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There were days when he didn't turn up at all - he'd just be out on his own, running his own lines and walking grids that might not even have existed outside his own head. Everybody could see that he was unravelling. Bits of him were fading and becoming as indistinct as the girl - we didn't know her name, where she was from, who killed her and why. For some reason, it seemed like traces of Sean's mind were blowing away on these breezes of dead air, and, even if we didn't discuss the subject openly, I think we all figured that solving the case might save him.
    Maybe it would have done, but we'll never know. However hard we looked and however many people we asked, we learned nothing. She had no name or identity, no family, no past, no future.
    And in the end, Sean literally went to pieces.
    When I thought about the dead girl, I thought of it like this.
    People die in swamps or quicksand and they get sucked under for a long time - maybe even for ever. But sometimes the ground shifts and the body is brought to the surface. It's not evil and there's no thought behind it; it's just what happens. The girl's corpse felt like that. It was as though our city had shifted awkwardly in a nightmare and one of its dead had rolled up into the light.
    Nameless and forgotten, she might have never been anyone at all.
    This was just what our city did. What went on underneath.
    Eventually, as stupid as it might seem, you start thinking.
    Perhaps nobody killed her at all. Perhaps she was just dead there in the same way that the paint was peeling and the walls were crumbling. It sounds ridiculous, but on the nights when you can almost hear the city breathing it doesn't always feel it. Sean and I talked about it once, drunk as fuckers, and, although it was left unspoken, we both knew that it scared us how similarly we were starting to see the world. So I understood a little how and why it was haunting him so much, but I didn't appreciate it properly back then. Now I realise the feeling took him over and he simply couldn't cope anymore. People die in our city every day, and you learn to deal with it, but Alison's death was always different. We didn't know it then, of course, but it was tied into our city and its history, vibrating on a wavelength that Sean had begun to hear increasingly clearly. I could only vaguely sense the echoes, but even that was enough to frighten me.
    And what happened was, Sean left.
    One day he did his usual not-turning-in routine, but this time his absence stretched to two days, and then to three, and then he just never came back. I didn't hear from him, and after a week of no word it seemed pretty clear that he was gone, one way or another.
    The exact circumstances were unclear, but we learned a little, here and there. Sean had rented his flat and lived alone, and it turned out that he'd left instructions with his estate agents to say that he wouldn't be renewing his tenancy. On the last day, the landlord turned up, expecting an empty house and instead finding that all of Sean's things were still there. This was a few days before we went looking, and when we did we found the landlord, slightly aggravated, in the process of bagging and binning most of Sean's possessions. There was no forwarding address, no contact details.
    It was as though Sean had simply not come home one night.
    We looked for him, of course. We tried all the obvious places and people, and then we moved on to the less obvious. Some of them, we leaned on pretty hard - but there was no trace of him.
    And in the months that had passed since - on those dark nights - I didn't find it impossible to believe that it had been a trade-off: that the city had accidentally let go of the girl's body in its sleep, realised its mistake and then lazily reached out and taken Sean instead.
    The rest of us packed up and moved on. Photographs tacked to walls were taken down; papers were filed; people moved to different desks and started giving a shit about other things. But