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verification was non-existent and cash was supreme. Nothing you’d ever find out about on the licensed news.
    “Why is Debra taking us to school this morning?” Zara asked as Jacinta tried to brush her long hair into some kind of order.
    “Both of us are busy, pet. Sorry,” Sid told her. The pan on the induction hob was boiling too strongly, so he turned it down to a simmer and set the timer for seven minutes.
    “Are you working again, Dad?” Will asked, his face all earnest.
    “Yeah, I’m working again.”
    “Can we afford to move now, then?”
    Sid exchanged a look with Jacinta. “Yes, we’re thinking about moving again.” They had lived in the three-bedroom house in Walkergate for five years now. A pleasant enough home, but its age meant it was never designed for the cold of today’s winters, so it cost a fortune to heat. Only having one bathroom was a pain, and the zone room was also the dining room. Then there were the neighbors, who were wary about having a policeman on the street.
    “What about school?” Zara protested. “All my friends are there. I don’t want to leave.”
    “You’ll stay at the same school,” Sid assured her. It was a private one, after all, which ate huge chunks out of his salary, and was the main reason he’d cultivated supplementary revenue streams income despite the risks. But nobody sent their kids to public schools if they could afford an alternative.
    “Actually I found one last night,” Jacinta said. “I was reviewing estate agent files.”
    “Really?” It was news to Sid. He sipped at a mug of coffee. The smartcells in his mouth detected the caffeine and flashed up a diet intake warning. It was his most sincere New Year resolution to eat better and do more exercise. But he’d barely had any sleep … You have to be realistic about such things. He told his e-i to cancel the warning, spooning an extra sugar into the mug in an act of petulant defiance.
    “In Jesmond.”
    “Jesmond’s nice,” Will said admiringly. “Sun Tu and Hinny live there.”
    “Jesmond’s expensive,” Sid said.
    “You gets what you pays for,” Jacinta replied.
    Sid took the porridge off the hob and ladled it into the bowls. “True.”
    “So can I call the agent?” Jacinta asked.
    “Sure, why not.” They could afford it—he’d stacked up a lot of money in his secondary account over the past few years. Now there was just the problem of how they used it to buy somewhere else without alerting the Tax Bureau. The reason they hadn’t moved before Christmas was because of the attention it would have focused on him. Buying a house while he was on the reduced salary of a suspension would have triggered a host of Tax Bureau monitor programs.
    “Mum,” Will pleaded. “Does it have a proper zone room?”
    “Yes, it has a proper zone room.”
    “Cool!”
    “What about en suites?” Zara asked urgently.
    “Five bedrooms, two en suites, one family bathroom.”
    Zara grinned contentedly to herself as she started to stir strawberry jam into her porridge. Just for a moment his family was happy and quiet; Sid felt he ought to put that in some kind of log. Dawn was bringing a harsh gray light to the misted-up kitchen window. It had stopped snowing. He began to have a good feeling about how the day was shaping up.
    “If we’re moving to a bigger house, does that mean we can have a puppy now?” Will asked.
    Newcastle’s central police station was a big glass-and-stone cube built in 2068, an impressive civic structure to reflect the newfound wealth that was benefiting the whole city as the bioil that flowed through the gateway increased on a near-daily basis. It had replaced the older station that had stood on the corner of Market Street and Pilgrim Street, providing all the facilities a modern police force could possibly want—if only it had the money to operate them.
    The underground garage had four levels, capable of holding staff cars and 150 official vehicles from mobile incident