic t-shirt of some kid’s cartoon, worn over a thick sweatshirt.

Well, it was February, after all. It had to play havoc with the tuning on the electric acoustic guitar he was decently taking though Say You Won’t Let Go.

He fished a fiver from his wallet and approached with it fluttering in the chill breeze making its way along the Liverpool streets, catching the musician’s attention. Butcher nodded to him as he finished the song and then carefully put it into the open guitar case at his feet, weighing it down with some change so as not to let it blow away.

‘Thanks,’ said Butcher, smiling. ‘I enjoyed that.’

‘Thank you,’ said the busker, delighted at the windall, rubbing his hands together to get some life back into his hard-working fingers.

Then Butcher lifted his other hand to show his phone with a picture of Cally Cuttler.

‘Do you know this girl?’ he asked.

The busker looks like he’s about to deny it, but then double-takes and looks closer.

‘Oh, my god, yeah!’ he says, glancing up at Butcher. ‘She used to play here, didn’t she? Oh, my god. I used to see her here all the time. She was so good, man. People, like, stopped to listen, even. It was unreal that she was playing on a street corner. Totally wrong, yeah? Has something happened to her?’

‘She’s been missing for over a year,’ said Butcher. ‘I’m an investigator. Trying to find out what happened.’

‘Ah, man,’ said the busker. ‘That’s shit. I hope she’s OK. Last time I saw her, she was down near the docks.’

‘Near the docks?’ said Butcher. ‘When was this?’

‘Oh, jeez, I don’t know,’ he admitted. His eyes flicked down at the open guitar case. Butcher could take a hint. He pulled out his wallet again, and eased a tenner out. ‘I mean, it was after I started playing here regularly, like, which was why I remembered her. And that was, like, last year. April, maybe? Late April, it must have been, because it was warming up. Maybe early May. I wouldn’t usually be out there this early, but, fuck, I’m so skint.’

Butcher slid a second tenner out and raised his eyebrows.

‘You’re doing me a solid, man,’ said the busker, reaching out. But Butcher held it back.

‘More,’ he said. ‘You saw her. Where? What was she doing? What was the weather like that day? What was she wearing? Why, after nine or ten months can you remember seeing someone whose name you don’t know and whom you haven’t seen since?

‘I am very good at my job, and that includes tracking down fuckhead drop-outs who lie to me and kicking seven kinds of shit out of them. So talk fast and earn this because a young woman is missing you might have been the last person to see her alive, so I will come back to retrieve it should a single word prove inaccurate.’

‘Y-yes, sir,’ nodded the busker, blood draining from his already-pale cheeks. ‘I swear I saw her. It - it was a sunny day. I’d just started playing here, and I’d got a good take and I saw her and wanted to ask her if it was OK. She was in a hoodie, but it was the same one she wore here, you know, with the hood all up so you could hardly see her face? And she had her guitar case. That’s how I knew it was her!’

‘Did you speak to her?’

‘N-no!’ he stammered, eyes on the money pinched between Butcher’s fingers. ‘I called out and she saw me and she just took off.’

‘Running away?’

‘No, just walked away, really quick. She didn’t want to talk, so I didn’t push it.’

‘Where?’

‘Um, I was just out of the Invisible Wind Factory,’ he replied. ‘Great Howard Street, I think?’

Butcher liked it. He liked stories that made sense. He liked intel driven by greed with the threat of violence to enforce honesty. It was a potent combination. He handed over the cash.

‘If I see you again -’

‘Bad news?’

‘No, son, good news,’ he smiled. ‘If you see me coming, it’s good news. If it’s bad news, I promise, you won’t see me coming.’

He winked at the lad and walked off.

A solid lead, at last! Total fluke, of course, but that was how intelligence worked. It was a numbers game. You just had to stab away at it until the probabilities turned in your favour, and his gut told him the busker wasn’t bullshitting him.

*

Liverpool’s Prince Albert Docks were one of those places that every new urban administration wanted to gentrify into something arty and life-affirming and, most importantly, profitable. The city’s long-gone glory days of trade and ship-building had left it with a chippy obsession. The docks themselves, though, extended for miles. And all the money the council threw at them could only ever make a small stretch acceptable to the modern middle class. The rest was still low-rent commercial units, smashed windows and niche business outlets that literally couldn’t afford to be anywhere else.

The artsy “funfair” of the Invisible Wind Factory had lost some of the lustre it had enjoyed when still new, but the strewn flyers, handed out, dropped and trodden on, that worked their way along Great Howard Street were testimony to the venue’s continuing popularity with the alternative arts scene that was alive and kicking in Liverpool. Was it possible that Cally was living out some extreme arts project? Psychedelics were earning their way back to respectability through treatments for depression, anxiety and addiction. Butcher had seen, first-hand, how a man with PTSD who looked like a wash-out, invalidity pension job had been transformed back into a quality soldier after a few months of monitored LSD micro-dosing. But the new cachet had introduced a whole new generation of drug-cautious millennial artists to the joys of psilocybin, and there had been a few high-profile cases of celebrities having public freak-outs after tripping on “organic” mushrooms.

It was better than overdosing on something lethal, he supposed. Still, it could explain it if Cally was flat on her back in an empty unit watching the universe spin and subsisting on takeaways and tap water.

Now that he was here, peering along the narrow alleys of metal shutters and fly-tipping, he wondered what he was hoping to see or find. It had been at least nine months since the busker had seen her here. Why did he think there was any chance he’d still find her nearby?

Well, he thought, sighing, that was intel. It was the last time anyone had seen her. It was at least two months after anyone else had seen her. So it made sense she was somewhere here - somewhere in the area. What could he do but look and ask around?

The problem was that people didn’t live around here. Not if they could help it. They might work here, but even then the kinds of jobs people picked up around this area were short contracts or cash-in-hand. It wasn’t the kind of place people stuck around long enough to notice someone else. But, if she were nearby, she’d need somewhere to sleep and she’d need food to eat. That meant supermarkets or takeaways. And, even as the thought crossed his mind, his eyes fell on a small cafe.

He pushed open the door and went in.

*

Two tedious hours later, Butcher was nearly ready to throw in the towel on the lead. The area where Cally had been seen was practically a social dead-spot. Hardly any takeaways and those there were had never seen her. The nearest Tesco Express was back in town. And as he left the nearest petrol station shop, he forced himself to take the route back to his car that would take him back along Great Howard. There wasn’t anything to be gained by walking a route where he had nothing to go on.

As he reached the main junction with Great Howard and turned left, reflecting on the city’s general dreariness, though, a figure walking ahead of him caught his attention and, unsure what had drawn his eye, he studied the man.

He wore baggy grey cargo pants in filthy condition, ripped to shreds around the hems, over battered work boots that seem almost comically large. He walks with an almost-waddling gait - not unlike the aggressive stride of an LA gangbanger that Butcher only knew from hip hop videos. His wide shoulders were bundled beneath a thick military-surplus jacket worn over a pale green hoodie, pulled tightly up over his large head. The rest of his face was turned away from Butcher but, finally, Butcher’s attention fired off the signal flare of awareness and he realized that the man had a glyph over his head!

It wasn’t entirely stupid of him to have not noticed it, he realized, because it wasn’t like the one he had seen on himself, Emmy, Geraldine or Ron. Those had been clear, bright symbols. This one was… glitchy. He couldn’t think of a better word for it. The glyph came and went and, each time it came back, it was a different short batch of symbols. And even when it was back, it was vague and flickering.

Then, suddenly, the guy snatched a look over his shoulder. For a split second, Butcher saw a face hidden behind a fabric street mask and yellow eyes staring at him from the darkness beneath the hood. The guy took off and Butcher, without a second thought, took off after him.

As he ran, Butcher reflected that he hadn’t really trained for speed. The nanoids had given him stamina up the wazoo, but the sudden burst of a sprint wasn’t something he was ready for and the big lad was already making distance between them. Impressive distance, at that. Butcher might not have been a sprinter, but he was moving fast and the man ahead of him had already doubled the distance between them. Then Butcher saw him cut left and disappear.

Butcher reached the corner, stopped, and looked round it carefully. The lad he was chasing was still running, almost halfway up the narrow side street, and Butched leapt after him, trying to find that next level of speed to start closing the gap. The side street was typical cheap commercial-industrial, metal shutters, piles of refuse and dark, blank windows. The night was drawing in by now and although a few lights were weakly illuminating the space, the sky had retreated to a narrow strip, and at the far end of the street it vanished entirely beneath the looming brick of the tunnel under the railway line. Butcher saw the lad silhouetted against the far end of the tunnel as he took another left under bright streetlights.

By the time he got there, the figure was gone. If he’d doubled back along the next road down, it was already empty. And the turning went nowhere. It was a dead-end to a metal fence over to a stretch of waste land, but -

Hang on...

Butcher spotted a gap in the fence where the metal panels had been pushed apart in a dark spot, away from the street lights and just short of the brick archway that went back under the railway line. He was there in a few strides, barely winded by his sprint. A few dark grey threads caught in the broken metal looked the right shade for the lad’s camouflage jacket. Butcher strained his hearing. It was noticeably more acute than it had been a week ago, and he briefly wondered whether it was a function of DEX or INT. At a guess, he thought it was a mix - DEX to hear something and INT to interpret what he heard. He idly wondered whether the nanoids could cure deafness. But then he thought he caught the scrape of metal on stone then, after a second, nothing else. His quarry had won himself a decent head-start, but Butcher was patient if nothing else.

He slipped through the fence, taking care not to snag his clothes. It was easier for him, being at least three inches shorter and narrower than the man he’d been following. Then he paused to inspect the wild and overgrown plant life in the space beyond. There were several things roughly equating to paths leading away from the fence. But on one of them he could see a thistle - dead and dried, but moistened from the weather, gently uncurling a stem from where it had been crushed just moments ago.

Silently he followed its short path which curved back towards where the trainline cut across the city at roof height, lifted up on Victorian arches, already suspecting what he might find.

Yes, sure enough, where it looked like this arch had been bricked up - but hidden behind the dense wild growth - was a small metal door.

This was the point, he thought to himself, that someone from the Regiment would pull a gun, yank open the door and plough in to see what happened. But Butcher was Det, not Regiment. His pistol was still in the glove compartment, and poking hornets’ nests for jollies was not his preferred modus operandi. What Butcher was good at was watching.

He retreated as silently as he had approached.

*

Ozzie pushed at the door.

He’d given it a good couple of hours since he’d ditched the Old Bill. Spent thirty of it at the door with a blade and a length of pipe, just in case. Fucking bizzie had been uncommonly fast on his pins there. But no one had come poking at his bolthole and things were looking well safe. Our Sandy was well hungry, and the wee man was chowing down big time, so it was past time our Ozzie went out and did his job. It was a solid dark night. The prospect of having enough of a stockpile that they could get the fuck out of this shit-heap city and find a place that their kind could live in peace… The cost was high, but Ozzie knew it was going to be well worth it. Plus, a bit of fresh meat wouldn’t do any harm, he thought, his mouth watering at the very thought.

The cloud cover was thick and low and Ozzie had places to be.

*

From the car, Butcher watched the feed from the GoPro. He had dropped the drone down onto the top of the wall above the door, let it go into standby and left the camera in low power mode. He just got a picture every thirty seconds, but it was enough for him to see the door pop a crack. He lurched up in his seat, tossing the empty coffee cup aside and stabbed the GoPro back to continuous feed as he clambered from the vehicle.

He could have followed with the drone but, first of all, he didn’t want to lose the guy and, second, he was worried about his opponent’s capabilities. The speed with which he had spotted him following him made Butcher think about his own heightened senses. If the guy clocked the drone, he was done. So instead he had parked on Love Lane, the crappy Insignia fitting in just fine amidst the rubbish, not far from the gap in the fence. As the guy started moving, Butcher followed. As he reached the guy’s trail, he shut off the camera and set the drone to return to him, tucking the folding device into one of his pockets as it settled into his palm.

Despite the night’s darkness, Butcher had no trouble observing the lad making his way across the waste ground away from his bolt hole under the railway line. It wasn’t quite like wearing night vision goggles, but it felt like his eyes were drawing in more ambient light to assist his observations. They passed along a well-trodden path through trees until they reached a gate back onto Love Lane, where his target paused and Butcher watched him crouch at the gate. Then he slipped a couple of metal bars aside, slid through and carried on his way, turning up Love Lane again.

Following at a distance, Butcher paused at the gap in the gate. Where his target had slid the panels aside there were a pair of bolts, loose on the ground and Butcher guessed this was an exit point less well known than the bent section he had first used to get into the waste ground. Butcher carefully followed, but by the time he was out on the street, his target had gained a lot of distance, as he headed on. Butcher sighed and pulled out the drone as he followed. He was going to need to risk it if he didn’t want to lose the target.

The drone zipped up into the sky and Butcher tried to keep moving as he handled its controls, setting it to fly to a point well ahead of him that should, at least, let him observe any turns the target made. He opened up his stride, trying to stay at the edge of the pools of illumination thrown by the streetlights.

As he glanced down at the feed from the drone, Butcher could see the shape of his target more clearly. It had changed since the last time he had seen him. Was it even the same guy? Was this a different hooded gorilla to the one he had followed here?

No, he realized. Same guy, but this time wearing a backpack - one Butcher recognized. It was classic PLCE military surplus, with the squashed and irregular appearance that told him it was empty or nearly empty. So his target was heading somewhere to collect something. Something heavy, most likely. And he wanted to keep his hands free. Either that or his target was ex-military and the backpack was all that he had.

The target turned up a street not far ahead and then paused at the corner. Butcher paused the drone and, as he approached the corner himself, called it back. It still had plenty of charge, but no sense to be wasting it. He pushed himself into the dark side of the street and approached the corner slowly, ears straining to pick up every sound. And there were sounds. Not loud ones or anything that he could identify with certainty but sounds all the same.

As Butcher peered around the corner, he realized that he was close enough to his target to see his glyph, which meant that Butcher’s glyph must be visible, too. He ducked back. The glyph vanished. That was interesting. At least it meant that the glyph was only visible if he was visible. He wondered how much of himself needed to be visible for the glyph to communicate itself and how the nanoids were sharing this information. Was it a passive thing, or were they actively communicating their location somehow? But, for now, that was a problem for another day. He had to risk observing his target. He leaned around the corner again and saw immediately that his target had gone.

‘Fuck,’ he whispered to himself, moving forward cautiously. This was not a good time or place to end up in an ambush with someone bigger and stronger than him… Although stronger might be questionable now. He was, technically, still pursuing his duty, which meant he ought to be a lot stronger than he appeared.

But before he could pursue it too deeply, he spotted the target again, further along the road, squatting on the pavement below a sturdy-looking brick wall topped with sharp metal railings and then -

‘Holy shit,’ he breathed. The guy had just made a standing jump over the wall into the space beyond. Why did he even bother with the metal panels and suchlike when he could do that? Come to think of it, how high could Butcher jump now? Was it a Feat of Strength? Hm. Probably not. But worth checking out.

As he mulled it over, he unfolded the drone and tossed it into the air to watch it hum up into the sky above where his target had jumped. The GoPro’s infrared was draining its battery fast, but suddenly Butcher could see where the noises he had picked up earlier were coming from. There was a small camp beneath one of the railway arches. There were figures moving within it - most of them huddled up against the wall, but a handful squatting here and there around what looked like a very small fire. Maybe a gas burner? And his target had hardly moved from the spot where he’d landed in. He was crouched within high grass, watching the group beneath the arch and Butcher let the drone hover about a hundred feet up - high enough to be inaudible over the general hub-bub of an urban night, but low enough to see the whole scene.

Not much happened for a while and Butcher was starting to get worried that the drone would run out of battery and buzz back to him automatically, but then one of the camp began to slowly walk away from the group and Butcher could see immediately that his target shifted at the sight. Dropping the drone a little lower, Butcher could see that the figure from the camp had staggered - drunk or high - around the corner to take a piss up against the wall of the next arch over and he guessed it was standard - that the homeless group (which was what he guessed they were) used the second arch as a toilet. It would still stink, but at least you weren’t sleeping in shit.

But his target was creeping closer to the urinating man and the scenario suddenly resolved itself in Butcher’s mind. Butcher wasn’t the only one here pursuing a quarry. The target was a hunter! He was going to ambush this homeless man!

Butcher watched the display on his phone, his jaw clenched with indecision.

Did he shout or yell or make a noise? Try to disrupt the attention of either hunter or prey? But then he might lose his only good lead and be no more aware what the target wanted with the homeless man.

And then in a sudden instant the decision became moot.

The hunter moved with a shocking speed and his target was crushed against the wall. From where he crouched at the corner, Butcher didn’t hear a thing - and he had been listening for it with nanoid-enhanced senses. The other people at the homeless camp couldn’t have heard it. And, as Butcher watched, shocked, the hunter yanked his hand back. It didn’t appear on the infrared, but Butcher realized that the homeless man had been stabbed at the same instant he was crushed. The clinical precision of it was unnervingly familiar to Butcher who had watched colleagues in the Regiment kill with the same silent and overwhelming force. Butcher had killed, more than once - and at least twice more than he couldn’t remember, if that video had been real. But that had been with a pistol or a rifle and, on top of that, it had been in active conflict zones, where the sound of gunfire was a daily routine and violence was the expected norm. The people he had killed - that he remembered killing - had been armed and dangerous men and in all but one case had been actively trying to kill Butcher at the time.

To see the hunter kill so expertly and decisively, here, in a UK city, as Butcher watched him do it...

But matters hadn’t concluded and, as Butcher watched, his target picked up the dead man and carried the corpse back into the cover of the long grass near the wall.

Then the camera blinked twice and went dark and the auto-return message popped up.

Shit, Butcher thought. If the hunter came back over the wall now, he would certainly see the drone and if Butcher moved, the drone wouldn’t have the range to get back to him. He should have pulled it back by now and relied on his own night vision to see what was happening on the other side of the fence.

But, luckily, it seemed that the hunter isn’t coming back just yet. As Butcher caught and stowed the drone, he could hear quiet organic sounds coming from the other side of the wall. Then suddenly -

The bergan flew up and over the wall and landed with an unpleasant smack on the pavement. Butcher realized that, in a few moments, his target would most likely be heading back the way he had come and Butcher was in his path. He glanced behind himself. Fifty metres away was a battered, white shipping container and, if he ran now, he might make it into cover before the target reached him. But if the target didn’t come back this way, he would lose him…

But he had had enough of being indecisive tonight and a man had already died as a result. Butcher backed away from the corner…