Chapter 3: CONSEQUENCE, Written in Blood

The dossier had told me Callum Drex was thirty-eight years old, five feet eleven, employed by Tesslar Systems as a mid-level data auditor for the past four years, and that he had been found at approximately quarter past six on a Tuesday morning by a maintenance contractor named Yusuf Chen who had come to inspect a faulty drainage coupling and instead found something that would, I suspected, follow him into sleep for the remainder of his natural life.

The dossier had not told me what the place would smell like.

Holmes collected me from my flat at half past seven, which I knew because she sent a single text message that read simply *Downstairs* and which I received because I had already been awake for an hour and a half, sitting at the desk with the dossier spread open and a cup of tea gone cold beside it. I had eaten — I will note this for the record, since she had told me to — a piece of toast and a boiled egg that I could not quite taste, which was less about appetite and more about the particular alertness that used to come over me in the hours before a field operation. The body remembers certain postures of readiness long after the circumstances that shaped them have passed.