The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I

A halyard flaps lazily against the flagpole in the wind. I look out over the city. It seems strangely peaceful. But then, from the roof of a ninety-floor skyscraper you don’t see the human ants fleeing or hunting through the streets. Hear the cries of those beaten to the ground, the pleas for mercy, the click of the cocked rifle. But you hear the shooting. The growl of a solitary motorcycle. And now that night has fallen you see the fires.

Although from up here most of them look small. The torched cars that look like cheerful lanterns, casting a little light in a city in which it has been over a year since the street lamps stopped working.

I heard a burst of machine-gun fire, not too long. They’re young, but they’ve learned when to stop to prevent the weapon from overheating. They have learned what they need to know in order to survive in these times. Or to be more accurate: to survive a little longer than a person whose needs are the same as yours; food, weapons, shelter, petrol, clothing, drugs and at least one woman who can carry a man’s genes into the next generation. To employ a cliché, it’s a jungle down there. And the jungle gets closer with each day that passes not with each hour. I’m guessing the building we’re standing on now will be part of the jungle by first light.

Up here those who are able to evacuate are doing so. The elite, the richest of the rich, the ones who could afford the ticket out. I stand and study them, the final group of fourteen people, impatiently peering in the direction of the bay from which they expect to see it approach, the military helicopter shuttling back and forth between here and the aircraft carrier the New Frontier. The ship has room for three and a half thousand people, food, medicine and everything else necessary for four years on the open sea without needing to visit a harbour. It sails tonight and will be at sea for an indefinite period of time. I don’t know what the tickets cost, only that it’s slightly less expensive for women since it has been decided that there are to be equal numbers of both sexes on board. No one’s saying it out loud, but this is effectively a Noah’s Ark for the elite.

My childhood friend Colin Lowe stands in front of me. His wife Liza and daughter Beth are closer to the landing pad, eyes peeled for the helicopter. Colin is one of the country’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. He owns internet sites and properties all over the world, including the skyscraper we’re standing on. But, as he has just told me, it took them less than thirty minutes to pack.

‘You’ve got everything you need,’ I assure him.

The atmosphere up here is nervous, hectic but also strangely excited. Heavily armed and uniformed private militia men, paid for by Colin Lowe Inc., guard the landing pad and the door to the roof. There are more of them on the ground level and around the lifts. Their job is to stop anyone storming the building in the hope of reaching safety before the gangs come. Or even better, of boarding the helicopter out to New Frontier. It’s hard to blame those who try, and hard to blame those who stop them. We fight for ourselves and those dearest to us, that’s the way we’re made.

When I arrived at the building earlier in the evening there was a smell of fear and desperation around the gates. I saw a man wearing an expensive suit offer one of the guards at the entrance a briefcase stuffed with notes, but the guard turned him down. Either because there were witnesses, or because no one knows whether that money will be worth anything tomorrow. There was a beautiful, middle-aged woman behind him whom I thought I recognised. As she offered herself to the head guard she reminded him of the names of the films she had acted in.

‘We’re heading for entropy,’ says Colin.

‘You know perfectly well I don’t know what words like that mean,’ I say.

‘The Second Law of Thermodynamics.’

‘Still blank.’

‘Don’t you legal people know anything?’

‘Only how to clean up after the engineers.’

Colin laughs. I had just summed up the symbiotic nature of our partnership in Lowe Inc. over the last fifteen years.

‘Entropy,’ says Colin, and looks out over the city’s skyline, a jagged silhouette against a sun that is about to disappear into the sea. ‘Entropy means that, in a closed system, over the course of time everything will be destroyed. When you leave a sandcastle it will be changed the following day by the weather and the wind. Not replaced by something even more fantastic but just flatter, greyer. Lifeless, soulless. Nothing. That’s entropy, Will. It’s the most universal natural law of them all.’

‘The law of lawlessness,’ I say.

‘Thus speaks the lawyer.’

‘Thus speak the philosophers. According to Hobbes, without laws, without a social contract, we’ll be thrown out into a chaos worse than the worst dictatorship. And the way things are looking now, he was right.’

‘Leviathan is here,’ Colin concurs.

‘What’s Leviathan?’ asks his daughter Beth. Without our noticing it she’s come over to join us. She’s seventeen, three years younger than her brother Brad, who is out there somewhere. She looks so like my own daughter Amy, but that isn’t the only reason I feel the tears welling up when I look at Beth.

‘It’s the story of a sea monster that doesn’t exist,’ I tell her when Colin doesn’t reply.

‘Then how can it be here?’

‘It’s just an image, darling.’ Colin pulls his daughter close. ‘A famous philosopher used it to describe a society without law and order.’

‘Like this one?’ she asks.

A man in military uniform approaches. Colin coughs. ‘Go and keep Mum company, Beth, I’ll be along soon.’

She obediently runs off.

‘Lieutenant?’ says Colin.

‘Mr Lowe.’ The uniformed man has thick, short grey hair and a crackling walkie-talkie from which an agitated voice seems to be trying to contact him. ‘My man on the ground floor tells me they’re having trouble keeping people out. Should they use live ammunition if...?’

‘Are they gangs?’

‘Mostly ordinary people hoping to board the helicopter, Mr Lowe.’

‘Poor sods. Only shoot as a last resort.’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘How long until the helicopter gets here?’

‘The pilot says in about twenty minutes, sir.’

‘OK. Keep us posted when it comes so that everyone is ready to board as soon as it lands.’

‘Very good, Mr Lowe.’

As the lieutenant moves away from us I hear him answer the voice on the walkie-talkie. ‘I know, sergeant, but our orders are not to use more force than is necessary. Understood? Yes, maintain your position and...’

His words fade, leaving behind the soft tapping of the halyard and the siren of a police car that rises up from the dark streets below us. Colin and I both know it isn’t the police — it’s been over a year since they dared patrol the streets after nightfall — but probably four young men armed with automatic weapons and doped up enough to leave their reflexes intact and hopefully intensified but their inhibitions dulled. Although inhibitions aren’t just dulled, they’re more or less gone. And not just among these predators but among the population in general.

And maybe that’s the only excuse for what I’ve done.

I can still hear that motorcycle. There must be a hole in the silencer or whatever it’s called.

I accelerate down the empty street, through the city, heading southwards, towards the slaughterhouse. It makes a racket from that bullet-hole in the silencer, gotta get that fixed. And I need petrol. The needle’s showing red, no bloody way of knowing if I’ve enough to get there. You definitely do not want to get stranded in the city centre in the middle of the night without your gang, because suddenly you’re the prey. But OK, as long as I have petrol, as long as this engine keeps turning then I’m at least partway up the food chain. Because I’ve found what I was looking for up on the hillside behind me. The opening. The hole in the fortress. Maybe everyone living in the villa will be dead in a few hours’ time, maybe not. I’m not the judge here, I’m just the messenger. The sound of the bike echoes round the tall, deserted office blocks. If I ride too hard I might run out of petrol, but the longer I’m still here in the centre the greater my chances of getting in trouble. The mob I just passed up by the Lowe building, for example, when I slowed down a bit one of them tried to grab me to get hold of the bike. People are animals, they’re desperate, they’re angry and afraid. For fuck’s sake. What’s happened to this city? What’s happened to this big, great country?

II

‘Helicopter due in eighteen minutes!’ shouts the lieutenant.

‘One thousand and eighty seconds,’ says Colin, always quicker than me at mental arithmetic.

It didn’t take long from the discovery of the virus to the outbreak of the pandemic and the sudden dissolution of everything. People dropped like flies. In the first instance from the disease, then as a result of the collapse of the economy and the social and political institutions. Naturally, the poor were hardest hit by the pandemic; bad news always operates that way. But it was not until food shortages occurred that the situation changed from being something societies tried to tackle together into a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. First pitting the poor against the rich, and then the poor against the poor, until finally the only ones who weren’t enemies were family and friends. The food shops were empty, and in due course the gun shops too, although the production of guns and rifles was about the last to stop. The forces of law and order, already breaking down, collapsed. The richest barricaded themselves in behind the walls of their farms and country mansions, preferably on elevated sites which were easier to defend. A few of the very richest, such as Colin Lowe, who had seen the coming of the collapse long before the pandemic, had taken the precaution of acquiring private estates and islands that were self-sufficient and guarded by private militia equipped with the latest in weapons technology. Paradoxically the virus helped them in their struggle against those who posed the greatest threat to them: hordes of the poor and the desperate. Because the virus spread out of control in and around households where people lived in crowded conditions without health insurance and unable to afford to follow the government’s quarantine rules. But once the pandemic had levelled off and become less of a threat than the plundering I think the hardest hit were those stuck in the middle. Those with something that could be taken from them but without the means to protect and defend it. And once they had lost everything these people also turned into plunderers. Poverty, desperation, violence, all were contagious.

When the pandemic started I was head of the legal department of Colin’s IT company. The virus came from the east, from the other end of the country, but it swept over us — the majority, the safe middle class — before we had time to react.

When Colin first showed me Rat Island five years earlier, a tiny prison island of no more than a hundred hectares not far from the airport, I’d teased him about being a doomsday prepper, one of those paranoid wackos who spends all their time preparing for the worst, for the day when they have no one but themselves to rely on. The reason there are so many of them in our country probably has something to do with the culture of individual liberty here. You make your own luck and no one’ll stop you, but no one’ll help you either.

‘It’s just common sense,’ was his reply when I suggested that it was bordering on the paranoid. ‘I’m an engineer and a programmer, and people like us aren’t hysterics who go around thinking the end is nigh. We just reckon on the likelihood of something unlikely happening, same as we do in our work. Because there’s one thing you can be sure of, and that is that, given enough time, everything — but absolutely everything — that can happen will happen. The likelihood of the breakdown of society in my lifetime isn’t great, but then it isn’t negligible either. When I multiply that likelihood by what it would cost me, financially and in terms of quality of life, what that gives me is the price I should be willing to pay for my insurance. This—’ he gestured with his hand in the direction of the barren and rocky island with the empty concrete buildings that had once been built to keep killers in, not out — ‘is a small price to pay if I want to sleep better at night.’

At that time I was not aware that he already had cabinets full of weapons there. Nor that the reason he and several of his director friends had undergone laser surgery to correct near-sightedness had not been cosmetic but from the knowledge that in a world without law and order it would be difficult to get hold of either spectacles or contact lenses, and that clear eyesight would be critical in a struggle to survive that would have brought us a step closer to the Stone Age.

‘No reason not to be prepared, Will. If only for your family’s sake.’

But I had not been prepared.

It is not the case that the looting started when the authorities decided to open the prisons which had, in effect, become chambers of death in which isolation was impossible and the virus spread unhindered. The numbers of prisoners released in this way was not sufficient in itself to account for the chaos. It was the feeling it created. A feeling that the authorities were losing control, that law and order were suspended, that soon we would have to grab whatever we could before others grabbed it first. Nor was it that we failed to see or understand what was happening. It was not an irrational fear. We knew that if we could just put this pandemic behind us — and in some countries it was already on the wane — we would be able to return to our normal lives. But we also saw that fear had grown stronger than the common sense of the herd. It wasn’t mass hysteria but the lack of a shared common sense. So people made individual choices that were rational and sensible for themselves and those they loved, but catastrophic for the rest of society.

Some became looters and turned to violence out of sheer necessity.

Others — like Colin’s son Brad — did so because they wanted to.

Brad Lowe’s relationship with his father was complicated. As his firstborn, Brad was the one Colin expected to take over the business after him. But it wasn’t something Brad was cut out for. He lacked his father’s intellect and his capacity for work, had neither his vision nor his desire to change the world, and none of his charm or his ability to enthuse others. What he had inherited from his father was an egotism that was at times infinite, and a willingness to sacrifice everything and everyone in pursuit of his goal. It might involve Brad using his father’s money to bribe the trainer to pick him for the college football team ahead of others with more talent. Or persuading his father to give him money for a project he and his friends had started to help less fortunate students but which, as it turned out, went towards drugs, women and wild parties in the off-campus house they rented. The final straw that made Colin remove his son from college was when the dean informed him that Brad had physically threatened him after it was discovered he had forged documents to make it look as though he had passed certain exams he had not even taken.

Brad came back home the ultimate loser that summer. And I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. For years our families used to spend mountain holidays in an enormous two-storey cabin we rented together until Colin bought the place. The bad relationship between father and son made it hard for the rest of us to be around Brad. Because he wasn’t a boy without feelings. Quite the contrary, in fact; he had way too many of them. He loved and admired his father. It had always been that way and was something people could see clearly. A lot more clearly than the fact that the father loved his son. Now Brad’s emotions veered wildly between despair, anger, an apathetic indifference and an aggression directed against everyone who didn’t do what he wanted them to, whether one of his family, one of ours, or one of the employees at the cabin. And that was when I discovered the other Colin inside Brad. The one who appeared when Colin’s seductive intelligence and contagious enthusiasm failed to persuade people: the threatening person. The Colin who could almost on a whim buy up some troublesome little competitor, strip its assets and put the workers out of a job. On the couple of occasions when I had trashed Colin’s plan on legal grounds he had become so angry that I know he was within a whisker of firing me. I know because I recognised from childhood the black look that came into his eyes when he didn’t get his way.

And stayed there until he did.

And I think that’s what Brad had discovered. That you can — by the simple act of abandoning a few inhibitions — get your own way through the use of violence, threats and brute force. The way he got the Winston brothers from the neighbouring cabin to join him in setting fire to Ferguson’s old garage. Because if they hadn’t done so — as the brothers explained later to the police — Brad had threatened to set fire to the Winston cabin while the family was sleeping.

Brad’s hapless attempt to court my daughter Amy further demonstrated that he was a boy given to strong feelings. He had been in love with her since they were small children, but instead of growing out of it as is usually the case with childhood infatuations his feelings just seemed to get stronger each summer when they met. Of course it might have been because Amy grew more lovely with each year that passed, but just as likely it was because his feelings weren’t reciprocated and her persistent rejection only spurred him on. He seemed to feel as though he had a right to her.

One night I was awoken by the sound of Brad’s voice in the corridor outside Amy’s room. He was trying to get her to let him in and she was obviously refusing. I heard him say: ‘This is our cabin, everything in here is mine, so let me in or else we’ll throw you out and your father will lose his job.’

I never told Colin about this — I’ve done and said a few stupid things myself in the grip of a romantic rejection — and I suspected Colin might come down too hard on his son as a way of showing he wouldn’t tolerate that kind of thing. So it wasn’t the threats made to Amy but the burning of the garage that tipped things over for Colin. Brad got off with a conditional sentence and the award of hefty damages to Mr Ferguson, paid for by his father, after which Colin put him under house arrest. Two days later Brad left for town on the motorcycle he had been given as an eighteenth birthday present. He took a large amount of cash from his father’s safe, and the keys to an apartment in Downtown.

‘Well, at least I know where he is,’ sighed Colin over breakfast.

Three months later Colin told me he’d heard from the police that the apartment had been completely destroyed in one of the many fires in Downtown, that they hadn’t found any bodies inside but that there was no sign of Brad either. Colin had then reported Brad missing and tried to pressurise the police into searching for him, but by that point the police had stopped following up anything other than street violence, arson and murder. We heard from the east coast that in some cities the police had had to barricade themselves inside their police stations as these had become a favourite target of the gangs because of the large numbers of weapons stored there. There were also rumours that in some states the police had stopped turning up for work and were instead operating as highway robbers in order to survive.

After the government had finally declared a state of emergency throughout the whole country and Colin had moved into the abandoned prison on Rat Island with his wife and Beth he told me that he had heard about Brad from other sources. Apparently Colin Lowes’s son was now the leader of a gang of looters who called themselves Chaos.

‘Why the looting?’ said Colin with a shake of the head. ‘If he just came to me he’d have everything he needs.’

‘Maybe this is what he needs,’ I said. ‘To show you he can manage on his own. Not only survive without your help in times like these but be a leader. Like you.’

‘Hm,’ said Colin and looked at me. ‘So you don’t think it’s simply because he likes it?’

‘Likes what?’

‘The chaos. Looting. He likes... destruction.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

And it was true.

As the world crumbled around us, Heidi, Amy and I tried to lead as normal a life as possible in Downtown.

Heidi and I had met when we were both law students and it had all happened so smoothly. It took us just two evenings to realise we were meant for each other, and two years to know that we had been right. So there was nothing to discuss. We got married, and Amy arrived three years later. We wanted more children, but it took another fourteen years before little Sam — now nearly four — appeared.

When the virus came along and the city was put on lockdown Heidi’s firm went bankrupt. She knew it would be tough to find work in a market in which unemployment had risen from five to thirty per cent, and the economic recession had entered what the experts call critical mass, a state in which a descending spiral had become its own accelerant. So following the pandemic, when people were once again able to move about freely without fear of infection, Heidi started offering legal assistance to the poor. She worked from our kitchen and of course was only rarely paid for the work she did. Luckily money wasn’t the biggest problem for our family. Directly before the onset of the pandemic the board of Lowe Inc. had accepted an offer from the country’s largest IT company. For me and the other internal shareholders it meant, in principle, that we need never work again as long as we lived. I had given up my job and spent the next few weeks thinking over what I wanted to do with my life. And in the course of those weeks the virus had struck again and decided what it was going to do not only with my life but with the lives of everyone on the planet.

So I had come to the conclusion that the most meaningful thing I could do was help Heidi to help others.

And from that day on not only our kitchen but also the living room and the library had operated as a kind of centre for shipwrecked souls and weird characters of every description. But by now even the legal system had started coming apart at the seams. Even though the government, the national assembly and the courts continued to operate after a fashion, the real question was how much longer we would have a functioning police force capable of administering the law and enforcing the verdicts of the courts, a jail system that could arrange for the serving of sentences, and even a military whose loyalty could be relied on. The national assembly had given the military leaders extended powers to protect property — at least, public property — and in other circumstances this might have been a first step in allowing a group of senior military figures to take over the running of the country. A junta would, after all — according to the social philosophy in Leviathan — be preferable to anarchy. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead soldiers and officers were recruited to join the private militia established by the wealthy, where they could make five times what they had earned in the regular army.

And those of us who weren’t as wealthy had also started to take steps to secure what was ours. What we thought of as ours. Started preparing for the worst.

But nothing could have prepared me for what actually did happen.

And as I stand here on top of the skyscraper listening out for the helicopter I can still feel the taste of the rope in my mouth, still smell the petrol in the garage and hear the screams of those I love inside the house. And the bitter certainty that I would lose everything. Absolutely everything.

‘Sixteen minutes!’ the lieutenant shouts.

Colin walks to the edge of the roof and looks down into the darkened streets. I can just about hear the sound of a solitary motorcycle. Only a month previously the city was full of motorcycle gangs on the rampage, but now the fuel shortage means most of the robbers are on foot.

‘So you don’t think Justitia is dead, she just has this hole in her forehead?’ Colin asks.

I look up at him. It’s hard to keep up with a mind like his, but since I’ve been used to following the train of his thoughts ever since we first met in junior school I can sometimes manage it. He hears the motorcycle and automatically thinks of his son Brad and his gang, Chaos. They wear helmets with a very striking club logo: Justitia, the goddess of justice, the blindfolded woman holding the scales. Only in this version she has a large, bloody bullet-hole in the middle of her forehead.

‘She’s down for the count,’ I say. ‘But I still think the rule of law will reassert itself.’

‘And I always thought that was naive. That sooner or later the only ones you can trust are your own close family members. Which of us was right, Will?’

‘People will fight back against your entropy, Colin. People want something that’s better, they want a civilised society, they want the rule of law.’

‘What people want is revenge for an injustice committed. That was what the rule of law was all about. And when that doesn’t function any more people arrange for their revenge themselves. Look at history, Will. Blood feuds, vendettas with sons and brothers avenging their fathers and brothers. That’s where we come from and that’s where we’re headed back to. Because that’s how we feel. That’s what we’re like, as human beings. Even you, Will.’

‘I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t agree. I put common sense and humanism above revenge.’

‘The hell you do. You might like to pretend you do, but I know what you’re feeling inside. And you know as well as I do that feelings will always, always win out over common sense.’

I don’t answer. Instead I look down at the street below, tryping to spot the motorcycle. The roar has died away, but I see a cone of light moving and hope that is it. Right now light and hope are what we need. Because he’s right. Colin is always right.

III

I slow down. Further down the avenue here there are neither people nor any other traffic on the move, but since I’m driving on sidelights only to attract as little attention as possible I need to keep an eye out for holes in the road. It’s crazy, but even though people ran out of petrol long ago they clearly still have plenty of grenades left — the explosions get more frequent by the day.

I brake. Not for a hole but for torchlight. A gang has taken up position at the next crossroads. A car burns soundlessly behind them.

Shit. They’ve spread spike strips across the whole avenue.

I check my mirror. And sure enough, in the glow from the brake lights I see they’re behind me too. They emerge from buildings on both sides, dragging a spike strip behind them to cut off a retreat that way. It takes me two seconds to establish that there are twelve of them, six in front and six behind, that only four of them are visibly armed, that they move like kids and they’re not wearing badges or outfits that might tell me which gang they belong to. The bad news for me is that they must have raided a police station for those spike strips, which means they’ve got guts. Which is another way of saying they’re desperate. The good news is that they’re ranged in a haphazard and not very practical formation, which tells me that either they don’t have much experience, they’re stupid, or they think numerical superiority is enough.

I’m still fifty metres away from them when I bring the bike to a complete stop and take off my helmet. Hold it up so they can see.

‘Chaos!’ I shout, hoping they can see the insignia on the helmet.

‘Shit, it’s a girl!’ I hear someone say.

‘All the better,’ another laughs.

‘Move those strips and let me by and there won’t be any trouble!’ I shout. As I expected, I get laughter in answer. I switch on the headlight. I can see them better now, ethnicities mixed, clothing mixed too. They look like the leftovers of what no other gang would have. Then I take hold of the Remington rifle fastened to the side of the bike and aim at the biggest one, still blinded by the headlight and as it happens standing directly in front of the spike strip. I think back to the last time I used it, how I made a perfect triangle out of the eyes and the bullet-hole. But of course, then I had the target hanging on a hook right in front of me. I pull the trigger, and the echo bounces around the walls of the houses. The guy falls the right way, backwards onto the spike strip, and I accelerate, aim for the open spread of his legs and manage to slip the rifle back into its holster and get both hands on the handlebars again before the front wheel hits him and I’m riding over him.

No shots from behind me.

These days no one wastes ammunition on lost causes.

I don’t know whether it’s a conscious decision to ride past Adam’s house, but anyway I don’t exactly have enough petrol to take any other route. But maybe I need to return to the scene of the crime, to remind myself why I’m doing what I am about to do. Anyway, suddenly I’m there.

Silence. Darkness. I don’t stop, just slow down.

The hole in the gate is still there. The hole I made.

I squeezed the handles of the wire cutters and the teeth snapped through the wires in the gate.

I could feel the eyes of all twelve of them behind me, the smell of testosterone, the scuffing of nervous boots unable to keep still on the asphalt.

‘Quicker!’ whispered Brad excitedly.

I could’ve asked him what the hurry was, told him there was no way the police might turn up.

I could’ve asked if he wanted to take over, told him I worked at the speed that suited me best.

Or I could’ve asked if we shouldn’t just drop the whole business and told it like it was: that it was a bad idea.

As Brad’s second-in-command it was actually my duty to tell him and to try to get him to give it up. I’ve thought about that a lot since then. Whether I could have done anything different. Probably not. Because it was Brad’s idea, and that mattered more than being a bad idea. In the first place he would not have wanted to lose face in front of the gang by admitting I was right. But I could have done what I usually did, which was to present my arguments as though they were just an interpretation of his own, so that when he realised I was right — and as things turned out he knew I was — he could take the credit for it. That was OK. A stupid leader can manage well enough as long as he is able to distinguish the good advisors from the bad ones. And Brad had that ability. Though he possessed only average intelligence himself, he seemed able instinctively to recognise intelligence in others. He didn’t need to be able to understand your reasoning; intelligence was like something that just grew out of your forehead. And it was that, and not my career as a kickboxer, that had led him to appoint a girl as second-in-command of Chaos.

The reason I didn’t even try to oppose him or manipulate him was that I knew this robbery was about more than food, weapons, petrol and a generator that may or may not have been in the garage. That Brad knew these people. That they had something he had to have, and nothing would make him change his mind. So I kept my mouth shut. Because I admit it; I don’t risk my position in Chaos, which is the only thing keeping me alive, for a bunch of rich whites I don’t even bloody well know.

‘There!’ I said, bending aside the strand of wire and slipping through, feeling the wired ends rasp against my skin and leather jacket.

The others followed. Brad stood there looking up at the darkened house bathed in moonlight. It was two o’clock in the morning. If people ever slept these days, then this was the time when they did it.

We took out our weapons. Sure, there were more heavily armed gangs than ours, especially the breakaway gangs of former policemen or soldiers, or former cartel people who had crossed the border. But by comparison with the usual youth gangs we were a heavyweight militia; each one of us with an AK-47, Glock 17 pistol and combat knife. We’d run out of bazooka grenades but Brad and I had two hand grenades each.

Brad’s eyes glowed like those of a man in love. He could almost have been handsome. Maybe he was handsome when he slept. But there was something disturbing about his facial expression and his vibe when he was awake, a fear, as though expecting to be hit, as though he hated you even before you’d done it. And this cold, hard hatred and fear alternated so quickly with what was warm and kind and sensitive that it left you wondering what it must be like to be him from the inside. You really couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. And want to help him. And on that particular evening, with the moonlight falling on his long, dirty-blond hair, Brad looked like Kurt Somebody-or-other, a rock star whose records my adoptive dad used to play when he got drunk and started yelling that everybody should do like Kurt, write a couple of great songs and then shoot themselves. But he couldn’t create anything at all, my dad, so he just copied the shooting-himself part.

‘Ready, Yvonne?’ said Brad and looked at me.

The plan was for me to take Dumbo and ring the bell at the main entrance while the rest got in round the back. For what it was worth, I hadn’t really understood why we had to wake up a family that was probably sleeping instead of using the element of surprise, but Brad had said that the sight of a Columbian girl and an undersized and retarded lad would make them lower their guard, that that was the kind of people they were. Helpful types, he had called them, his voice filled with contempt.

I nodded, and Brad pulled the balaclava down over my face.

I rang the bell. Must have waited a minute before I saw the little light by the camera above the door go on.

‘Yes?’ said a drowsy man’s voice through the speaker.

‘My name’s Grace, I was in the same class as Amy,’ I said in a tearful voice. I’d got the names from Brad and the acting talent from a Columbian man and woman I never even knew. ‘This is my kid brother.’

‘What are you doing outside at night and how did you get in?’

‘We’ve been taking some food to my grandma, but now there’s a gang in the street down here and then I remembered Amy’s house. We climbed over the barbed wire. Look at Sergio.’

I pointed to the tears we had made in Dumbo’s shirt — although it should have been obvious he hadn’t a drop of Latin blood in his veins.

There was a pause. He was probably thinking. It wasn’t that unusual to transport food and other stuff between households under cover of darkness.

‘Just a moment,’ he said.

I listened. Footsteps on the stairs inside, sounded like an adult male.

The door opened. Slightly at first, then all the way.

‘Come in, I’m Will. Amy’s father.’

The man had blue eyes with laugh lines around them, a goatee beard and curly red hair that made him look younger than I guessed he was. Brad was probably right. The types that help people. He was barefoot but had pulled on a pair of worn jeans and a T-shirt with a name on it, probably the university where he was a student. I slipped inside so that I was behind him as he held the door open for Dumbo. Took out my gun and swung the barrel hard against the side of his head. Not to harm him or knock him out — because as tall as I am a kick from my heel to his head would have done the job — but to show him that the girl and the little guy were willing to use violence.

He shouted something and held his hand to the bleeding wound on his forehead. I pointed the gun at him.

‘Don’t harm my family,’ he said. ‘Take whatever you want, but don’t—’

‘If you do exactly as we say no one in the house will get hurt,’ I said. And thought I was telling the truth.

IV

Blood ran from the wound in my forehead and down onto my T-shirt as they took me out to the garage and tied me to a chair, which they then tied to the lathe. The girl who said she was a classmate of Amy’s — and for all I knew she might have been — examined the diesel generator. It’s on wheels, but it weighs 150 kilos, so she was probably trying to figure out how she could take it with them.

My own thoughts were of what Heidi would do now. She’d been woken by the doorbell too and must have realised what had happened. Had she managed to get Amy and Sam to safety in the basement? To what we called the panic room, but which was actually a windowless cellar with stone walls, a solid door that could be locked from the inside, and enough food and water for a week. If the tall girl with the dark hair was as rational as she seemed then they would take just what they needed and could carry and get out of here. The boy with her hadn’t said a word, just obeyed the slightest sign from her, and he seemed too harmless to be the type to enjoy hurting people.

It was when I heard Heidi’s scream from another part of the house that I realised there were more of them.

‘You said—’ I began.

‘Shut up,’ said the girl, and hit me again with the pistol.

The boy looked up at her but she said nothing, just looked at me. It was a look that seemed apologetic.

And then a guy in a white ice-hockey helmet was standing in the garage doorway. The Justitia logo was painted on the front of the helmet.

‘He wants you to come in,’ he said. There was a repressed laughter in his voice.

Who was he? The leader, presumably.

The kid and the girl disappeared and the guy stood in front of me. He was holding a Russian automatic weapon, the type suddenly everyone seems to have, said to be very reliable. A Kalashnikov. In some countries it’s part of the national flag, they see it as a symbol in the fight for freedom. But it just makes me shiver. That curved magazine, there’s something perverse about it.

‘I’ll pay you five thousand if you let me and my family go,’ I said.

‘Which I’ll spend where?’ asked the guy, laughing. ‘7-Eleven maybe?’

‘I can give you—’

‘You don’t need to give me anything, Gramps. I take what I want.’

He took down my old motorcycle helmet from a shelf. Took off the hockey helmet and tried it on. Raised and lowered the visor a couple of times. Seemed satisfied, took off the rucksack he was wearing on his back and pushed the helmet down into it.

I heard screams from inside the house again and couldn’t breathe. I was the idiot who had opened the door and let Leviathan in. I didn’t want to breathe, I wanted to die. But I couldn’t die, not now — they needed me. I had to free myself. I tugged on the plastic strips the girl had used to tie me to the chair, felt the skin break and the warm sticky blood running down into my palms.

Heidi screamed again, so loud that I could make out a word. Just the one word. ‘No.’ Like a desperate and hopeless protest against something she knew was going to happen.

The guy looked at me, put his hand around the barrel of the Kalashnikov and moved it up and down as though masturbating. He grinned at me.

And right there and then, I think, was where it started. When everything I had always thought would be me began to fall apart.

Me and Dumbo stood in the doorway and looked at the dining table. It was made of thick, rough brown planking. Sort of rustic style but you can bet it cost a fortune. Like the one Maria had shown me in some Country Living kind of magazine and said she wanted a table like that herself. But there was no way I could get that thing on the bike with me. My gaze moved on to the woman. She was lying tied up on the table. They must have found the rope somewhere and tied it round the tabletop and across her neck, chest and stomach. Her legs were tied to the legs of the table and her nightshirt pulled up above her stomach and down below her breasts.

In front of her I saw the back of a red leather jacket with the embroidered motif of a gaping dragon rearing up out of the sea. Ragnar’s jacket. He turned to us.

‘There you are.’

Below the smooth brown mane of hair that he would lose before he was thirty Ragnar had these predator’s eyes that glowed with something evil and dangerous, even when he smiled. Especially when he smiled. Maybe it wasn’t just by chance he referred to the city as ‘the savannah’ and kept a long metal chain with a hook attached to his bike that he used when he was busy ‘separating out the weakest animal in the herd’ as he liked to call it.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Really,’ he said, and his smile widened. ‘Objections?’

I saw that he saw how I swallowed them down. That’s the price you pay for being in a gang. There are rules you must follow. Among other things. But what came next wasn’t in the rule book.

‘The hour has come, Dumbo,’ said Ragnar. ‘It’s your turn.’

‘Eh?’

‘Come on. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Dumbo looked up at me, wide-eyed.

‘He doesn’t have to,’ I said, and I could hear the tightness in my voice.

‘Yes, he does.’ Ragnar gave me that hostile, challenging look of his, the one that said he should have been Brad’s second-in-command, not me. He waited for me to protest so that he could play his ace, but I already knew what it was.

‘Brad’s orders,’ he finally added.

‘And where is Brad?’ I asked, looking round. Everyone, including Dumbo, was standing with their eyes riveted on the woman on the table. For the first time now I saw the little boy with the large round eyes in an armchair facing the table. He couldn’t have been more than three or four years old and he sat there looking at his mother.

‘Brad’s upstairs,’ said Ragnar, and turned to Dumbo. ‘You ready, Shorty?’

One of the O’Leary twins sneaked up behind Dumbo and jerked his trousers down. Everyone laughed. Dumbo too, but then he always laughs when the others do so that no one will suspect he hasn’t got the joke.

‘Hey, hey,’ said Ragnar. ‘Hey, look at that, the dwarf really is ready!’

More laughter, Dumbo’s louder than anyone’s.

‘Tell Yvonne you’re ready, Dumbo!’ Ragnar said, looking at me.

‘I’m ready!’ Dumbo laughed, thrilled to be the centre of attention, his glassy gaze fixed on the woman on the table.

‘Jesus, Dumbo,’ I said. ‘Don’t—’

‘Insubordination, Yvonne?’ Ragnar taunted, laughter in his voice. ‘Is this incitement to insubordination we hear?’

‘I’m ready!’ shouted Dumbo. He liked to repeat sentences he thought he’d got the hang of. And now the others hoisted him onto a chair, turned the music up loud and cheered him on.

I felt my blood boil. But that’s when you lose a boxing match, when you let the temperature of your blood decide. So I just said it, quietly, but loudly enough for him to hear me very clearly:

‘You will fucking well pay for this, Ragnar.’

There was a scraping of chair legs. The woman was lying with her head turned and looking at the little boy. Tears ran down her face and she was whispering something. And I couldn’t help myself, I went closer so I could hear. In spite of the effort she was making to control it her voice was trembling:

‘Everything will be fine, Sam. Everything will be fine. Close your eyes now. Think of something nice. Something you’d like us to do tomorrow.’

I stepped forward, took hold of Sam under the arms and lifted him up.

‘Let go of him!’ the woman shrieked. ‘Let go of my son!’ I caught her eye.

‘He doesn’t need to see this,’ I said.

Then I hoisted the boy up onto my shoulders, keeping a tight hold of him because he was struggling and squealing like a stuck pig. I headed for the kitchen door but then Ragnar appeared in front of me and blocked the way. Our eyes met. I don’t know what he saw in mine but after a couple of seconds he stepped aside.

I heard the mother scream ‘No!’ as I ducked down through the doorway, walked through the kitchen and out through another door into a corridor. I kept on walking until I found a bathroom. I put the little boy down on the floor and told him his mother would come and fetch him if he kept completely quiet and put his hands over his ears. Then I took the key from the door and locked it from the outside.

I climbed a staircase, passed a couple of open doors and then one that was closed. I opened it carefully.

Light from the corridor entered the room. Brad was sitting beside a bed in which a blonde girl of about my own age lay sleeping. She was still wearing a pair of headphones. I recognised the type, with noise-cancelling so good you could even sleep through the sounds of hand grenades exploding in the streets outside.

Or of your own family being tortured a few metres away.

Brad looked as though he’d been sitting there and looking at her for quite a while. And the girl was nice-looking, in a sort of old-fashioned romantic way, not exactly my type. But obviously Brad’s — I’d never seen him like that before, soft and dreamy-eyed, with a small smile on his lips. It struck me that it was the first time I’d ever seen him happy.

The girl in the bed turned away from the light without waking.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I whispered. ‘We heard the screams even out on the garage — the neighbours might have called the police.’

‘We’ve got time,’ said Brad. ‘And she’s coming with us.’

‘Eh?’

‘She’s mine.’

‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’

I don’t know if it was because I spoke so loudly, but suddenly the girl in the bed opened her eyes. Brad took the headphones off her head.

‘Hi, Amy,’ he whispered in a velvety smooth and completely unfamiliar voice.

‘Brad?’ the girl said, her eyes wide open as she sort of scooted up the bed and away from him.

‘Shh,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to save you. There’s a gang down on the floor below us, they’ve got your parents and Sam. Stuff a few clothes into a bag and come with me, I’ve got a ladder outside the window.’

But the girl, Amy, had seen me. ‘What are you doing, Brad?’

‘Rescuing you,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘The others are in the living room.’

Amy blinked and blinked. Got the picture. Got it quick, the way we all had to learn to.

‘I’m not leaving Sam,’ she said loudly. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but you can either help me or go.’ She looked at me. ‘And who are you?’

‘Do as he says,’ I said, and showed her my gun.

I don’t know if that was the right or wrong thing to do — Brad hadn’t given any instructions about kidnapping — but as she was about to sit up in the bed he grabbed hold of her hair, jerked her head backwards and pressed a cloth against her mouth and nose. She struggled for just a couple of seconds before her body shuddered and then collapsed into his arms. Chloroform. And there was me thinking we’d run out of it.

‘Help me carry her,’ he said as he stuck the cloth into his pocket.

‘But what are you going to do with her?’

‘Marry her and have children,’ said Brad.

Straight away of course I reckoned he’d lost it completely.

‘Come on,’ he said as he took hold of the limp body under the arms. Looked at me, eyebrows raised.

I hadn’t moved. Didn’t know if I was going to be able to either. I looked at the poster pinned above her bed. Same band as the one I liked listening to.

‘That’s an order,’ said Brad. ‘So make up your mind.’

Make up your mind. I knew what that meant, of course. Make up your mind whether you still want to be a member of the only family you’ve got. With the only protection you’re ever going to get. Make up your mind now.

So I did manage to move after all. I bent forward. Took hold of her legs.

I heard the sound of several motorcycles fading into the distance as Heidi staggered into the garage with one of my coats wrapped round her. She found a knife on the workbench and cut me loose. I put my arms around her. She was trembling and shivering as she buried her face in my neck, sobbing as though the tears were choking her.

‘They took her,’ she said as the tears ran warm against my T-shirt. ‘He’s taken Amy.’

‘He?’

‘Brad.’

‘Brad?’

‘He didn’t show his face, but it was Brad Lowe.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘He was the only one wearing a balaclava and he didn’t speak. But he was in charge and he went upstairs to Amy. And when the girl and the boy came into the living room one of them said it’s Brad’s orders.’

‘Said what was Brad’s orders?’

Heidi didn’t reply.

I held Heidi tight. I didn’t need to know. Not yet.

The brown-skinned girl had known that our daughter’s name was Amy and that she was the same age as her. Brad was a gang leader, that added up. For him to have hidden his face so he couldn’t be recognised, that was logical. But the fact that he was still not quite sharp enough to get away with it, that he’d been recognised after all, that was typical of Brad Lowe too.

It was him all right, Brad Lowe. Gone wrong. But lovesick.

So there was a faint hope at least.

V

‘So that’s nine minutes until the helicopter gets here!’ shouts the lieutenant. The halyard is slapping quicker, the wind has got up.

Colin signals to a man who then disappears into a penthouse apartment and re-emerges carrying a champagne cooler with the neck of a green bottle sticking up.

‘We might as well say goodbye in style,’ smiles Colin. ‘The decadents used to say après moi, le déluge, but in our case — since the deluge is already upon us — vintage champagne should be popped and drunk by those with the palates — and the throats — to appreciate it. Before their throats get cut.’

‘Well,’ I say as I accept a glass from the man holding the cooler, ‘I’m probably a little more optimistic than that, Colin.’

‘You always have been, Will. After all that’s happened I can only admire the fact that your faith in the human race remains intact. I wish I had even a fraction of your trust. And your heart. At least you’ve got that to keep you warm. But all I have is this cold, rational brain. It’s like living alone in an enormous stone castle in the dead of winter.’

‘Like your prison on Rat Island.’

‘Yes,’ says Colin. ‘And by the way, I’ve heard a new explanation of why there are so many rats there. In the 1800s before they built the prison, there was an isolation hospital there for people with typhoid fever. They knew that they were going to die, and no one in the city wanted anything to do with a corpse with typhoid fever, not even relatives. And the rats knew it too. After dark they sat would sit squeaking and hissing and chattering and waiting for the fresh corpses to be tossed out of the hospital’s back door. If someone died on that island the body would be consumed before sunrise. It was a satisfactory arrangement for all concerned.’

‘Do you believe that story? Or do you still think they fled there, the same way you did?’

Colin nods. ‘Typhoid from humans can’t infect rats but even rats can be infected by our fear. And frightened rats are aggressive, so we’re afraid of them and slaughter them indiscriminately. It’s not the virus that’s going to do for us, Will, but our fear of each other.’

I think of fear. The fear on the night Chaos came to our home. The fear I tried in vain to communicate on the night Heidi and I reported the case, and the following day, when we spoke to detectives at the police station.

The two investigators seated behind the desk no longer looked in my eyes nor in Heidi’s but instead down at the notebooks in front of them. I assumed the reason was the horrendous story we had just told them: that our daughter had been kidnapped and my wife raped while I sat tied up in the garage. Not until later did I realise it was because we had just told them we were convinced the gang leader was Brad Lowe, son of the IT entrepreneur Colin Lowe.

‘We’ll look into it,’ said the female investigator who had introduced herself as Chief Inspector Gardell. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’

‘Don’t hold your breath? How the hell do you expect us to breathe?’ I wasn’t aware I was shouting until I felt Heidi’s hand on my arm.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But our daughter is out there and we’re sitting here and... and...’

‘We understand,’ said Gardell. ‘I expressed myself badly. What I was trying to say was that it might take time. In the current situation the police simply don’t have the resources to investigate all crimes of violence.’

‘I realise you must have your priorities,’ said Heidi, ‘but this is a recent kidnapping, involving a young person, with a perpetrator who we’ve more or less handed to you on a plate. If anything should have priority...’

‘We promise to do the best we can,’ said Gardell, exchanging looks with her colleague. ‘We’re on our way out to the scene of a murder, but you’ll be hearing from us.’

They stood up, and so did I.

‘Aren’t you going to take fingerprints?’ I said. ‘DNA, talk to the neighbours...’

‘As I say...’ said Gardell.

For the remainder of the day I tried in vain to get in touch with Colin.

I also drove to the apartment his son had taken the keys to, only to establish the truth of what Colin had said: that all that remained of it was a burned-out shell.

I drove round the streets, almost hoping a gang would try to stop me, I’m not really sure why. But that didn’t happen; it looked as though all activity had come to a standstill. Like a truce had been declared.

I drove home and Heidi and I lay with Sam between us. Perhaps it was to give him the feeling of total security we had been unable to give Amy.

At daybreak Sam was sleeping deeply and I asked Heidi if she would tell me the rest of what had happened, the details that had not emerged in the concise description she had provided for the police.

‘No,’ was her brief answer.

I looked at her and wondered how she could remain so cool and calm. I knew psychological shock could manifest itself as apathy, but that was not what this was. It felt as though she had taken control of her own mind and body and forced herself to assume this chilly calm, the same way certain animals can lower their own body temperature.

‘I love you,’ I said.

She didn’t answer. And I understood. She had blocked out all emotions, chilled her heart to ice so that it wouldn’t run out of her and across the table and onto the floor. Because then she wouldn’t be any use to either of us. Out of love she now loved us a little less. That had to be the explanation.

‘I love you,’ he said.

She didn’t reply.

I watched them through the keyhole. Saw Brad lean towards the girl, Amy. She sat there on his bed with her head bowed. She was wearing a pair of comically large, checked golf trousers and a man’s shirt that Brad must have taken from the wardrobe of the people who lived here before; they hadn’t taken much with them when they left.

I looked around carefully, listened out for the others down in the kitchen; I didn’t want to be caught in the act of spying on our leader.

Then I put my eye back to the keyhole again.

She was so pretty, even with her hair hanging down and covering most of her face.

Was that why I was spying on them?

After the robbery we’d gone straight home. I rode behind Brad’s bike up one of those narrow, deep valleys that cut furrows through the hills at the northern end of town. Once — when this was coyote country — artists and hippies had lived here, people who couldn’t afford to live in the city centre. Now it was the other way around: the poor lived in the centre and the rich in big houses with views over the bay and the skyscrapers down there. But many things were going back the other way again. Several of the houses were empty, and we saw more coyotes and wild dogs trotting along the roads in search of something to eat.

Chaos’s new clubhouse was directly opposite a house where a gang had killed six people, including the wife of a wealthy film director. That was a long time ago. We moved here after the fire at Brad’s apartment in Downtown. It was a villa belonging to one of the partners in Brad’s father’s company and when the pandemic started Brad heard his father mention that this guy had moved to New Zealand and taken his family with him. It was apparently pretty common for rich doomsday preppers to buy houses down there, a place far enough away to shelter them from all the rest of the world’s miseries. Well, you can’t get lucky all the time every time and before the TV news channels closed down they were reporting that New Zealand was one of the countries hardest hit by the virus. Brad said that whether the owner was dead or not the big house was standing there so empty it was almost inviting us in.

The whole way here Brad had been holding the girl upright on his bike as we crawled through the curves. I had never seen him riding so carefully.

And now he was sitting there in the big bedroom and telling her he loved her.

Which was definitely a new and unknown side to the guy.

I was the only one with my own bedroom; the others shared the five other rooms. Before long the villa was on its way to becoming an uninhabitable pigsty and — to Ragnar’s great annoyance — I got Brad’s permission to arrange housekeeping duties for everyone.

‘Do you hear what I’m saying, Amy?’ Brad bent his head in order to catch her gaze. ‘I love you.’

Amy lifted her head. ‘I don’t love you, Brad. I don’t even like you, I never have done. Now will you take me home?’

‘I understand that you’re afraid, Amy, but—’

‘I’m not afraid,’ she interrupted firmly. ‘You’re the one that’s afraid, Brad.’

He gave a strained laugh. ‘What have I got to be afraid of? Are you a kickboxer maybe?’

‘Of what you’ve always been afraid of, little Brad. Your big daddy. You’re afraid he’s going to punish his snot-nosed little disappointment of a son.’

Brad’s face went white. ‘He’s nothing to worry about because he’s not here.’

‘Oh, but he is here. He’s always up there on your shoulder. When you say—’ she put her head on one side and imitated Brad’s sincere delivery — ‘ “I love you”, that’s your father you’re talking to.’

There was no way this could end well. But she just kept on:

‘But as you can hear, your father is saying he doesn’t lo—’

Brad hit out. Just with the flat of his hand, but with enough force to turn her head on that slender, fine neck of hers. She put a hand to her face. Blood was coming from one of her nostrils. I knew Brad, had seen him so many times once he’d lost control, and I was certain that from now on things could only get worse for Amy.

‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said quietly. ‘Take off your clothes.’

‘What?’ She sniffed in contempt. ‘Are you going to rape me?’

‘Understand one thing, Amy. I am the only one who can protect you from the world out there. And the world out there starts in the kitchen downstairs. If I’m not here to stop them, they’ll tear you to pieces. They’re a pack of wolves, that’s what we are.’

‘I’d rather have ten of them than you, Brad.’

He hit her again. This time with his fist. She tried to hit him back but he blocked her arm. He’s got quick reflexes, Brad. He’s strong and he keeps in shape. If he could only control his emotions then he’d be a good fighter.

He grabbed hold of her blouse and pulled and the buttons flew off and scattered across the parquet floor. Then he stood up and took off his trousers. Amy tried to jump down from the bed and run towards the door but Brad easily stopped her with one arm and pushed her back onto it.

‘For your sake I hope you’re not a virgin,’ said Brad as he sat on her chest so that his legs pinioned her arms.

‘I’m not,’ she said defiantly, though her voice was trembling now. ‘But you are. Since rapes don’t count, I mean. And you won’t manage it this time either...’

Her voice was cut off as Brad clutched her throat. With his other hand he pulled down the baggy trousers and her knickers. He must have relaxed his grip because she managed to splutter: ‘...because I am your father, you’re afraid of me too, just wait...’ before he began to choke her again.

He forced himself in between her thighs. I saw his naked buttocks tense and relax, but from the anxious swearing and the jerky movements I realised he wasn’t able to manage it. Either she’d jinxed his erection or else he just couldn’t handle the situation. Or else — and this struck me as a third possibility — he really did love the girl.

‘Shit!’ he yelled and jumped off the bed. Pulled up his trousers and buttoned them as he walked towards the wardrobe and took something from inside. It took me a moment to realise it was a golf club. He held it with both hands above his shoulder as he walked towards Amy.

I put my hand on the doorknob and turned it. Or did I? Maybe I didn’t have time, maybe the door was locked on the inside. Maybe I changed my mind. Because one way or the other, what could I have done about it? There was a dull thud, like the sound of a meat-hammer hitting a steak as the head of the club buried itself in her upper body. And a crackling, crunching sound — like when you’re frying an egg for breakfast — when the next blow hit her on the forehead. She collapsed silently across the bed.

Brad turned and walked straight towards me. I was just a few metres away down the corridor by the time the door opened, but I managed to turn to make it look as though I was walking towards his bedroom and not away from it by the time he burst out.

‘There you are!’ he said. ‘Get someone to help you carry her down into the basement. Use one of the rooms with thick walls and a decent lock.’

‘But...’

‘Now!’

He carried on past me and down the stairs.

VI

It was now three days since Amy had been kidnapped. Having tried in vain to get hold of Colin by phone, mail and through intermediaries I made my way down to the harbour. The sex clubs there were still open as though nothing had happened, or perhaps because they had. Finally I met in one of them a slightly drunk fisherman who was willing to take me out to Rat Island and asked a ridiculously high price for such a short trip. The stripper onstage gave me a dirty look as I walked off with a third of her audience.

As we neared the island a boat of the same type used by the coastguards approached us. On reflection it probably was a coastguard boat. A machine gun had been mounted on the foredeck. The boat came alongside us. I shouted across to a guy in uniform the purpose of my visit; he called it in on the radio and a couple of minutes later he waved us in. Colin was standing on the jetty smiling broadly as we lay to.

‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ he said as he embraced me.

‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.’

‘Oh, really? The signal out here is even more unreliable than it is in the city. Come on!’

He strode on ahead of me in the direction of the huge building in the centre of the island.

‘So?’ he said. ‘You and the family well?’

I swallowed. ‘No.’

‘No?’ He tried to adopt a quizzical look.

‘I’ll get to it,’ I said. ‘So this is your home now?’

‘Well, for the time being. Liza hates the place and thinks I should have bought some lovely big island instead of this barren lump of stone. She doesn’t understand that the overview is more important than the appearance right now.’

We stopped in front of the building. I put my head back and looked up at the tall, weather-worn concrete wall.

‘You feel safe in your home?’

‘Here, yes,’ said Colin, hitting with concrete with his fist. ‘These walls could’ve stopped the French Revolution. And my snipers can pick off anything that approaches, even at night.’

High above I saw the line of narrow, arrow-slit windows that commanded unbroken views in all directions. The sea glistened and glinted invitingly around us, as though this were just a normal day. But there wasn’t a sailing boat in sight. Just the thick smoke drifting across the surface of the water from the city fires. On the other hand, maybe the sea didn’t find this day any more special than one with happy yachts and surfers sailing about. Yep, just any old day with the human race wandering about the surface of planet Earth.

‘Let’s eat. I asked the kitchen to make some—’

‘No,’ I said, watching as a brown rat scampered across a sloping rock. ‘Let me tell you why I’m here. Brad attacked us in our house.’

‘What did you say?’

‘He took Amy.’

‘What?’ He tried to sound as if he was shocked.

‘And the police won’t — or can’t — do anything about it.’

‘When...?’

‘Three days ago.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? Right, problems with the net.’

Colin has many talents but acting isn’t one of them. He made a show of shaking his head as I told him about the nightmare night, in as much detail as Heidi had been willing to share with me. And after that he didn’t have to pretend to be horrified any more.

‘We told the same story to the police,’ I said. ‘But once they realised that the man we were talking about was Colin Lowe’s son they stopped taking notes.’ I took a deep breath. ‘It looks to me as though you already know all this, so I’m assuming they contacted you immediately afterwards.’

‘The police contacted me?’

‘Come on, Colin. I know you too well. And as your lawyer I know all about your connections in the police.’

Colin studied me for a few moments. And, as usual, his assessment was correct.

‘What you’ve got to understand, Will, is that you are my friend, but Brad is my son.’

‘I know that and you’re forgiven, but he has to let Amy go. And you must get them to arrest Brad.’

‘Hang on,’ said Colin. ‘There’s more. The police told me the only evidence they have that it was Brad is that in the course of the evening someone apparently mentioned his name. But that you yourselves did not recognise him. Not recognise a boy who practically grew up with you? Not recognise the body language, the eyes, the voice?’

‘What are you saying, Colin?’

‘I’m saying that when your daughter gets kidnapped you’re desperate. You look and you search until you find something, anything at all. And what you found was the sound of one of the most common names in the city, briefly and in passing. Because it gave you something to hang on to. But I know Brad. God knows he’s no angel, but he didn’t do this, Will.’

‘Then find him. Talk to him!’

‘No one knows where he is, no one has any contact with him. Listen, I’m as worried about Brad as you are for—’

‘Then let the police send out an alert for him,’ I interrupted before he could finish the meaningless sentence.

‘But there’s no proof, not even a suspicion. And they’re the ones saying it, not me. None of us can force them to use resources on a case they don’t believe exists.’

‘Yes, you can!’

‘I can’t, my dear Will. Not even if I wanted to.’

‘Yes. But you don’t want to. You’re afraid Brad’s guilty.’

‘He isn’t guilty.’

‘Then you’re afraid he’ll be found guilty.’

‘Maybe that has something to do with it, yes.’

I punched the concrete wall in despair. ‘The courts are still up and running, Colin. And on my life I swear Brad will get a fair trial. Yes, even if he’s killed her. You hear me?’

‘And I swear on my life that my son is neither a kidnapper nor a murderer, Will. On my life. You hear me?’

I looked out over the sea again. The silent sea that witnessed fates such as ours being played out each second of each day. And twinkled and sparkled just the same.

‘Yes, I hear you,’ I said. ‘You swear on your life.’

Another rat scampered across the wet, sloping rock, the sun catching on its long tail.

Then — without a word or a gesture of farewell — I walked down to the jetty and the boat that waited for me.

That night I drove through the city streets again, looking for Amy or someone who could tell me something. The following day I was back at the police station in Downtown asking for news, asking them to investigate, trying to persuade them that Brad Lowe was behind it. And again all I met was closed doors and deaf ears, and I was finally asked to leave the station.

As I walked across the large car park outside the shopping mall I saw someone leaned up against my car. It was Chief Inspector Gardell.

‘How’s the search going?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘Want a tip you didn’t get from me?’

I looked at her. Nodded.

She took a sheet of paper out of a folder and handed it to me.

I studied it. An address, with a name I recognised.

‘This was one of Lowe’s partners,’ I said. ‘You think Amy might be there?’

Gardell shrugged. ‘We’ve had complaints from the neighbours. Drugs, gunshots and partying late into the night. Seems like Brad Lowe and his gang have moved in there.’

‘But you haven’t done anything?’

‘Complaints about noise aren’t a top priority for us right now.’

‘But gunfire and illegal occupation, aren’t those pretty serious?’

‘We’ve had no complaints from the owner. And for all we know the people living in his house have a firearms licence.

I nodded. ‘I’ll get up there and check it.’

‘Not sure I would do that,’ said Gardell.

‘No?’

‘With so many weapons around it’s not advisable just to turn up and ring on the doorbell. At least not alone.’

I looked at her. ‘But you won’t help me.’

Gardell took off her sunglasses and squinted with one eye in the sunlight.

‘You’re not the only one saying that these past few months.’

‘I’m not?’

‘No.’ She handed me the folder. I opened it and flipped through the documents. They were reports. Armed robbery. Causing bodily harm. Grievous bodily harm. Rape. Twenty, maybe thirty of them.

‘And what is the connection?’

‘Brad Lowe and his gang,’ said Gardell. ‘This is just a selection, but I think it might interest you.’

I looked at her again. ‘I think I know what you’re risking by doing this, Chief Inspector. So why are you doing it?’

She sighed. Put the sunglasses on again. ‘Why do we do anything at all in this fucked-up world?’

Then she left.

In the course of that afternoon I spoke to most of those who had signed the complaints in the folder.

The ones I contacted first were those who had been raped. On the assumption that they, or their fathers or brothers, would be most highly motivated and easiest to persuade. But presently I realised that what Gardell had given me was already some kind of shortlist of names of people who not only had good reasons to want revenge but were physically and mentally capable of getting it. At least if they weren’t acting alone.

‘You mean vigilantes?’ said one of those I spoke to.

I savoured the word. It represented everything I was against. At least, in a society in which there was an already functioning judicial system it did. But in the absence of such a thing then it wasn’t vigilante activity as such but the best alternative means of getting justice. That was the way to look at it: not as breaking the law but as a kind of emergency supplement to the law.

I tried to explain this to the person involved, but the legal terms I used might have made it difficult to follow my reasoning.

‘Sounds like vigilantes to me,’ he said. ‘I’m in.’

By that evening I was able to tell Heidi that I had the backing of fifteen grown men. And that one of them had undertaken to provide us with weapons.

I had expected her to be pleased — or at least to snap out of that darkly apathetic mood she’d sunk into since the attack — but instead she just stared at me as though I were a stranger.

‘Find Amy,’ was all she said, and closed the door to our bedroom.

I slept in the living room and heard an animal howling and howling out there in the night, and the dull thuds of exploding grenades that might have been a block away or ten blocks away, it was impossible to tell. I don’t know what kind of animal it was, but it sounded big. I’d heard about the fire in the zoological gardens the previous night and how they had had to release the animals to save them. Good idea, I thought. But if that particular animal was edible... I didn’t have time to complete the thought before I heard a shot and the howling came to an abrupt halt.

‘What you see here represents my most fundamental rights,’ said the bald-headed man as he gestured with his hand towards something that reminded me more than anything else of a collection of insects mounted on pins, only magnified and more grotesque. The wall was covered with handguns. Pistols, rifles, automatic weapons, machine pistols, even a large machine gun mounted on a tripod that looked like someone kneeling.

‘The freedom to defend myself.’

The bald-headed man gave us a pleased smile. He wanted to remain anonymous and had asked us just to call him Fatman. Of the fifteen who had signed up two days earlier three had pulled out. It wasn’t surprising. Initial enthusiasm at the chance for revenge had given way to more rational considerations: other than a short-lived emotional satisfaction, how would it benefit me personally? And what was I risking? When the courts punish criminals the overwhelming power they have access to means they risk little; but what about us? What happens when revenge is taken for revenge?

‘They knew we had weapons, that was why they came,’ said Fatman. ‘But they didn’t find this secret room, so all they got were the Kalashnikovs and the hand grenades. Help yourselves, gentlemen.’

‘What did they do to you and yours?’ asked Larsen — an African American music teacher wearing a freshly pressed blue shirt — as Fatman showed him how to load, prime and change the magazine on the weapon he had chosen.

‘I just told you,’ said Fatman.

‘They... er, stole some rifles?’

‘And my hand grenades.’

‘Grenades. And that was enough to leave you wanting revenge?’

‘Who said anything about revenge? I just want to shoot some bad guys, and now I’ve got a bloody good reason, right?’

‘Nice one,’ said Larsen quietly.

Fatman flushed. ‘How about you?’ he snorted. ‘They take your Volvo?’

I cursed inwardly and closed my eyes. I needed these men to work together, not this. I’d read the reports carefully and knew what was coming.

‘They killed my wife,’ said Larsen.

It went very quiet in this damp basement room. When I opened my eyes again I saw everyone had their gaze fixed on the man in the blue shirt and suit trousers. In the report, Larsen had written that he and his wife were standing on the pavement outside a secret food depot with the food they’d bought. They’d gone there with eight adult relatives; it was the usual thing to move around in packs, it was reckoned to be safer. A motorcycle gang had come at them and the men pulled out the few weapons they had — knives and an old rifle. But the bikes had passed them without slowing down. They thought the danger was over until the last rider tossed out a chain with a hook on it that embedded itself in Larsen’s wife’s thigh and dragged her off down the street, and while the men rushed to her assistance the gang stopped and picked up their bags of food.

‘An artery in her thigh was punctured,’ said Larsen. ‘She bled to death in the street while those bandits picked up the hams and the tins.’

The only sounds that could be heard were Larsen’s hoarse breathing and swallowing.

‘And they had...?’ said a cautious voice.

‘Yes,’ said Larsen, who had regained control of his voice. ‘They were wearing helmets with dead Justitia.’

The men in the room nodded.

One of them coughed.

‘Tell me, that machine gun... does it work?’

Two days later we were ready.

We’d had shooting practice at a rifle range under the direction of Pete Downing, a former Marine who had been involved in house-to-house fighting in Basra in Iraq. Him, me and Chung, a construction engineer, had gone over the drawings of the place Chung had obtained through a contact in the Planning and Building Services Department. Downing had drafted a plan of attack that he went through with us in a room we had rented in the basement of the rifle range. He pointed out that there could be several kidnap victims in the house, playing down in this way the fact that the focus of the action was primarily on Amy and me. The funny thing was that once he was done he turned and spoke to me.

‘Well, Will Adams, think that sounds OK?’

I nodded.

‘Thank you,’ said Downing as he rolled up the large sheets of paper he had drawn on.

I stood up. ‘Then we meet here at midnight,’ I said. ‘Remember, dark clothing.’

The men stood up and filed out. Several of them nodded as they passed me, from which I realised that they regarded me as the leader of the operation. Was that just because I had taken the initiative? Or was something more involved? Was it because of the way I had described not just the practical side of our intended operation but also its moral and socially responsible dimensions? Had my simple remarks about justice not being something you get but something you take given them a thirst for battle they hadn’t been able to feel when they were alone, but that they realised they had been missing now that they had been given a morally acceptable motivation? Maybe. Because maybe they had noticed that I meant every word of what I was saying. That it is everyone’s responsibility to cut the head of the Leviathan, the sea monster, before it grows so big it devours us all.

But I don’t think that was on anyone’s mind as our column of three cars crawled up the narrow, twisting road heading towards the villa on the hill. I sat squashed between two others in the back seat and thought only of what I was to do, my own practical role in the planned operation. And that I didn’t want to die. The smell I recognised through the sweat from the others in the car was probably the same as I was giving off myself. Fear.

VII

I awaken to the sounds of shots, people shouting, running footsteps along the corridor.

My first thought was that it was just another party that had got out of hand, that someone had started a fight, probably with Ragnar.

I heard someone try the door of my room. It was locked, the way it always is. It’s not from the fear that someone will come in and rape me. In the first place I know I could take them, and in the second place Brad would chop their head off, and in the third place, you become sort of demagnetised as a sex object for guys when they realise you’re into the same thing as they are: girls. But I also know that the way the drug-taking has, to put it mildly, escalated these days it’s just a question of time before someone tries it. And that will mean so much trouble for them that there’s no reason not to lock the door. But from my point of view they’re the ones who are locked in, not me.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and grabbed the Kalashnikov lying underneath it. Because the voices out in the corridor didn’t belong to any of the boys, and now I heard two loud bangs from shock grenades. Oscar was on watch tonight; what the hell was going on? Had he fallen asleep on the job?

No one trying the doorknob any more — have they moved on? Just then I heard the dull thud of a shot from the other side of the door and the whiplash as the bullet passed my head and hit the wall.

I raised the gun, pushed the security catch into automatic and fired. Even in the half-dark I could see how the salvo perforated the door and the white splinters of wood flaring. Outside, someone fell heavily and began to scream. I pulled on my shoes, trousers and jacket and crossed to the window. Down on the lawn Oscar was lying splayed out on his back in an X-shape, the Kalashnikov beside him, as though he was sunbathing in the moonlight. I made a quick calculation. I didn’t know how many of them there were, but they’d taken out Oscar before he had a chance to raise the alarm, and they had shock grenades. So not just a bunch of amateurs. And who were we? A gang of doped-up kids who knew how to attack but hadn’t had any practice in how to defend. If I didn’t take a decision quickly it was going to be taken for me.

I had the bike key in my pocket.

Shit, I even had a place to go: Maria had asked me to move in with her on a permanent basis. And hadn’t I even considered it, independently of this? OK, Chaos had saved me once, but wasn’t it true that we had all saved each other? That it was the pack, the twelve of us together, that protected us? And not loyalty, or some code of honour. Fuck that. Had anyone here ever sacrificed anything for me? No way.

I got the window open and climbed out, hung from the ledge by my arms and then let go. The roses in the bed below were dead and gone long ago, but not the bramble bushes that had replaced them, big and ugly. It was like rolling around in barbed wire.

I took a deep breath, pulled the pin on the shock grenade and nodded to Downing. He nodded back, turned the handle on the door I had pointed out on the plans as the master bedroom, and pushed it slightly open.

I did as he had shown me, bent low and rolled the grenade along the parquet flooring so that it made as little sound as possible. Downing closed the door again and counted to four.

Even through the closed door the sound was deafening and a flash of light blitzed out through the keyhole.

Downing kicked the door open and we went in, positioning ourselves on each side of the doorway as he had shown us.

My pulse was racing as the beam of my torch searched the room for Amy. It flashed across the window, and on the lawn outside I saw a figure running towards a parked motorcycle. I moved the beam on until it caught something that at first I thought was a sculpture. A boy with pale white skin sat bolt upright in bed, staring as though paralysed. That’s the effect the shock grenade has, Downing had explained.

It was Brad.

Downing yelled at him to put his hands up, but Brad was probably still deaf from the bang and he just stared at us in bewilderment. Downing hit him across the face with the butt of his gun, and a slimy blob of blood and spittle flew through the cone of light.

I pushed Brad backwards onto the bed and sat on top of him. He didn’t struggle.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Will. Where is Amy?’

He blinked up at me.

I repeated the question, at the same time pressing the barrel of the pistol I had chosen against his forehead.

‘We know it was you,’ I said. ‘Your sentry’s dead. You want to be next, Brad?’

‘She...’ he began.

It took him two long seconds, time enough for me to start shaking like a leaf on a tree, before he was able to continue:

‘She isn’t here. We let her go as soon as we left Downtown. Didn’t she turn up?’

I don’t know whether it was because he had inherited his father’s repertoire of facial expressions, but I knew he was lying.

I hit him with my gun. And again. Apparently. Because by the time Downing stopped me and I was in control of myself again Brad’s face was a grotesque bloody mask beneath me.

‘She’s dead,’ I said.

‘You don’t know that.’

I closed my eyes. ‘He wouldn’t have lied if she wasn’t dead.’

I climbed on my motorcycle that was standing beneath the large garage overhang. From where I sat I could see across the lawn and into Brad’s room and the dancing light beam of a torch.

They’d got him.

I was about to start the engine. I would have been out of there in seconds flat, but a thought stopped me. The thought of leaving Dumbo, just abandoning him. I glanced at the room he shared with Herbert, the only Black guy in the gang. The light was on inside. Maybe they hadn’t reached them yet. I climbed back off the bike and sprinted across the lawn and over to their window. Stretched up on tiptoes and peered in. Dumbo was sitting on the bed in his underpants and T-shirt, feet dangling as he stared at the door. Herbert was nowhere in sight. I tapped on the glass and Dumbo jumped, but when he saw my face pressed against the windowpane he smiled.

He opened the window. ‘Herbert went out to see what’s going on,’ he said. ‘Do you know—’

‘Put your shoes on!’ I whispered. ‘We’re getting out of here!’

‘But—’

‘Now!’

Dumbo disappeared.

I saw him fiddling with his shoelaces as I counted the seconds. I should have got him shoes with Velcro.

‘Freeze,’ I heard a voice say right behind me.

I turned round. A bald-headed man holding a rifle with telescopic sights was standing there. I continued to turn.

‘Didn’t you hear—’ he began to say, then dropped the rifle and stopped speaking and breathing after my kick hit him between the legs. I saw him collapse to the ground, then turned back to the window. Dumbo was standing on the ledge.

‘Jump!’ I said.

I took his fall, but he was so heavy we both tumbled over onto the grass. Then we were on our feet and he was running after me towards the bikes.

I’d heard Fatman’s voice outside the window and looked out.

A long-legged girl and a small, bow-legged boy were running across the lawn. It was them. I was certain of it. Everything about them — faces, bodies, their way of moving — was etched fast in my memory from when I sat tied up in the garage. They reached the motorcycles and the girl sat on one of them while the boy climbed up behind her. She fiddled about in her pockets looking for something, keys probably. I saw a red dot dancing on the white T-shirt under her jacket.

Laser.

I opened the window. Fatman was lying on the lawn below, the butt of the rifle to his cheek.

‘Don’t shoot!’ I shouted. ‘We’re not killers.’

‘Shut up,’ he grunted without looking up.

‘That’s an order!’

‘Sorry, but this is my bad guy.’

‘If you shoot, so will I,’ I said. Quietly. That was probably why he stopped and looked up. Saw the pistol pointing at him. Stared as we heard the roar of the motorbike rise, fall and then disappear as it went through the gate and headed down towards the valley.

I lowered the pistol. I don’t know why, but a small part of me had wanted him to shoot them. Because then I could have shot him.

‘The helicopter will be here in four minutes!’ shouts the lieutenant. ‘Everyone who’s boarding, get ready now!’

I only half hear him. Because standing here on the roof of the skyscraper and waiting to say goodbye I’m thinking now about something else: that I had wanted to shoot someone. That I had wanted circumstances to give me an excuse to become a person I don’t believe myself to be. That perhaps I no longer know who I am. I look at the lucky ones, standing there listening out for the helicopter. I look for signs of guilty conscience among them. I don’t see any.

We were all gathered in the living room as Downing and Larsen cleared the rest of the house.

We had one man badly wounded, they had one dead — the sentry — and four wounded.

‘We’ve got to get him to hospital,’ said Chung, meaning the man who had been wounded by the shots through the door.

‘No way. That was the agreement,’ said Fatman, who seemed to be suffering discomfort in his groin.

‘But—’ said Chung.

‘Forget it. We don’t want the police breathing down our necks,’ said Fatman with finality.

‘Drive him to hospital,’ I said.

Fatman turned towards me, his face flushed with anger. ‘Says you, yeah, who let one of the bastards escape.’

‘There was no reason to kill her, she was running away.’

‘We’re here to exact punishment, Adams. You’re just here to find your daughter, and you’re using us to help you do it. Fair enough, but don’t go playing the Good Samaritan at our expense. Try telling Simon here that that girl didn’t deserve a bullet.’

I looked at Simon. A chubby, softly spoken chef with kind eyes and an infectious laugh. Yes, we’d had laughs together too. Simon and his family had been visited by a gang with dead Justitia on their helmets. They’d launched grenades from a bazooka and within seconds the house had turned into a blazing inferno. His wife and son were still in hospital, so badly burned no one could tell him whether or not they would survive.

‘What d’you think, Simon?’ I said. ‘Should I have let him kill her?’

Simon looked at me for a long time. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.

‘Will you help Chung get Ruben to the hospital?’ I asked.

He nodded.

Downing and Larsen came in.

‘Find anything?’ asked Fatman.

They didn’t answer. They couldn’t look me in the eye, and whatever slender hope I might still have been clinging to vanished.

Amy was in the basement, lying on a filthy mattress in a locked room. Not to stop her running away, but to hide the body. I stared at her. My heart was switched off. My brain simply registered what I saw. Unless something else had killed her first, the cause of death was obvious. Her forehead had been smashed in.

I went down the basement corridor where Larsen and Downing stood waiting.

‘We’ll interrogate them,’ I said, nodding up at the ceiling and the next floor above where the gang members were, sitting on the floor of the room, their hands strip-tied.

‘You don’t think first we should—’ Larsen began to say.

‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘Let’s get started.’

The question of guilt was soon established. We used an old trick, simple but effective. In my professional capacity as a lawyer I had often criticised the police for using it.

We placed the gang members in separate rooms, left them there for a while before two of us went in and pretended we had already spoken to the others. I did the talking, and my opening was the same every time:

‘I’m not saying who, but one of your gang has just identified you as the person who killed my daughter Amy. I’m sure you can guess who that is. I will shoot you, personally and with great pleasure, unless you can persuade me within the next five minutes that it was someone else.’

The bluff is so obvious that some of them will see through it immediately. But they can never be completely certain. And they definitely can’t be certain that the others will see through it too. So the maths goes like this: why should I keep quiet and take the chance of this being a bluff when someone else is bound to snitch anyway?

After four interrogations two had identified Brad. After six we knew it had happened with a golf club in the bedroom. I went to one of the two offices where Brad was sitting and confronted him with what we had found out.

He leaned back in the leather chair, hands behind his back in the plastic cable ties, and yawned. ‘Well then, I guess you’d better shoot me.’

I swallowed and waited. And waited. Then came the tears. Not mine, his. They dripped down on the aged grey teak of the desk. I saw them soak into the wood.

‘I didn’t mean it, Mr Adams,’ he snuffled. ‘I loved Amy. Always have done. But she...’ He took a deep, quivering breath. ‘She despised me, she didn’t think I was good enough for her.’ He gave a quick laugh. ‘Me, son and heir of the second-richest man in the city. What do you think of that?’

I said nothing. He raised his gaze and looked at me.

‘She said she hated me, Mr Adams. And you know what, that’s one feeling we do share. I hated me too.’

‘Is this your idea of a confession, Brad?’

He looked at me. Nodded. I looked at Larsen who nodded briefly to indicate that he’d seen it the same way as me. We stood up and went outside to where Downing was waiting.

‘Confession,’ I said.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Larsen.

I took a deep breath. ‘Put him in jail.’

‘Jail?’ snorted Downing. ‘He’s gotta hang!’

‘Have you thought this through, Will?’ asked Larsen. ‘You know as well as I do that if you hand him over to the police he’ll be out on the street again by tomorrow morning.’

‘Yes, but I’m going to imprison him in his own jail.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Lock him up in the same place where he locked up Amy. He can sit there in custody until I’ve prepared the case and had him convicted.’

‘You’re going to... put Colin Lowe’s son in front of a judge and jury?’

‘Of course. Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the law. That’s the foundation our nation is built on.’

‘There I am afraid to say you are mistaken, Adams,’ said Downing.

‘Oh?’

‘Our nation is built on the principle that might is right. That’s the way it is now, and that’s the way it always has been. The rest is just playing to the gallery.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘Maybe it’s possible for might to be really in the right for once.’

Just then we heard shouting. It was coming from behind the house.

We ran outside in time to see that we were too late.

‘The Black guy confessed,’ said Fatman. He was holding a flaming torch in his hand and the light made the sweat on his forehead glisten. Like us he was staring in the direction of the tall oak tree. The rest of the men stood around us, all of them silent now.

A boy was dangling from the lowest of the branches. There was a noose around his neck. He was tall, thin, maybe sixteen years old and he wearing a T-shirt with ‘Chaos’ written on it.

‘Herbert,’ a hoarse voice shouted from a window in the house. I turned but saw no one.

‘We’ve got a confession,’ I said. ‘You’ve hanged the wrong person.’

‘Not that confession,’ said Fatman. ‘He confessed to starting that fire. And it wasn’t me that hung that guy, it was him.’

He pointed to a man standing directly beneath the hanged boy. Simon, the cook. His hands were pressed together as he looked up at the corpse and he was muttering something. A prayer, maybe. For his family. For the dead. For himself. For all of us.

As a group we had never discussed what we were going to do with the members of Chaos. All our attention had been focused on freeing Amy, and it was pretty obvious that the gang members couldn’t expect any mercy if they tried to resist. They would get hurt or be killed. For most of us that would probably be revenge enough. But we hadn’t talked about what to do if they surrendered, as they had done now.

Essentially there were only three options. Execute them. Maim them. Or let them go.

Fatman was the only one to vote for execution.

A few thought that some kind of amputation, such as severing the right hand, was in order, but there were no volunteers to perform the amputations. I suspect that the thought of nine mutilated but still fully functional young men wandering about the city with revenge on their minds was not particularly attractive.

Downing’s suggestion that they be lashed with a rope seemed to have the most support. It would probably be seen as some kind of let-off and not a motivation for revenge at a later date.

I argued that we shouldn’t hand out any punishment at all unless we could give the ‘accused’ a fair trial. That, I said, was what distinguished us from them. In rejecting revenge we would not only be true to the principles of justice our forefathers had built this land on, we would also be providing a good example for these young people, showing them that it was possible to behave in a civilised fashion in the midst of these chaotic times, that there was a way back to decency. I promised I would personally make sure that, as far as possible, Brad Lowe would be treated in accordance with our most fundamental principles of justice.

I don’t know whether it was my words that convinced them. Whether it was the fact that Larsen — the only one of us besides me with a close relative murdered — offered a few short words in support of me. Or whether it was the wind that had made the young Black man in the tree swing back and forth, and the branches to give off a moaning sound that constantly turned our attention in his direction.

Without further discussion we released all of them except Brad.

‘We’re gonna regret this,’ said Fatman as we watched the rear lights of the motorbikes disappear into the deepening darkness of the city night.

VIII

Amy was buried after a ceremony in a church in Downtown. It was sparsely furnished and austerely equipped, yet everything seemed strangely untouched, as though God’s house was still holy even to the looters. We didn’t advertise the service or invite anyone, and besides Heidi, Sam and me the only others present were Downing, Larsen and Chung.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to persuade Heidi to move to Colin’s hillside villa along with Chung, Larsen and Downing’s families. I reminded her how easy it had been for Chaos to enter our house, that the same thing not only could but would happen again. And that there was safety in numbers. Heidi said we couldn’t, it was someone else’s house, someone else’s property, even if it was standing empty at the moment. I said that while I had the greatest respect for property rights, at the moment those rights were taking a short break. And we needed somewhere to hold Brad in private custody until the court case against him started.

The following day we moved the few things we needed up the hill and started work on turning the place into a fortress.

The attorney general’s large white office building in Downtown had just the right balance of the architectonic pathos that encourages respect, and the dull pedantry that does not provoke when the taxpayer is the one funding it.

Adele Matheson, the attorney general, had the kind of office that’s used for working in, not for giving off signals about authority and status to visitors and colleagues. A simple writing desk piled high with documents, a slightly out-of-date computer with cables in all directions, shelves of legal literature and a window that offered light but not a distracting view. And absolutely no family photos that might remind her of things more important in life than work and urge her to stop working and get on home.

Matheson sat in a high-backed leather chair behind the piles of documents and peered at me over the top of her glasses. Though she didn’t have the high profile of some of her colleagues the respect she enjoyed from her peers was all the greater. If she was known at all it was for her integrity and her tenacity in hunting down the powerful and those with an aversion to finding themselves exposed in the media. A journalist once wrote that any interview or press conference involving Matheson was confined to a repertoire of four responses: ‘Yes’, ‘No’, the slightly longer ‘We don’t know that’, and the really long ‘We can’t comment on that’.

‘You are a lawyer, Mr Adams,’ she said when she had listened to me. ‘If you believe you have proof that this person killed your daughter, why come here, why not take the case to the police?’

‘Because I no longer trust the police.’

‘We’re living in strange times, no doubt about that. And yet you seem to trust the public prosecutor’s office?’

‘Going through the attorney general means at least one step less in the process before the case gets to court.’

‘You’re worried about corruption. Is that it?’

‘The boy’s father is Colin Lowe.’

‘The Colin Lowe?’

‘Yes.’

She rested a finger on her upper lip then made a note. ‘Do you know where the boy is now?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that is?’

‘If I told you he was being held in private custody you would have to prosecute me and that would put the case against the boy in jeopardy, don’t you think?’

‘Private detention is of course a serious matter and if the confession came as a result of it then the court can simply throw the case out.’

‘Fruits of a poisoned tree.’

‘Yes, you are of course familiar with the legal principles involved. But if things are as you say, and you have witnesses who can confirm that there was a confession and that it was not coerced, then we have a stronger case.’

I noted that she was now saying ‘we’ instead of ‘you’. Was that because of the name Colin Lowe?

‘You will also need to get hold of at least one of the gang members who identified Brad as the killer,’ she said.

‘That could be difficult. But several of us heard them say that it was Brad.’

‘That is indirect information and as a lawyer you are aware that would not be sufficient in a court of law. If I’m going to bring this to court I need to feel at least as sure of getting a conviction as the jury does if they’re going to reach a verdict of guilty beyond reasonable doubt.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll find one of them who identified Brad.’

‘Good.’ Adele Matheson clapped her hands together. ‘I’ll get going, so let’s stay in touch. This might be a good opportunity to show the world that the rule of law has not broken down completely.’

‘I hope so too,’ I said, looking at the only picture in the room. It was small and hung slightly sideways. It showed Justitia. Blind, impartial. With no bullet-hole in her forehead.

From the attorney general’s office I made my way to the police station in Downtown where I asked to see Chief Inspector Gardell. She accompanied me out to the car park by the shopping mall where I told her I could get Brad Lowe in front of a jury if I could get hold of one of the gang members who had identified him as the killer.

‘You had the bastard but you’re going to give him his day in court?’ she asked, with the same sense of astonishment an atheist might use when asking a Christian if they really believed that business about walking on water.

‘I need to find one of the gang,’ I said. ‘Can you help me?’

She shook her head. I thought it was a no until she said: ‘I can certainly keep my ears and eyes open, but don’t—’ and I knew what was coming next — ‘hold your breath.’

I thanked her, and as I walked away it was with a feeling that she was watching me and still shaking her head.

Chung, the structural engineer, was in charge of making the villa impregnable.

The wall surrounding the property was raised, the two gates reinforced, and everything between the house and the wall that could be used as cover or shelter was removed. The windows were fitted with bulletproof metal plates with gun slits, and the walls, doors and roof reinforced to resist grenades. Mines and booby traps with motion sensors were sown across the outer approaches. A control room was established in the basement from where the property could be kept under surveillance, with facilities to operate remotely controlled machine guns and grenade throwers mounted up on the first floor. We also had two drones with cameras that could be remotely controlled from the basement, or the War Room as Downing insisted on calling it.

In essence: anyone wanting to capture the villa would need artillery and bombs.

And if, in spite of all, someone managed to get inside the place, Downing had night-vision goggles. He said that he and his brother soldiers had made an ally of the nights in Iraq by cutting the power before starting the nightly hunt for terrorists in the hostile neighbourhoods of Basra. Once our families had gone to bed and all the lights were off Larsen, Chung and I practised working with these, but in truth the trials just left me feeling giddy and nauseous. And once, when Chung turned on the light without any warning, it was like staring straight into the sun and I was left half blind for several hours afterwards.

Chung also suggested we dig a tunnel in case we needed to retreat. I thought about it for a long time before saying it would cost too much. I was lying.

Through former colleagues in the Marines Downing had heard about an ammunition depot where we could barter weapons for food and medicine, and this we did. Larsen and I stored the ammunition in an unused washroom with thick stone walls in the basement. When Chung joined us he showed us the hole in the wall where the private sewage pipe he had made ran. If we were under siege and had our water and sewage disposal cut off then we now had a sewage pipe that opened onto a steep, overgrown slope below the property, as well as a water pipe Chung had attached to the mains supply further down the valley. In the unlikely event the besieging force should come across the sewage pipe and identify it as leading to our house there was of course the possibility they could fire a grenade up through it and into the house, but according to Chung it wouldn’t do much damage — the walls of the room were just too thick. Unless, of course, high explosives were being stored in there.

He said it in his usual dry, practical way, with no facial expression to indicate whether he was being ironic or humorous. And that’s why we laughed, Larsen and I, as Chung looked at us with his sorrowful gaze, which made us laugh all the more.

We decided to move the ammunition to the laundry that was being used as Brad’s cell. I had put him there because that was where they had kept Amy’s body. I was probably hoping it would serve as a constant reminder to him of what he had done, and would torment his conscience.

When we were finished I stood in the doorway of Brad’s new cell where he lay on the mattress reading one of the books I had put in there with him. He was already thin and pale after the short time he had been held in custody, despite the fact that we fed him well and walked him in the garden every day.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, pointing to the hole in the wall beside his head.

‘It’s for the sewage,’ I said.

‘You mean like me?’ He put down the book, bunched his fist and put his arm in all the way up to his shoulder.

‘People aren’t sewage,’ I said.

‘If I slim down enough to wriggle out through it, where would I end up?’

‘The slope below the Polanskis’ house,’ I said. I don’t know why I told him that. Or did I actually know, even then? I picked up a plastic tie that had slipped down off one of the boxes of ammunition. Gathered it up and shoved it in my pocket.

Brad smirked. ‘So I won’t hang myself with it?’

I didn’t answer.

He leaned on his elbow. ‘Why can’t you just execute me and get it over with?’

It was strange. Even though he was lying down and I was standing, he was the one locked up and in my power, it was as though he looked down on me, not the other way round.

‘Because we aren’t like you,’ I said. And I met his gaze.

‘You soon will be. If you want to live, I mean.’

‘What I hope,’ I said, ‘is that you’ll become like us. Or better than us.’

‘How is that going to matter if I’m locked up for the rest of my life?’

‘There’s no guarantee that you will never again have to make a choice which has consequences for your fellow human beings, Brad.’

‘Well then, give me the chance. Let me go. I promise you, my dad will pay whatever you ask. Make that whatever I ask!’

I shook my head. ‘This is about something bigger than you, Brad.’

‘Come on! What could be bigger than my dad’s fucking money?’

‘Choosing what’s good instead of what’s evil. That’s bigger.’

Brad laughed and shoved the book so that it came skidding across the stone floor towards me. ‘Like it says in here. Liberal left-wing piss if you ask me.’

I looked down at the book. Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law. Liberal left-wing piss? That meant at least he must have read it to form an opinion on it. Maybe it was true, what I was hoping: that all of us, including me, had underestimated Brad’s intellectual capacity?

‘You’re telling me you don’t want revenge?’ he asked. ‘Then you’re lying!’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But anyway, executing you wouldn’t be a good enough revenge. Because yes, I want you to feel remorse. I want you to feel the same pain as I do at losing someone you love above all others. And yes, I want you to experience the same feelings of guilt as I do at having failed to protect your family well enough. I’m not above that, not as a human being. But we humans have the unique ability to renounce a short-term satisfaction in favour of something that has a higher goal.’

‘Now you’re talking like that book.’

‘Read it,’ I said. ‘Then let’s talk some more.’

I went out, locking the door behind me.

I entered the bedroom where she and Sam were playing with two Transformer figures Sam had got for Christmas from ‘Uncle Colin’, as it said on the gift label. Heidi and I had seen from Sam’s reaction when he unwrapped them that it would break his little heart if we took them away from him and exchanged them for toys that didn’t glorify violence in the same way.

‘I gather you’re having fun,’ Heidi observed.

There was an edge to her voice and I realised she’d heard Larsen and me laughing.

‘Well, I’m trying to anyway,’ I said, hearing the same hard edge in my own voice.

‘Have you talked to him?’ she asked.

‘Him’ was Brad. She would no longer say his name.

‘I checked on him,’ I lied. As if laughing out loud wasn’t bad enough, was I also supposed to tell her I had just had a meaningful conversation with our daughter’s killer? Yes, I had said we had an obligation to get over Amy’s death and try to look forward, for our sake and for Sam’s sake. But in Heidi’s view, sensitive people allowed grief to run its course; grief was the recoil after love, and if I didn’t feel it then I had never loved Amy as deeply as I claimed. Her words had wounded me, of course they had. And she had seen it, and apologised. Everyone grieves in a different way, I had said, and maybe Heidi’s was the better way, maybe she was dealing with something I was postponing. Even though I could see she didn’t believe I meant what I was saying, I knew that she liked the way I was trying to compromise with her.

‘Dad, look!’ said Sam, running over and jumping into my lap. He held the Transformer figure up in front of my face and growled, ‘I am Devastator! I can change!’

He twisted parts of the figure and a fork-like weapon appeared, before suddenly appearing to lose interest in the toy and looking me right in the eye: ‘Can you change, Dad?’

I laughed and ruffled his hair. ‘Of course I can.’

‘Let’s see then.’

I pulled a face, one that usually made him laugh. Now he just looked at me. He seemed strangely disappointed. Then he put his arms around me and buried his face in my neck. I looked up and Heidi gave me a tired smile.

‘I think he thinks it’s OK if dads don’t change,’ she said.

We kept strictly within the bounds of the property and tried not to get on each other’s nerves too much. Even with four families there was more room than we had had in Downtown, but all the same it somehow felt more cramped. After the kidnapping Heidi felt she had to keep Sam close to her at all times. She wouldn’t even let him play with the other kids in the large garden unless she was there with them. I tried to persuade her that we were safer here than anywhere else in the world right at that moment, but it didn’t help.

‘We will be attacked,’ she’d said one day as we sat in the garden watching Sam playing with the two Larsen children. The mines and the booby traps had been deactivated and they were able to run around the garden in complete safety. It was a relief to hear their carefree laughter and know they really were enjoying the atmosphere of safety and security we were so desperately trying to encourage. Heidi had been raped but she still wouldn’t talk about it. When I asked why and said it might be good for her to get it out in the open she replied that she really couldn’t remember much about it. A girl had been there, and fortunately she had taken Sam out of the room, but after that she’d blanked everything out, all she thought about through the whole thing was Sam and Amy. So there wasn’t much to talk about. If the memories were somewhere down there in her unconscious then let them stay there — right now what mattered was that she function. My own understanding was that Heidi’s ability to suppress these memories had something to do with the way great pain can, for a time at least, hide the distress of lesser pains, the same way it can with physical suffering. And the great pain was the loss of Amy. I realised that was why Heidi — that strong, caring, selfless woman who under normal circumstances would automatically have stepped in as a reserve mother for Larsen’s motherless children — now almost avoided them. It was instead Chung’s young wife who took on that role.

‘They might try,’ I agreed. ‘But then they’ll move on in search of something easier.’

‘Not the gangs,’ she said. ‘Him. Colin. He’ll find us.’

‘Not if we lie low,’ I said, with a worried look at the children. They were digging in the back garden where we had buried the young Black boy Herbert. Brad claimed not to know his surname; not that it really mattered, we weren’t going to use it anyway. There was no cross to mark the grave that might have exposed the lynching.

‘A father or a mother will always find a missing child,’ said Heidi.

I didn’t answer. Because I knew she was right.

I visited the police station the next day and heard some good news. Chief Inspector Gardell had traced a member of the gang, a guy named Kevin Wankel. It wasn’t all that difficult since he was already in jail. Wankel had recently been arrested for killing and robbing a policeman, she told me. In his statement he had volunteered the information that he was a member of Chaos. But since the money Chaos shared out wasn’t enough to pay for his methamphetamine habit he had gone out on his own to rob someone. He’d waited outside a strip club, approached the first man who came out, held a gun to his forehead and demanded his wallet. Witnesses described how the man had calmly said he was a policeman and that Kevin should be on his way, at which Kevin pulled the trigger, grabbed the wallet and ran off. He was arrested in the street an hour later as he tried to buy methamphetamine. His trial was already over and he’d been sentenced to life imprisonment.

She showed me Wankel’s mugshot, but I didn’t immediately recognise the face. He definitely wasn’t one of those who had identified Brad as the killer.

‘I’ve spoken to him,’ said Gardell. ‘He’s more than willing to testify that it was Brad who did it. On condition that we get him some meth.’

‘What?’

‘Of course I said no. Adele Matheson won’t bring a case that depends on evidence that’s been bought with narcotics. But we can try offering him a reduction in his sentence.’

I looked at the photo and shook my head. ‘He wasn’t even there.’

‘What?’

I pushed the mugshot across the table to her and pointed to the date.

‘This was taken two days before the raid on our villa. He was already locked up. All he wants is dope. He’d sell his own mother for a gram.’

‘Damn,’ said Gardell. She looked as disappointed as I felt.

It’s a strange thing when you’re offered hope and then have it taken away from you. I left the police station the same as I’d come — empty-handed — and yet the day now seemed worse.

After Dumbo and I escaped from the villa that night we moved in with Maria.

She wasn’t exactly over the moon about the fact that I’d brought somebody with me, but she accepted it as part of the deal. Because the deal wasn’t just that we shared a roof, a table and a bed, it was also that I protected us and could — when necessary — go out and get us food. Maria didn’t ask how and I never told her.

One trick was to find some quiet little road and get Dumbo to lie down in the middle of it. People didn’t stop to help someone lying in the road any more, but at least they slowed down to drive round them. And as they did so I came riding up on the bike from the opposite direction, creating a little traffic jam. If we timed it right the car would come to a halt next to Dumbo, who would then get up, grab the shotgun he’d been lying on and shout ‘Hands up!’ — a line he loved and enjoyed shouting out whenever and wherever the notion took him. Motorists had no way of knowing whether I was part of the business involving the little guy with the shotgun or not and didn’t automatically put their foot on the accelerator and mow me down, and those few seconds’ hesitation were all the time I needed to produce my own shotgun.

This particular day we’d just played this trick. The guy was sitting in the car with his hands in the air and Dumbo’s shotgun pointing at his forehead as I emptied the car of food and pushed one end of a plastic hose down into the fuel tank.

‘Hands up!’ shouted Dumbo for the third time.

‘They already are,’ said the motorist in a despairing voice.

‘Hands up!’

‘Dumbo!’ I shouted. ‘Calm down now.’

I closed my lips round the other end of the plastic pipe and started sucking to get the petrol moving up and into the jerrycan standing on the road.

I was concentrating so hard I never heard them coming, not until a voice that was way too familiar said loudly: ‘Never knew the rug muncher could suck.’

I swallowed and coughed up petrol, spinning round ready to use the Remington rifle though I knew it was already too late.

There were three of them. One of the O’Leary twins had a gun pointed at Dumbo’s forehead, the other a Kalashnikov pointed at me. The third — the one who had spoken — was wearing a red leather jacket on the back of which was, I knew, an embroidered sea monster.

‘Ragnar,’ I said. ‘Long time.’

‘But not long enough?’ he smiled.

I started to get up.

‘Stay on your knees, Yvonne, it suits you. And tell your dwarf to put down his shooter or we’ll kill everyone.’

I swallowed. ‘Do as he says, Dumbo. You’re going to take what we got here?’

Ragnar swung his chain. ‘Wouldn’t you do the same?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess that depends.’

‘If, for example, someone ran off when the gang where she was second-in-command were under attack?’

‘Wouldn’t you have done the same?’

‘You let us down. That’s the first rule of Chaos, we don’t let each other down. Am I right, boys?’

‘Right,’ the O’Leary twins answered in unison.

‘The battle was lost,’ I said. ‘There was nothing I could do for you.’

‘No? But you rescued this dwarf here.’ Ragnar nodded towards Dumbo. ‘You’ve trained him well, looks like he’s learned how to make himself useful. We could use someone like that.’

‘What happened up there?’ I asked.

Ragnar peered into the bag of food I had set down on the road.

‘They lynched Herbert and took Brad prisoner. Let the rest of us go, the idiots.’

‘So then I guess you’ve already mounted a counter-attack.’

Ragnar gave me a puzzled look.

‘Since they’ve got Brad, and one Chaos never deserts another Chaos in trouble,’ I said. ‘He’s tried to rescue Brad, hasn’t he, boys?’

This time the O’Leary twins said nothing.

Ragnar’s small eyes were getting even smaller. But I couldn’t stop myself: ‘No? Ah, maybe you were happy enough to have me and Brad out of the way, so you could take over as leader?’

Ragnar’s knuckles turned white as his grip on the chain tightened. ‘You always did have a big mouth, Yvonne. No one ever tell you that’s not such a good idea when you’ve got a Kalashnikov pointing at you?’

I swallowed. Thought of that girl, that Amy. Hadn’t anyone told her?

‘I’ve talked to Brad’s old man and told him what happened,’ Ragnar said, glancing over at the twins as though to make sure they’d heard him. ‘He’s going to handle it himself.’

‘You saying you found Brad’s father?’

He shrugged. ‘It was more a case of him finding us. Anyway—’ he took an apple out of the bag and bit into it — ‘it’s out of my hands now.’ He made a face and threw the apple away. It bounced down the road.

‘Did you know they still pay for dwarf sex down by the molo?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Remember, I let you live, Yvonne Big Mouth,’ he said. Then he turned and started walking towards the corner where they must have left their bikes in order to sneak up on us. ‘Remember the bags!’ he called over his shoulder.

‘OK!’ shouted the twin who had the gun pointed at me. ‘Shall we take the guns too?’

‘Jesus, what do you think?’

Even though the O’Learys took our weapons they backed away after Ragnar, the Kalashnikovs still pointing at Dumbo and me.

I heard Ragnar’s bike start; it had a special hoarse kind of sound. Then they rounded the corner. It took me a couple of seconds to realise what was happening, and before I could get up and yell to Dumbo to get out of the way I saw Ragnar swinging his hook. It made a sort of mushy sound as it caught in the back of Dumbo’s shoulder, and I saw the point come out again on the other side, below his collarbone. The breath left Dumbo in a single, long-drawn-out gasp as he was dragged away from the window of the car he was trying to cling on to. He bounced twice, three times on the asphalt before he disappeared howling around the corner and was gone from my sight. I turned, ready to jump on my bike and follow them, and then the twins were roaring towards me and I heard the bullets strafing my machine.

And when they were gone too, and the fumes vanished, there I was, kneeling by the wheels of what had been my holy and damned machine.

‘You need a lift?’ asked the guy who was still there in his car.

I closed my eyes. I felt like crying. This isn’t the town and this isn’t the time for crying. It sure isn’t. But I cried anyway.

It was late in the evening, and I was on my way home after yet another fruitless day’s searching for members of Chaos. I needed an eyewitness, someone who could point the finger directly at Brad Lowe.

As I drove past the public prosecutor’s building I saw lights on in a couple of the offices and on impulse parked in the almost deserted car park and rang the bell. Asked the voice that answered to call Adele Matheson’s office. A few moments later she was on the speaker.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way home, can you wait five minutes?’

Four minutes later she came out the door. The outfit she was wearing, even the blouse, was the same as when we met the last time. She immediately began walking towards the car park. Her shoes were worn down on the inside, and that made her even more knock-kneed.

‘Can you help me find Brad Lowe?’ she said.

‘But I told you—’

‘You told me nothing I don’t want to know, and I suggest we carry on like that. Can you guarantee that he will appear in a court case, yes or no?’

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised.

‘Good. His next of kin have been informed of the charge and now you have been. It means that you and those who helped you when you found Amy must be willing to appear as witnesses.’

‘Are you saying that...?’

We stopped by a red Ferrari. I found it hard to believe the low, sexy sports car could belong to her until she unlocked it.

‘I’m making no promises,’ she said. ‘All I’m saying is that after due consideration the public prosecutor’s office has come to the conclusion that we have enough evidence to charge Brad Lowe with murder.’

IX

The attack came just before dawn.

They were well prepared, obviously familiar with the layout of the property, and counting on being met by force.

They were wearing camouflage and came gliding over the wall like porpoises across the surface of the water.

‘These boys are pros,’ said Downing as he leaned back in his chair and studied the monitors.

Less than two minutes had passed since the silent alarms on the outside of the wall had been triggered. Downing, who had been on watch, had roused us and we were now gathered down in the basement. The women and children were locked in the secure room directly opposite the cell where we were keeping Brad, while Downing, Chung, Larsen and I kept watch from the control room at the other end of the basement. On the monitors our camouflaged cameras — ordinary game cameras with night vision — showed the attackers gathering on the inside of the wall and then spreading out to approach the house from different sides.

‘About thirty men,’ said Downing. ‘Various types of weapons but light, automatic rifles. I don’t see any hand grenades or flamethrowers, so this looks like a surgical attack — the only ones to die will be those who are meant to die.’

All except Brad, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.

‘Night vision, same old type as mine. These are experienced veterans, boys. The worst type of opponent.’

‘There are so many of them,’ said Larsen. His voice was trembling. ‘Shouldn’t we detonate the mines now?’

‘That is scenario two,’ said Downing as he drummed with his fingers on the side of the keyboard. ‘What does that mean, Larsen?’

Larsen gulped. ‘That we don’t activate the mines and booby traps until they start the attack,’ he whispered.

‘Precisely. Chung?’

‘Yes?’ said Chung, who had just come in after making sure all the women and children were safely locked inside the secure room.

‘When the mines and the booby traps start going off, switch on the current to the wall. I don’t want any of them escaping.’

‘OK.’

‘Adams, you pilot the drone and give us overhead views.’

‘Copy,’ I said, using the military jargon we had just adopted.

‘And, Larsen, you’re ready with the machine guns, right?

‘Yep,’ he said, adjusting his position in the chair and taking hold of the joystick on the remote control.

All of us were trying to sound a bit tougher than we actually felt. At the same time I think we also felt a sort of excitement that the thing we had been preparing and steeling ourselves for was finally happening.

‘Right then, scenario two. When they start to move I’m going to count down to three and on zero we activate. Questions?’

Silence.

‘Ready?’

Yes, in three voices.

A lot of things aren’t the way they seem in films.

This wasn’t one of them.

The next few seconds — because it lasted only a few seconds when we saw the recordings afterwards — were as unreal as anything I’ve seen on the big screen.

When they attacked and we switched on the floodlights, when the mines started to explode and the body parts were flying through the air, when the booby-trapped shotguns cut down one attacker after another, when several of them desperately tried to retreat and climb back over the wall that was now live, and I saw through the drone camera how the jerking bodies fell to the ground, how the bullets from Larsen’s machine guns meant that they carried on jerking, it was really quite hard to believe it was all actually happening out there.

Then the explosions and the gunfire stopped and suddenly everything was very quiet.

Outside, some of the wounded began screaming for help. Larsen — who was sitting in a chair next to Downing and operating the machine guns through a joystick, the way you would in a computer game — had stopped shooting. Now he looked at the monitors, including the one showing the images from my drone. He used these to take aim. He fired only in short bursts, and with each burst there was one less cry for help.

Soon all was deathly silence.

We stared at the screens. There were bodies everywhere.

‘We’ve beaten them,’ said Chung cautiously, as though he didn’t quite believe what he was saying himself.

‘Yee-ha!’ Larsen hollered, his arms stretched up in the air. It was as though a light that had been turned off in his head for a long time was suddenly switched on again.

I piloted the drone over the wall. A hundred metres down the hill three armoured trucks stood stationary, their engines turning over. And an SUV that I seemed to recognise.

‘They’ve got more men on the outside,’ I said. ‘Shall we turn on the loudspeakers and tell them we’re opening the gates so they can fetch their dead?’

‘Wait,’ said Downing. ‘Look.’

He pointed to the alarm lights. One of them was on.

‘Someone’s broken the kitchen window,’ he said.

I flew the drone back and sure enough, the shutter on the kitchen window had been twisted to one side, probably with a crowbar.

‘A passed pawn,’ said Downing. He put on his night vision and picked up his rifle. ‘Adams, you take over here.’

The next moment he was out the door and had disappeared into the dark corridor outside.

We looked at each other. ‘Passed pawn’ was a term we’d learned. It meant soldiers operating independently of the unit. Without waiting for orders they could react at lightning speed to any opportunities that suddenly opened up. We listened but we couldn’t hear Downing’s footsteps. He had briefly shown us a ninja technique for silent walking but there hadn’t been time to train in hand-to-hand fighting, we’d been so focused on making certain the walls were impregnable.

We heard a bang that made us jump.

Then a sound like someone falling down the basement stairs.

We waited. I was holding the automatic shotgun so tightly my forearm ached.

I counted to ten, and when Downing still hadn’t knocked I turned to the other two.

‘Downing’s dead,’ I said.

‘This passed pawn will never breach the secure room,’ Chung said confidently.

‘Yes, but he can get Brad out,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

‘Are you crazy?’ whispered Larsen. ‘The passed pawn has night vision — you won’t have a chance, Will!’

‘That is exactly my chance,’ I said, checking that my gun was loaded and the safety catch off.

‘What do you mean?’

I pointed to the control panel, to the switch that controlled all the lighting in the house.

‘Turn the light on when I go out, turn it off again in eight seconds, then on and off every five seconds.’

‘But...’

‘Do as he says,’ said Chung, who I could see had got the idea.

I opened the door and slipped out into the darkness. The light went on. I ran towards the stairs, about as ninja-like as a rhinoceros. Downing lay there at the bottom. The night vision obscured his eyes but from the hole in his forehead I could see he was dead. I counted the seconds silently inside as I pulled the night vision off him. I sensed rather than heard the enemy approaching, hoping that the blinding of the light would delay him just long enough while he had to stop and remove the night vision.

Six, seven.

I had just got the night vision on when the light went again.

Now I heard the steps, heading away. He was retreating, had to get his goggles on again.

I followed the sound, trying to step more quietly but guessing he couldn’t hear me as well anyway now that he was on the move himself.

I came to the T-junction with the security room to the right and Brad’s cell on the left. Counted. Three, four. Flipped up the goggles and slipped round the corner to the right as the light came on.

Nothing.

I turned and there he was, standing seven, eight metres away from me, in front of the door to Brad’s cell. Wearing black, not camouflage. He turned towards me, towards the light, for it was clear he could see nothing, and he lifted a hand to remove the goggles he had down over the balaclava.

Maybe the balaclava made it easier, I don’t know, but I dropped to my knees, aimed and fired at him. To my amazement none of the bullets seemed to hit him. He tore off the goggles and tossed them away so they skidded over the floor and then he fired, the sounds echoing deafeningly around the stone walls. I didn’t feel any pain, just a pressure in my left shoulder, as though someone had given me a friendly shove. But I lost all strength in that arm and the rifle slipped to the floor.

The passed pawn saw that I was helpless, but instead of firing wildly he took aim with the rifle steadied against his shoulder. It looked as though it was a point of honour for him to drop his enemy with a bullet through the forehead.

I raised my right hand, the palm towards him, and for a fraction of a second he hesitated, as though this universal and timeless gesture of submission touched some instinct in him. Because that’s how I like to think of mercy.

Five...

Dark again, and I rolled from my kneeling position down and sideways as he fired. I pulled the goggles back down, saw the figure in the puke-green light, raised the rifle with my right hand and pulled the trigger. One shot. Then another. The second one got him. And the third. The fourth missed and ricocheted off the wall behind him. But the fifth hit, I think. And the sixth.

The lights came on and went off twice before I had emptied the magazine.

It was only later, after they had retrieved their dead and wounded, and I had taken off the night goggles, that it struck me: I no longer felt the dizziness and nausea I had felt earlier. On the contrary, I had never felt more balanced, more on top of things, clearer.

And at about daybreak, for the first time since Amy disappeared, Heidi slipped across to me in bed and put her arms around me. I kissed her and then — more careful with each other than we usually were — we made love.

X

A few days after we had repulsed the attack, I was back on Rat Island. Again Colin was waiting for me on the jetty. He looked wasted. Not thinner, wasted.

Rats darted back and forth in front of us on our way to the prison building.

‘There are more of them,’ I said, looking down at the sloping rocks which had been white the last time I was here. Now they looked black, not from the waves that broke over them as I had thought when I stood looking from the fishing boat on the way in, but because there were so many rats covering them.

‘I think they swim over in the night,’ said Colin, noticing the direction of my gaze. ‘They’re frightened.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of other rats. Those on the mainland are running out of food, they’ve started eating each other. So the smaller rats come over here.’

‘Won’t they start eating each other here too?’

‘In the end, yes.’

We went inside, entering a part of the building that had been converted into a sort of mansion-type medieval castle. Liza was waiting at the top of the first-floor stairs and she shook my hand. Previously we would always hug each other. That was another of the customs that had vanished with the coming of the pandemic, although in our case now that wasn’t the only reason: Amy’s absence and Brad’s absence made the children almost painfully present.

She excused herself, saying she had things to do, and disappeared, leaving Colin and I to enter the large and sparsely furnished dining room just in time to see an unusually large rat disappear through the door at the other end.

‘Damn, that was big,’ I said.

‘But not so big that it doesn’t run away from us and not the other way round,’ said Colin. ‘Although that’s probably just a matter of time,’ he added with a sigh.

We sat down and two servants approached, placed white serviettes in our laps and served us directly from a steaming saucepan.

‘We can’t even serve the food from ordinary dishes,’ said Colin. ‘They’re everywhere and they’ll risk anything once they pick up the smell of food. And they reproduce faster than we’re able to shoot them.’

I looked at the stringy lumps of meat in the brown stew in front of me. I presumed it was meat from animals we’re accustomed to eating, but once the thought had been planted the imagination wasn’t easy to stop.

‘It was good to come,’ said Colin, who didn’t seem to have much of an appetite either. ‘All things considered.’

‘You attacked us,’ I said. ‘You killed one of us.’

‘You killed nineteen of ours and you’re holding my son prisoner.’

‘He’s in custody,’ I said. ‘Awaiting a fair trial. The public prosecutor told you Brad was going to be charged, but you still attacked us. Because you know he’ll be found guilty.’

‘You’re putting yourself above the law.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in the law.’

‘No, but you say you do, Will. And a man can only be condemned for betraying his own principles, not someone else’s.’

‘Or for not having any at all.’

Colin forced a smile. I knew why. These were the kinds of exchanges we used to have when we were growing up together, starting in the days when we dominated the school debating society and developing still further once it became my job to oppose his sometimes over-hasty thought processes. As usual he was the one who had the last word:

‘Not having principles is also a principle, Will. As in, for example, adhering to the view that no principle shall be allowed to get in the way of your own survival and the survival of those closest to you.’

I looked down at my hands. Usually they were shaking. It started at about the same time as the pandemic. But now they weren’t. ‘What do you want, Colin?’

‘I want Brad,’ he said. ‘And I want your villa.’

I neither laughed nor forced a smile. I just placed my serviette on the table and stood up.

‘Wait.’ Colin got to his feet too. Held up a hand. ‘You haven’t heard my offer.’

‘You’ve got nothing I want, Colin. Don’t you understand that?’

‘Not you maybe, but what about Heidi and little Sam? What if I have something that can give them a new and better life, a chance to build a better society, one that follows the rule of law? Have you heard of the New Frontier? It’s an aircraft carrier. It’s sailing soon. There will be three thousand five hundred people on board. I’ve got three tickets on that boat. Bought them a while ago. Cost me a fortune. You can’t buy tickets any more, no matter how much you’re willing to pay. You get my three, and in exchange you give me Brad and the villa.’

I shook my head. ‘Keep your tickets, Colin. Letting Brad get away unpunished would make a mockery of Amy’s memory.’

‘Ah, see how the noble Will Adams descends to our level. Suddenly it’s not about keeping strictly to one’s principles in the name of all mankind. Now it’s revenge for your daughter.’

‘It was a manner of speaking, Colin. Regardless of what I might think, Heidi would never agree to a trade-off like that.’

‘Women are often more pragmatic in such matters than men. They see the benefit to the community, they laugh at our obsession with pride and honour.’

‘So then I’ll give you your answer before she has the chance to contradict me. No.’

On the way back down to the boat the rats didn’t run out of our way quite so quickly.

‘You weren’t afraid I might take you prisoner and offer a swap for Brad?’

I shook my head. ‘Everyone in the house is agreed that we won’t give in to any form of blackmail if I don’t return. Even though I left no instructions about what to do about Brad in that case, I think we both know what would happen to him.’

‘He wouldn’t get the trial you want to give him.’

Naturally he’d thought about it.

‘Is it because of the rats that you want to get away from here?’ I asked.

Colin nodded. ‘Beth is ill. We think it’s typhoid — she might have got it from a rat bite. We’ve tried everything we can think of to kill the damn things without killing ourselves at the same time. Did you know that rats and humans share ninety-seven per cent of the same DNA? One day the rat-human will appear. If it hasn’t already.’

‘She’ll get better once she’s on board the carrier,’ I said. ‘I hear some of the best doctors in the country were offered tickets at discount prices.’

‘Yes,’ said Colin. ‘And yet you really are willing to deprive your family of those tickets because of a principle you know means nothing in the world of the rat?’

I didn’t answer, just took the short step from the jetty and onto the fishing boat, turned and watched Colin grow smaller and smaller as we chugged away from the island.

But still something was bothering me. I knew him too well. He would never have let me get away so easily if he didn’t have a backup plan. Some kind of alternative.

XI

It’s night. I’m riding southwards and thinking back to the day Ragnar and the O’Leary twins took Dumbo. How different everything could have been. Or could it? Anyway, I’m headed for the slaughterhouse, and for the end of this story. Behind me is a spike strip and a guy who tried to stop me; there’s the house where I first met Will Adams, and the Lowe building where it looks like it won’t be long before the mob gets inside. Maybe everything is preordained, maybe people like me just do the bidding of fate. The fuel gauge is on red. OK, let fate decide if I’m to run out of petrol and things don’t end the way they were planned. Because something unexpected always happens. Like the way, for example, that Dumbo reappeared again a week after he disappeared.

I’d lost hope of seeing Dumbo again when my phone rang. Maria woke me, pointing to it almost in fear. It hadn’t rung at all for the past couple of months because most of the networks were down and only one operator was still working.

I picked up and heard Dumbo’s voice: ‘They’re allowing me one call.’

He was in the prison in Downtown. It was the last one still in operation and being used to hold people in custody as well as prisoners serving long sentences. An hour later we sat facing each other on different sides of a thick partition in the large visiting room, each with a telephone in our hand. He was wearing a striped outfit. I’d called it retro, which at least made him laugh, since he realised I’d said something that was meant to be funny.

Then he told me what had happened, and neither of us was laughing any more.

After Ragnar and the others had kidnapped Dumbo they’d taken him to Chaos’s new clubhouse. From Dumbo’s description I knew it had to be in the abandoned slaughterhouse down by the oilfield, on the road out to the airport. One evening Ragnar had brought a man back to the slaughterhouse and told those Dumbo shared the room with to get out.

‘Ragnar pointed to me and said I was perfect,’ said Dumbo. ‘The man could have me if he got the gang somewhere decent to live, a new bike for Ragnar, twelve Kalashnikovs and fifty bazookas and fifty hand grenades. Plus one hundred and fifty grams of meth, two hundred tabs of Rohypnol, two hundred antabiato... no, anta...’

‘Antibiotics,’ I said.

‘Yes, and—’

‘That’ll do,’ I said. Sometimes Dumbo had a surprisingly good memory for details, especially insignificant details. ‘But the man wasn’t going to pay all that for just one night, was he?’

‘No,’ said Dumbo. ‘For the rest of his life.’

‘So he was from that club down by the docks.’

‘No, he was from Rat Island, he said.’

‘And? Did he say what he wanted you to do?’

‘Yes. It was Ragnar said it.’

‘What did Ragnar say?’

‘Ragnar said I was to tell the police who would be coming soon that I hit that girl on the head with a golf club. And I was to say the same thing to the judge.’

I stared at him. ‘And if you didn’t?’

Dumbo’s large eyes filled with tears and his voice trembled. ‘He said they would feed me to the rats on Rat Island.’

‘Then of course you had to say yes. But when the judge heard that...’

‘I didn’t say yes,’ Dumbo said, his voice still choked. ‘I said no. Because that would mean I would have to be in jail for the rest of my life, and I didn’t want that.’

‘I understand. But you told the police you did it — that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That was very clever, because they can’t feed you to the rats before you tell the judge they threatened you.’

‘No!’ shouted Dumbo and beat his forehead against the glass screen. He sometimes did that when he got frustrated because he couldn’t explain what he meant. I saw a warden making his way towards us.

‘Easy, Dumbo.’

‘They didn’t threaten me. They threatened you! They said they’d kill Yvonne if I didn’t do as they said.’

I took it in, piece by piece. Those bastards. All they need to know is what’s irreplaceable for someone. Once they know that they’ve got them. Or got her.

Behind me the warden coughed. I put my hand to the glass screen.

‘I’ll get you out of here, Dumbo. I promise. I’ll get you out. You hear?’

Dumbo pressed his hand up against mine on the glass wall and the tears came rolling down his cheeks.

‘One minute. The helicopter will be landing in one minute!’

Of course it feels absurd to be standing here on top of a skyscraper twirling a glass of champagne while down below us civilisation as we know it is falling apart. On the other hand it wouldn’t feel much less absurd without the champagne.

The lieutenant approaches, whispers something in Colin’s ear, then runs back to the helicopter deck where the last of the rich and privileged wait to be lifted up and whisked away to a fresh start on board the New Frontier.

‘He says the mob has got inside,’ says Colin. ‘But my people have cut the cable to the lifts so they’ll have to fight their way up the stairs. Do you know, by the way, why staircases in old castles and cathedrals always run clockwise going upwards?’ As usual Colin Lowe doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘It gave the defenders the advantage over their attackers because they could use their swords in their right hands.’

‘Interesting,’ I say. ‘Incidentally, is there a way down that doesn’t run the risk of getting your head chopped off? For those not travelling on the helicopter, I mean.’

‘Sure. Relax, everything’ll be fine. Look, there it is.’

A moving point of light comes swaying towards us. I look down into my glass, at the bubbles released from the bottom of it and rising up to the surface. Inexorable as a physical law.

‘Tell me, Colin, were you infected with fear? Like the rats?’

Colin looks at me in some surprise. He hasn’t yet raised his glass for the toast I know he’s planning to make. To friendship, to family, to the good life. The three regulars.

‘What are you thinking of?’ he asks.

‘When you bought Dumbo’s confession. Did you panic?’

Colin shakes his head. ‘I don’t know to what extent a father is capable of rational thought when it comes to his own son or daughter, but when this Ragnar contacted me and said he had an offer I couldn’t refuse, he turned out to be right.’

‘Your conscience didn’t bother you?’

‘As you know, Will, mine is not as active as yours. So no, it didn’t make too much noise. According to Ragnar, Dumbo was so severely mentally handicapped he was unfit to plead and by law couldn’t be punished anyway.’

‘It isn’t that simple, Colin. And I think you know it.’

‘You’re right. It’s probably that I wanted it to be that simple. Anyway, it seemed to me he deserves whatever punishment they can give him. Ragnar told me he raped Heidi.’

I grip the stem of the glass so tightly that for a moment I’m certain I’ll snap it. Against the orange sky of evening I see the helicopter approaching between the skyscrapers. It makes me think of a grasshopper. Like that lovely, pea-green specimen I took home with me from my grandmother’s farm one summer holiday. On the drive home I had it in a jam jar with a hole punched in the lid. But when we arrived it was dead, and for years afterwards my father would reminisce about it at family gatherings, about how inconsolable I had been, that I’d pushed a pin into my fingertip as a way of punishing myself. I could never understand why the grown-ups laughed.

‘I’m thinking about what happened afterwards,’ I say.

‘You know very well I had nothing to do with that,’ sighs Colin.

‘But you could have prevented it.’

‘The list of our sins of omission is infinitely long, Will. Of course you can accuse me of lacking the imagination to realise the extent of Ragnar’s cynicism. But had he asked me I would never have allowed it to happen.’

By now I can just about hear the helicopter, the rotor blades whipping the air, the drone of the engine.

It was raining next day when I went to the courthouse. I wasn’t allowed to see Dumbo but heard that his defence lawyer was someone named Marvin Green, from the firm of Amber & Doherty. It took me the rest of the day to find the firm’s offices; apparently they’d moved from the address I got at the courthouse and were now located in a graffiti-covered office block. I wasn’t allowed in, just told through the door phone that Green wasn’t there. When I asked where I could find him, said it was urgent because I had information concerning one of his cases, the person at the other end just laughed. She said I would either find Green at the pub on the corner or he’d gone home for the day. I went to the pub, heard from the barman that Green had just left, went back to the office block and after a lot of fuss and bother got Green’s address. It was pouring with rain and riding up the hill was like riding up a stream.

The address wasn’t far from the villa we’d been driven out of. But this was a small house, almost a bungalow, the type of place the artists who first moved up here long ago built for themselves. But it had steel gates and walls with embedded glass and barbed wire.

I rang the bell.

‘Who is it?’ said a hoarse, slurred voice though the speaker on the wall.

I looked up into the camera on the gatepost, gave my name and said I had information that could help Mr Green in his defence of Gabriel Norton, aka my friend Dumbo.

I heard the chinking of glass. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘You mean come in?’

‘Go on, as in “talk”. I don’t let strangers in.’

So I said what I had to say standing out there in the rain. That Dumbo hadn’t killed Amy but was the victim of a plot aimed at whitewashing the rich man’s son Brad Lowe. It was a long speech and since I was neither interrupted nor given any other sign that anyone was listening I began to wonder whether Green had just hung up. But at least no one came out to chase me off so I carried on talking. Told him how Dumbo and I — back before we knew each other — almost by chance had saved each other’s lives in a fire, and how we’d stuck together since then. We’d joined a gang, and that’s how we managed to survive. I said there were probably a lot of things Dumbo was guilty of, but not the killing of Amy. I’d been in the house and could give him an alibi for the time the murder was committed.

I was finished, and so wet and cold my teeth were chattering as I stood there staring at that perforated brass plate below the bell. I had considered telling him that I had actually seen Brad killing Amy but decided that with Brad’s father on the warpath it would endanger not just my life but Dumbo’s and Maria’s too. My goal was to get Dumbo out; what happened to Brad was a matter of indifference to me.

‘Mr Green?’ I said.

Silence. Then a wet coughing. And then that hoarse voice, a little less slurred now: ‘I’ll need your address if I’m going to call you as a witness.’

I gave the address where Maria and I lived, dictating the flat number so slowly and carefully that even a drunkard defence lawyer who’d long ago stopped caring about anything would be able to get it right.

‘It’ll be safest for you if you don’t talk to anyone about what you know, or tell anyone you’ve been here,’ he said. ‘I’ll contact you — don’t contact me.’

On the driver down afterwards I had to stop on a bend. A coyote stood motionless in the middle of the road and looked at me. The eyes reflected light, and I almost thought it was a ghost. Coyotes usually run, but this one stood its ground. Like me. I thought of getting the Remington out and shooting it — we were out of meat, and maybe this would be edible if you cooked it long enough — then remembered that Ragnar and the twins had taken the gun. I waited for the coyote to move, but it didn’t. Instead two more came slinking into the street light.

Just recently there had been more of them on the roads; not just coyotes but more animals in general. And fewer people. At night I could ride through one district after another and never see a soul. Were they all staying indoors, the way people did during the pandemic? Or had they left the city and moved out to the countryside?

I automatically checked the rear-view mirror to see if there were any coyotes behind me as well.

No. Not yet.

I revved the engine, opened the throttle and rode at them, horn blaring.

The coyotes didn’t seem particularly afraid. They moved reluctantly out of the way. One of them snapped at me as I rode by.

XII

When I got back from Rat Island the last time I hadn’t told Heidi I’d turned down Colin’s offer of tickets on the New Frontier aircraft carrier. Not that I thought she would have agreed to the trade-off, because I felt sure she was as determined as I was that Brad should stand trial for what he’d done. But at least in not knowing there was a choice she was spared the dilemma, and the gnawing doubt about whether we had made the right decision in depriving Sam of what was perhaps — what was actually pretty definitely — his chance of a better life.

At the same time I was still waiting for Colin to make his next move. If he had an alternative plan to free Brad, and it succeeded, wouldn’t I then bitterly regret that I had turned down his offer? Or would I continue to feel that I had done the right thing, responded the way a decent and upright person should respond? Maybe I wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing my daughter’s killer get his just punishment, but at least I hadn’t lost my soul.

And then it came. The next move.

I was in the garden when Adele Matheson phoned me and told me the news over a very poor connection. That a certain Gabriel Norton, nicknamed Dumbo, had confessed to Amy’s murder. And unless the confession was withdrawn, or evidence produced that exonerated Norton, then naturally she couldn’t proceed with the case against Brad Lowe.

I said that this was Colin Lowe’s doing. That either this Dumbo was taking one for the team, or else they were threatening him with something that was worse than life imprisonment.

‘We can’t exclude the possibility,’ said Matheson. ‘But...’

She didn’t need to finish. As long as we couldn’t prove that Dumbo was lying or being manipulated, then there wasn’t much we could do.

I leaned against a tree, checked that Heidi and Sam were too far away to overhear anything, and tried to gather my thoughts. Adele Matheson waited patiently, but all I could do was open and close my mouth. Not a word came out.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a few moments. ‘We must just hope that this Dumbo changes his story or fails to convince the court that he’s a killer. I heard one detective say that they can’t quite get the angle between the point of impact and the golf club to add up with the fact that Norton is a dwarf.’

‘A dwarf?’

‘I’m sorry, short. Or whatever the prevailing euphemism is. Anyway, circumstantial technical evidence like that doesn’t count for much when there’s a confession.’

I was only half listening. Thinking. So the one who’d confessed was the boy who’d rung the bell that evening with the girl. The same two I had let go the night we took the villa.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said.

‘By all means, try,’ said Matheson.

‘I mean it. I stopped one of ours from shooting him and the girl when they escaped on her motorcycle. He might be aware of the fact that I... well, that I saved their lives. Maybe I can get him to feel he owes me something in return.’

Matheson didn’t reply.

‘I’ll keep you posted,’ I said.

‘Then goodbye.’ She said it the way you say goodbye to someone you think it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing again.

XIII

I was searched before being allowed into the large visiting room. Four other visitors were already inside, talking on the phone to inmates behind the glass partition — it was just like when I visited Maria in hospital during the pandemic. The warden indicated my chair, number eight. Dumbo wasn’t there yet.

I was looking forward to telling him I had spoken to his lawyer and that he would be calling me as a witness so that I could give Dumbo an alibi. We were just to say that we were together, nothing about how I’d seen through the keyhole that it was Brad. That way everything would be fine. We wouldn’t be lying, we just weren’t telling them everything.

As I took my seat I saw a familiar face behind the glass in number-one booth, in the far corner. It was Kevin Wankel. So it was here the stupid meathead was serving his life sentence.

I sat waiting and watching for Dumbo to come through the door.

It didn’t look as though Kevin had a lot to say to his visitor. They sat in their respective chairs, her slumped, him with his greasy hair and the stubby brown teeth in his meths mouth.

Then the door at the back on the prisoners’ side opened and Dumbo came in wearing the same striped prison outfit. His face lit up when he saw me, and I guess mine did too. The warden behind him said something I couldn’t hear through the glass and pointed to the chair in front of me.

As Dumbo started walking towards me I sensed a movement in my peripheral vision. I didn’t immediately react to it; Kevin had obviously suddenly made up his mind the visit was over and was heading towards the exit door and Dumbo. As he came closer I noticed he was holding his hand inside the back of his trousers.

I jumped up and yelled, but that damn glass wall reaching up to the ceiling choked off most of the sound.

There was a glint of steel as Kevin swung his hand in a low arc, caught Dumbo in the stomach and pulled the blade towards him. Dumbo doubled over. Both hands went to his stomach and I could see the blood running between the stubby fingers. Kevin grabbed hold of Dumbo’s hair and pulled his head back, exposing the throat and cutting it with a sideways, arcing slash. Blood sprayed and splashed across the floor and Dumbo tumbled forward. Two wardens stormed in and Kevin dropped his weapon. It looked like a flattened piece of metal. He put up his hands in a show of surrender. Two guards pinned Kevin to the floor while a third came running in and pressed a hand against the gaping wound in Dumbo’s neck. The pressure in the fountain of blood was gone and now it was just pumping weakly.

Dumbo’s eyes were looking in my direction but they were glazed over. Of course I knew that with all the blood on the floor, blood that should have been circulating through his brain, he had to be unconscious already but I did it anyway. I picked up the receiver, put my other hand against the glass wall and said: ‘It’ll be all right. Just look at me, Dumbo. It’ll be all right.’

Then it was as though another layer folded itself over the glassy stare, and I knew he was dead.

I had just arrived in the waiting room attached to the visiting room, taken a seat and was waiting to meet Gabriel ‘Dumbo’ Norton. Earlier in the day I had seen the mugshot and was able to confirm what I suspected, that it was the same boy who I had seen on the steps outside our house. Who had helped to tie me up. Who had...

I knew I mustn’t think about that other thing, not if I was to be able to do what I intended to and establish a relationship with the boy that was based on sympathy and understanding and the sort of humanity and mercy I would need to discover for the most difficult thing of all — forgiveness.

I hadn’t been told who the visitor before me was but I knew at least that it wasn’t his defence lawyer — they didn’t use the visiting room.

Suddenly from the other side of the door I heard screams, shouting and the scraping of chair legs.

The guard in the waiting room put his eye to a peephole and then checked that the door was locked.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘A stabbing,’ he said without turning round.

A minute later he unlocked the door and the five visitors came out. They looked pale and shaken, but it was clearly not one of them who had been attacked.

One was crying. Or rather, there was no sound, but the tears streamed down her face. Maybe they blinded her so that she didn’t recognise me.

I quickly joined the dots and a clear picture emerged.

I followed her.

She didn’t notice me until we were out in the street and she was sitting astride her motorcycle. I stood directly in front of her.

‘Is Dumbo dead?’ I asked.

I saw how she automatically reached for something in a pannier on the bike, a weapon maybe, but it wasn’t there.

‘Was it you who killed him?’ I asked.

I stared at him. Because it really was him, Amy’s father, I saw that now. Was he asking if it was me who killed Dumbo?

‘No,’ I said, and I had no control at all over my voice. ‘But maybe you did.’

‘Then I would have been better off letting that shaven-headed guy with the laser rifle shoot the two of you up at the villa.’

I didn’t know what to say. Or do. Because yes, I had wondered if it was his voice I’d heard when someone stopped the guy with the laser sight on his rifle from shooting. Shouting that they weren’t murderers and — unless I saw wrong — pointing his own gun at the guy.

‘So then who was it?’ he asked.

‘Dunno,’ I said and started the engine.

‘But you know it wasn’t Dumbo who killed my daughter.’

What the hell was I supposed to say? Dumbo was dead, there was no one left to save any more. No one but myself.

‘I don’t know anything,’ I said and revved the engine. He still kept standing there, the straight idiot.

‘You know it was Brad,’ he said. He rested both hands on my handlebars and stared at me, eyes burning like he was on speed.

I didn’t answer.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You aren’t like them.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like those others in the gang. Chaos. You want something more than that, don’t you?’

‘I want my Remington rifle back,’ I said. ‘Apart from that I don’t give a fuck about anything. Get out of the way, mister.’

‘I’m living in the villa. If you want justice like me then come and talk to me. I think maybe we can help each other.’

I slipped the clutch and he jumped out of the way. Accelerated away. The exhaust popping and banging from the bullet-holes from when the O’Leary twins peppered the bike. I rode so fast I could feel the tears streaming horizontally into my helmet and across my temples.

It was Ragnar. I knew it was Ragnar, he was the only one who could get Kevin to do something like that. The only question was how did Ragnar know I was going to get Dumbo to withdraw his confession? I mean, it really wasn’t all that fucking complicated.

The connection became even clearer when I got home and saw the ambulance parked in the street. Part of me was surprised because you so rarely see an ambulance these days; another part of me had been half expecting it.

I dismounted and walked over to the two men who were loading a stretcher into the back.

‘Who...’ I started to say, but they jumped in behind the stretcher, slammed the doors in my face and drove off, sirens blaring.

I turned and saw the trail of blood leading from where the ambulance had stood at the entrance to our block. I swallowed. It was my fault. My fault again.

I was the one who had given the address to Dumbo’s drunken and corrupt defence lawyer.

No, it really wasn’t all that complicated.

The street door opened and a pretty young woman came out.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘It was a guy with the same kind of helmet as you,’ she said.

‘Red leather jacket with a monster coming up out of the sea?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘He used a crowbar and broke into the flat at the end of our corridor.’

‘But?’

‘But when he got inside the man there had a knife and the motorbike guy had a Kalashnikov and shot him before he could use it. I spoke to his wife. She says they say he’ll survive.’

She wiped away a tear and I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.

‘I’m scared,’ she sniffled.

‘I understand, Maria.’

It was so quiet I could still hear the ambulance, the siren rising and falling as though searching for a frequency it couldn’t find.

I thought of the man. He looked like Amy, his daughter. I thought of when he sat tied up in the garage, the look on his face when he heard the screams from the house. Pain at the thought of pain in someone you love.

‘So it wasn’t you, it was Ragnar who arranged to have Dumbo killed?’ I say. I have to raise my voice to be heard above the sound of the approaching helicopter.

‘He didn’t tell me about it until afterwards, and as I say, I would never have allowed it. Not murder.’ Colin sighs and looks up into the sky. ‘But of course, I’m not completely guilt-free.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’d been in touch with Marvin Green, Dumbo’s defence lawyer. Good defence lawyers are in short supply now, most of them have left the city so people turn to the likes of washed-out alcoholics like Green who don’t have the money to get out. And yes, he was easy enough to turn and he didn’t ask for too much. He was told not to put a great deal of effort into defending Dumbo and not to put him in the witness box in case the poor bugger got mixed up about his confession. But then Green called me and said he’d had a girl come to see him who said she could give Dumbo an alibi. I got her address.’ Colin took a deep breath. ‘You know, before they turned off the power I never realised how beautiful the night sky is above the city.’

‘Go on,’ I say.

‘So I got in touch with this Ragnar again and told him it was a condition of him getting the weapons and all the other stuff that Dumbo’s confession stood, and that Brad didn’t have to face a charge.’

‘In other words you ordered him to kill Dumbo and the girl.’

Colin shook his head. ‘It would have been enough if he’d threatened the girl to keep quiet and Dumbo had been sentenced, case closed. Instead this Ragnar decided on drastic action because — as he said afterwards — the dead don’t talk. He was pleased as punch when he came and told me what he’d done. No, he hadn’t got the girl, obviously she didn’t completely trust Green and had given him a false address. But that hardly mattered, he said, because he’d shut Dumbo up on a permanent basis, so now he couldn’t retract his confession. He couldn’t understand why I was so angry...’

‘Don’t you feel you have more than a little guilt in all this, Colin?’

He shrugs and sticks out his lower lip the way he always does when he’s pretending not to understand the obvious.

‘It wasn’t my choice. He acted on his own free will.’

‘You allowed his evil nature free play because you knew what the result would be. It was obviously you who gave him the girl’s address. That was the choice of your own free will, Colin.’

‘I thought he might have a word with her, not...’ He spread his arms out wide. ‘OK, so maybe I’m naive, but I do actually believe in people’s ability to learn. To change and choose what is good.’

‘That’s good to know,’ I say.

‘Meaning what?’

‘That you believe that free will combined with experience can turn someone who was previously bad into a person who will choose the good.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘That’s why we release people from prison and hope it’s safe. So for the sake of you and your family let’s hope it is true, Colin.’

‘Now what are you talking about, Will?’

By now I’m having to shout to be heard above the helicopter. ‘I’m simply saying that your survival, like mine and like everyone else’s, is in the final analysis dependent on our ability to learn the qualities of mercy, wisdom and forgiveness. And in particular the ability of those closest to us to learn them.’

‘Amen to that!’ Colin calls to the stars and the descending helicopter as he finally raises his champagne glass.

XIV

Within twenty-four hours of my meeting Yvonne outside the prison where Dumbo had just been murdered she was standing at our door.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I said.

She muttered something uneasy in reply. I had realised some time ago that certain people, certain sections of the population, are just not used to those who go around thanking each other for things.

She told me her name as we stood in the living room, looking out at Heidi playing Hawks and Doves with Sam. Heidi put on a deep menacing voice as she advanced on him, fingers hooked like a hawk’s claws. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, all that came through the window were Sam’s squeals of delight.

‘He’s a nice boy,’ she said. ‘How...’ She didn’t finish her question.

‘He seems to have forgotten everything,’ I said. ‘Can you understand that?’

Yvonne shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but for kids most of what happens is new and dramatic, even everyday things that seem trivial to us grown-ups. For example, I don’t know if seeing someone in your family getting a beating is worse than being stung by a wasp, or your teddy bear losing an eye.’

I looked at the young woman. Something told me she was speaking from experience.

‘So then why are children traumatised by sexual assault but apparently not by circumcision?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I would guess pain and humiliation are easier to take if the pain feels natural and necessary in some way. People can get tortured in a meaningless war and lose their minds, but not people who have a tooth taken out without an anaesthetic. Or a woman giving birth.’

I nodded. Now Heidi had caught Sam and they laughed as they rolled around on the grass. Heidi laughing; it struck me that was a sound I hadn’t heard since that terrible night.

‘Context,’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘I read somewhere that some people believe our minds can deal with pain better if we’re able to put it in a context that seems to us to justify it.’

Yvonne nodded. ‘Good. Then someone’s written down what I think.’

‘But...’ I said, drawing a breath and folding my hands. ‘The pain of losing Amy for me and Dumbo for you aren’t things we can place in a meaningful context. So we need to find other ways of dealing with the pain, am I right?’

‘Revenge,’ she said.

I looked down at my hands. Colin used to say I always folded them before saying something important. And that when a lawyer is about to say something important that usually means bad news.

‘That’s one way,’ I said. ‘The human appetite for revenge distinguishes us from the animals, but from an evolutionary perspective it’s still logical. If everyone knows that killing a child will lead to revenge, that will make the child’s life safer. But if there’s dispute over the question of guilt in the death of the child then any act of revenge is liable to give rise in turn to yet another act of revenge. Which in turn gives rise to yet another. It was spirals of bloodthirsty revenge like that that decimated the population of Iceland, for example. And the same thing happened in Albania. In Iceland they solved the problem by establishing a court consisting of the best minds in the community and they were charged with the task of deciding on questions of guilt or innocence, and where necessary passing sentence and carrying out the punishment. In so doing they eliminated the need for revenge. And this idea is not just the basis of the use of courts for dispensing justice but for the whole idea of societies in which the law is the same for everyone. This meant the end of a tyrannical system in which the strong were always in the right. Because when it is the state that is strongest the tyrannical and the barbarous must defer to the power of the law. Justice, common sense and humanity are the guiding principles. And that is what I want — that is why I have not executed Brad but intend to charge him in front of an independent court of law.’

I’m not sure I understood everything he said, but I think I got his point.

In the first place the rules of the road are for everyone who drives, and when there’s been a crash it’s not always best to leave it to the two hotheads involved to sort it out themselves.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But how about when you realise the judge has been bought by the other side and that might is right after all? Should you just roll over and let it happen? Or should you stand up and fight?’

Will, as he insisted I call him, looked at me as he scratched his chin.

‘My wife and son are coming in,’ he said. ‘I think maybe it’s best if you don’t meet. Come with me.’

I followed him down into the basement. Saw he’d made quite a few changes. He took me into a room that looked like a cross between the bridge of a ship and the control room in a recording studio.

‘What do you need?’ he asked. ‘To get what you want.’

‘A weapon,’ I said.

‘A weapon?’

‘Ragnar stole my Remington rifle. But for this I’m going to need something heavy.’

Will nodded. He left the room and returned with a machine gun. He demonstrated for me how it worked. It could be used to mow down a small squad of men but was light enough for me to hold. He placed four hand grenades on the table in front of me.

‘Enough?’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Why are you helping me? I was one of those who attacked your family.’

He looked directly at me. ‘In the first place I’m going to ask you to do something for me in return. In the second place, I know you weren’t a part of what happened when my wife... That you took Sam out of the room before...’ His voice became thick and hoarse and he blinked twice. We could hear the two of them on the floor above us. He cleared his throat.

‘And in the third place, because you remind me of Amy.’

There were tears and tenderness in his eyes and for a moment I thought he was going to stroke my hair.

‘Same fighting spirit,’ he said. ‘Same sense of justice. When my generation is dead and gone and it’s the turn of others to run the world I hope that it’s people like you who run it, Yvonne. Not people like Brad and Ragnar.’

I nodded slowly. I hadn’t done much to stop the rape, but it probably wouldn’t do any harm if he thought better of me than I deserved. ‘I’ll do the best I can, Mr Adams. What is this thing that you want me to do in return?’

Slowly and in some detail, a look of pain and despair on his face, he told me. I realised this had been a very hard decision for him to take, and that he was still torn by doubt over it. And this time it was me who wanted to stroke his hair.

‘OK,’ I said.

He looked almost surprised. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I’m in.’

He checked that his wife and little Sam weren’t nearby, then he followed me out to the bike.

‘You don’t think this is a gruesome plan?’ I asked.

‘Of course it’s gruesome,’ said Yvonne as she packed the stripped-down machine gun into the side pannier of the bike. ‘Leaving the gruesome to the gruesome.’

She straddled the bike. ‘I’ve no idea if your plan’s going to work, Will. But if it does then it’s probably the closest you’re going to get to justice without one of those courts of yours.’

‘It’ll be your job to see that those are re-established once everything has totally collapsed and it all has to be built up again from scratch,’ I said.

She rolled her eyes, put on the helmet with the image of Lady Justice executed, and the bike started up with a bestial roar.

I stood watching her until she disappeared from sight around a corner.

I didn’t see a single coyote as I rode down through the valley. I’ve heard that they can smell danger. They’re smart creatures.

XV

The day after I was up at the Adams villa I mounted the light machine gun on the front of my bike so that I could ride and shoot at the same time. Maria watched me wide-eyed and asked if I was going to war.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The slaughterhouse was in an industrial area south of Downtown, on a field surrounded by nodding oil pumps that looked like enormous ants raising and lowering their upper bodies over their front legs. It seemed as though the old pumps — again like ants — just kept on doing what they do regardless of whether the human race was going to hell or not.

The afternoon sun was low in the sky behind me as I turned into the forecourt in front of the slaughterhouse. The timing was carefully chosen. Dumbo had told me they would gather to eat in the main part of the slaughterhouse before heading out to raid after dark. And I needed them all to be together — that was going to be my only chance.

I’d made a reconnaissance trip earlier in the day and established that they didn’t keep watch and that the big sliding door at one end of the hall was always left open, probably because they had no electricity to run the air conditioning. They must have thought that was OK; they probably didn’t feel much threat out here.

I rode into the main hall. It was rectangular and big as two football pitches. Light fell from the windows in the ceiling high above. There were rails and wires with meat hooks up there too, but of course, no meat left hanging from them; anything like that had been consumed long ago. The smooth concrete floor inclined gradually towards the sluices, presumably so the blood would run away before it dried.

The bikes were parked at the far end of the hall and the gang was sitting in the middle at a long table, like in that painting of Jesus and the disciples. Only Jesus wasn’t with them. It had taken me two seconds to count to eleven. Ragnar wasn’t here.

Two of them jumped to their feet and ran towards their bikes. They were new. They didn’t know who I was.

I opened fire, aiming just ahead of them so they could see the bursting showers of plaster and know they would never have time to reach the weapons on their bikes. They threw themselves to the floor.

‘Stay down!’ I yelled.

The walls echoed. They stayed down.

Then I rode slowly forward and stopped between two dangling meat hooks five or six metres from the table, so I was still covering everyone with the machine gun.

‘What do you want?’ asked one of the O’Leary twins — you can never be sure which is which until they’re on their bikes.

‘I want my rifle back,’ I said. ‘And my gang.’

‘Your gang?’ said the other twin.

‘My gang,’ I repeated. ‘When Brad isn’t here I’m the leader of Chaos.’

One guy laughed loudly. Another new one.

‘Where’s Ragnar?’ I asked.

As though in reply came the snarl of an engine starting. A special, hoarse roar. I turned to the parked bikes and saw Ragnar riding towards us on his red Yamaha. He was steering with one hand. In the other he was holding what looked like a shiny new Kalashnikov with a pistol grip. Wonder how he’d come by that. I had my suspicions. He was fifty metres away when I turned the front of the bike towards him and fired off a short burst.

None of the bullets hit him but he braked sharply, only now realising it was a machine gun I had. And that meant superior firepower.

‘Jump her!’ he shouted. ‘She can’t take you all.’

‘But quite a few,’ I said in a voice so low only those at the table heard me.

‘That’s an order!’ shouted Ragnar.

‘The order is that you stay exactly where you are,’ I said. ‘I need you all alive.’

They stared at me. No one moved. Not that they thought I was the new leader. Not yet. But for the time being it was a machine gun giving the orders, not Ragnar. And it looked like he was losing.

But Ragnar knew the rules. He kicked out the stand, dismounted, and held up the Kalashnikov.

‘You and me, no weapons!’ he shouted, releasing the curving magazine and tossing it away so that it bounced and skidded across the floor. ‘Or don’t you dare, Miss Kickboxer?’

Of course I could have turned him down and just shot him there and then.

But I also knew that if the gang was going to accept a girl as leader then I had to show them something more than just that I was capable of pulling a trigger.

I dismounted, took the machine gun and walked over to the table, pulled out the bandolier and dropped it in front of them. Heard that hoarse roaring behind me, turned and saw that Ragnar was back on his bike and already on his way towards me, swinging the hook and chain around his head. I walked towards him, stopped between the meat hooks and waited. I’d seen it so many times. I knew his technique and I could read his body when he was about to throw. And when he did I held the machine gun up in front of me with both hands. The chain hit the top of the barrel, twisted round it once, the hook caught in the middle leaving me one second in which to act. I wedged the barrel down in two of the meat hooks, one on each side of Ragnar’s hook, let go of the gun and took a step backwards. There was a rustling and juddering from the pulleys and wires up by the beam as they tensed, and then a straight line of steel connecting Ragnar’s bike and the beam above. The engine of the Yamaha howled as it came to a sudden stop and the wheels had nothing to grip. Ragnar went flying over the handlebars in a perfect arc that threw him ten metres further down the hall, where he fell to the floor with a thud beneath a row of meat hooks.

I walked over to him.

He lay with his back to me, apparently unconscious. But as I got closer it was as though the sea monster on the back of his leather jacket flexed, and I saw his hand grab for something in the waistband of his trousers. I ran and kicked his hand as he turned. A glistening pistol — it looked like an expensive Glock — spun through the air. I could have let him get to his feet, I could have taken him anyway, but I had an audience. A gang wondering if this girl who said she was the leader was tough enough. Efficient enough. Merciless enough. So I gave Ragnar a simple but effective foot jab while he was still lying there. And before he’d recovered from that I was behind him with a so-called rear naked choke, my left arm around his throat, the right arm locking it, my forehead pressed against the back of his head as though comforting him. Then squeeze and cut off the supply of blood to the brain. Within ten seconds Ragnar was unconscious. I let go of him, pulled down one of the meat hooks directly above him. Glanced over at the table fifteen metres away and saw they were all watching. Rolled Ragnar onto his stomach, pulled up the red leather jacket and choked back the nausea as I drove the hook into the pale skin of his back. I crossed to the wall and turned the crank and Ragnar was hauled up into the air, the blood running evenly and steadily down his back towards the waistband of his trousers. I left him dangling a half-metre above the ground, walked over to his bike, unfastened the chain and then used it to tie his hands behind his back. Ragnar regained consciousness and began swearing and screaming at me, tried to twist himself loose but soon stopped, probably because he felt the meat hook digging into his muscles and tissue.

I walked back to the table and stood there. I could almost see the questions in their eyes. Who the hell was going to lead them now? Who was going to provide them with their next meal, with clothes, a roof over their heads and a place where they could be safe from their enemies? It wasn’t going to be that loser hanging there on the meat hook, that much was obvious. But could it really be her — a girl?

‘You took something that belongs to me,’ I said. ‘A Remington rifle. Which one of you has it?’

Of course they couldn’t help themselves; everyone turned towards the guy who had it.

‘You,’ I said to him, a boy with big red pimples who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. ‘Go and get it. Now.’

He stood up and began to walk towards the bikes.

‘Run!’

He ran.

‘You others come with me,’ I said, turning and heading back towards Ragnar. I heard nothing behind me and thought: shit, I’ve lost them. But then I heard the clinking of cutlery and the scraping of chair legs.

We stood in a semicircle around Ragnar. He was breathing heavily, his face twisted in pain, but he kept his mouth closed. Though it was nothing like when Dumbo got his throat cut, the blood dripped steadily from his boots and ran down the slope to the nearest sluice just the way it was meant to.

‘This man here forced one of our own to confess to a murder he didn’t commit,’ I said, pointing up at Ragnar. ‘After that he had him liquidated. There aren’t many rules in Chaos, but the ones we do have are all we have.’ I was talking loudly, louder than I had planned. Maybe it was to drown out the echo that made it sound as if I was standing in a church. ‘Rule number one: one for all and all for one. If we follow that then we’re invincible. If we don’t, Chaos will be history inside a month.’

I looked round. A couple of them nodded.

I heard running footsteps. I turned and the pimply guy handed me my Remington.

‘Ragnar,’ I said. ‘This is your jury. Do you plead guilty as charged?’

He groaned and kicked out with one leg, causing his body to half turn.

‘No, all right then,’ I said. I loaded the rifle and raised it. ‘Then...’

He made a hissing sound and I lowered the rifle.

‘I did it for us.’ His whisper was almost inaudible. ‘For Chaos. We wouldn’t get weapons, nothing, if Dumbo withdrew his confession.’

‘How much did you have to offer Kevin to kill Dumbo?’

‘Not much,’ he whispered.

‘No, because Kevin’s serving life already so he had nothing to lose.’

‘Nothing to lose,’ Ragnar repeated. His head was dangling now.

‘I’m presuming you didn’t tell anyone here you were planning to have a member of the gang liquidated?’

‘All the weapons, the food...’ Ragnar groaned, his chin on his chest. ‘Without me we wouldn’t have had anything.’

‘We would have had Dumbo.’

Ragnar didn’t reply. His body had rotated back to its original position.

‘OK,’ I said, addressing the others. ‘Those who are against me sentencing this person to death, raise your hand.’

No hands.

‘The condemned man gets to choose. Do you want to hang there till you die or do you want a bullet?’

Ragnar lifted his head slightly. His eyelids looked heavier. I had to make an effort to hear what he was saying: ‘I’ll take that bullet.’

I raised the Remington, pressed my cheek against the cool, good butt of the rifle. With an effort Ragnar lifted his head again slightly, as though to make my job easier. Aiming for his forehead I had the idea of trying to make the bullet-hole form a triangle with the eyes.

Then I fired.

XVI

I met Adele Matheson and Chief Inspector Gardell at the airport in the morning. It had been closed during the pandemic, when most of the privately owned airlines had gone bankrupt and never opened up again.

I’d parked out on the runway and could see the cars driving towards me like undulating spectres through the shimmering heat haze. As they got closer their outlines became clearer; one was a police car, the other a low, red sports car. They parked one on each side of me and we all got out.

‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.

‘No need, but I don’t have much time,’ said Adele Matheson.

‘Why here?’ asked Gardell, who was still wearing sunglasses.

‘The visibility’s good,’ I said. I knew they had noticed the Kalashnikov lying on my passenger seat. ‘I just wanted to let you know that as from this afternoon Brad Lowe will be a free man. I’ve arranged for one of his relatives to fetch him.’

Matheson nodded. ‘Chief Inspector Gardell and I take this as being simply information you possess and not implying in any way involvement in any potential case of false imprisonment.’

‘I expressed myself in such a way as to allow of that interpretation.’

‘Then you won’t get any problems from us,’ said Adele Matheson.

‘What remains to be seen, of course, is how Brad Lowe interprets it. If he makes a complaint against me then you know where I am.’

‘If that’s all, then I have a case in court in an hour’s time,’ said Matheson.

I offered my hand. At first she just looked at it as though I had made a gesture that was obscene or at best old-fashioned. Then she shook it lightly. Gardell remained standing where she was as Matheson headed back to her Ferrari. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Haven’t I answered that question once before?’

‘That business about respect for the courts and the rule of law? I don’t buy any of that. Put it another way: I think you’re as driven by revenge as the rest of us.’

‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ I said as I watched Matheson’s red wonder turning dreamlike in the haze. ‘It’s from the law of Moses, one of the earliest collection of laws we know of. It says the perpetrator must pay in kind for the harm done to others. But how can a perpetrator pay for having taken away a member of someone else’s family? The greatest harm isn’t necessarily to the one whose life has been lost but to those who have lost someone they love. The ones left behind who have to live with the loss, the pain and the guilt. The perpetrator should have to live with the same pain.’

‘An eye for an eye,’ said Gardell.

‘It’s a good law,’ I said.

And once she had left I got back into my car and looked at the gun.

I waited. Peering into the haze. Waited.

Then it came. A large black SUV, the same one I had seen driving away from the villa after the attack. Colin Lowe’s car.

Brad wept when I told him I was setting him free and that soon someone I hoped he loved would come and pick him up.

‘I don’t deserve it,’ he sniffled as the tears dripped down onto the mattress.

‘You’ve been here for a while now.’ Then I had to steel myself for what I said next: ‘And everyone deserves a second chance.’

‘You know what, Mr Adams? I’ve learned more from you in the short time I’ve been here than I did from my father during all of my upbringing.’ His mouth opened and closed before a sob came out. ‘I’m so sorry Amy’s dead. I know there’s nothing I can do for you, but...’

I laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘There is something you can do. Chung and Larsen moved out yesterday and I need a strong man to help me move the ammo back here.’

He gave me a puzzled look.

‘Heidi and I need somewhere in the basement to store food,’ I lied. ‘In here it’ll just attract rats through the sewage pipe, so I’m going to have to use this room for ammo.’

‘I’m ready.’

Brad didn’t even ask me why I didn’t simply block off the pipe but just got down to work carrying crate after crate of bullets, grenades, dynamite and petrol.

By the time we were finished we were both sweating and exhausted. Maybe there’s something in the idea that hard physical labour creates a bond between men. I offered him a beer but he declined, saying he knew beer was in short supply and asked if he could have some water instead. It made me recall something a forensic psychiatrist told me once, how people will often say they made a mistake and were taken in by a man who devoted all his spare time to helping the poor and then turned out to have been a serial child abuser. But, said the psychiatrist, they hadn’t made a mistake or been fooled. What was good in the man had really helped these people. It wasn’t done as a cover for the other things he was doing. It’s simply that people aren’t either all good or all bad. Not Brad, not his father, and not me.

Night descends over the Lowe building as the enormous, insect-like helicopter prepares to land with a deafening roar. We stand watching in silence as the air is whipped up and the hairstyles and ties and dresses whirl about us. A few drops of champagne from Colin’s glass sting my face like icy sleet and I taste the bitter sweetness in my open mouth.

And then the helicopter is down, the engine turned off and the rotor arms still spinning as the high-pitched whining gradually descends and decreases in volume and pitch.

Colin looks at me. Liza and Beth are standing by his side.

‘Final group, board now!’ shouts a voice from the helicopter door.

A dozen people swarm towards him.

Colin straightens his back, and I feel my eyes filling with tears.

The way they had done five days ago, when the Larsens and the Chungs took their few possessions and moved out. Larsen spent his money on a smallholding in the south, a place where they could grow their own food and be less affected by the collapse than in the cities. Chung had bought a fishing boat, and a lighthouse for his family to live in.

The way they had filled with tears when Brad left the villa four days earlier.

Why all these tears? Is it because what is inexorable, the certainty that there is no way back from here, always touches something deep in us? Whether it be farewells, or deaths, or just those ocean currents of time, happenings and life itself which separate us and pull us all apart from each other?

I hold out a hand to Colin.

‘Farewell,’ I say.

‘Thank you.’ Colin takes my hand and draws me close to him. ‘Thank you for letting my son go.’

‘Will!’ shouts Heidi. She’s standing by the helicopter door holding Sam by the hand. ‘Darling, come on.’

‘And thank you for letting me take over the villa,’ says Colin.

‘I’m the one who should be thanking you — for the tickets,’ I say. ‘It’s just a pity there aren’t enough for us all.’

‘It’s right that we should stay behind,’ says Colin. ‘I’m sure Brad will come back to us when he’s had time to sort himself out. I think the way you treated him has given him a lot to think about, Will. You’ve given all of us a lot to think about.’

‘Will, darling, they say they can’t wait any longer!’

‘I’m coming!’ I shout back as I look into the eyes of my childhood friend. When choice is free, and yet inexorable. That false sense of freedom, contra to what has already been decided. The choice the brain would always make, based on the sum of all the information and every inclination available at the moment when the time for action comes. The absolute inevitability of the fact that I will never see Colin again, hear his laughter, smell his smell, feel the warmth of his handshake or his embrace. Of course I might be wrong, I can hope I’m wrong. But in the depths of my soul I’m afraid I neither hope nor believe I will see him again. But my eyes are as full of tears as his.

As the helicopter rises from the roof and wheels round I look down at the three people standing there waving, then I turn to Sam who tugs at my arm from his seat between Heidi and me.

‘Where are we going, Dad?’

I point. ‘There.’

‘What’s there?’

‘West.’

‘What’s west?’

‘The future.’

‘What’s future?’

‘It’s what’s coming soon. Look...’ I hold my hand in the air above him, flutter it down like a butterfly and tickle the pit of his throat. ‘It’s here now!’ I shouted as he wriggles about, laughing away. ‘And now it’s over!’ I say and stop tickling him. Hold my hand over him again. ‘But there’s more to come,’ I say, and already he’s giggling in terrified anticipation. As I’m tickling him my eyes meet Heidi’s. They look dulled, but she’s smiling. Again I raise my hand.

‘And that was the end of that,’ I say without taking my gaze from hers. ‘But there’s more to come...’

XVII

I’d found a shady place out of the baking hot sun while I waited for Will Adams to release Brad Lowe. Finally I heard their voices on the other side of the wall. Relaxed, good-humoured. Christ, they sounded like two old chums.

‘So you’re the one who’s come to fetch me,’ said Brad as the gates to the villa closed behind him. ‘I thought he meant my father.’

For a few moments he just stood there looking at me and my bike.

‘You ran out on us that night,’ he said.

‘It was all over by then,’ I said. ‘Getting out of there was the only option.’

Brad thought it over. Nodded. ‘Sure. I would probably have done the same. So what happens now?’

‘That’s what we’re wondering.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re the leader of Chaos. We’re wondering what plans you’ve got for us.’

Brad stared at me in surprise.

I nodded at the bike. ‘I’ll ride pillion because I’m thinking you’ll want to drive?’

Brad gave a big grin. He put his arm around my shoulder. ‘I knew I could trust you, Yvonne. You know, if you hadn’t been a carpet muncher I swear I would have had you for my girl. Where are we going?’

‘To the funfair,’ I said.

The reception had been a bit mixed when I told the gang I was off to fetch Brad and that from now on he was going to be leader. They were happy enough with me, they said, and couldn’t quite understand why I would voluntarily give up tall privileges such as the best bike and first choice of weapons, food, room and girls.

But they did as I told them, painted WELCOME BACK, BRAD on a banner that was hanging above the gate as he and I rode into the abandoned little funfair the gang had taken over the day before. We had two generators with us, eight kilos of meat and ten litres of spirits.

To be honest the place was a bit creepy in the dark, but after dinner we lit the whole thing up in all its glorious bright colours and even got some tinny music going on the roundabout and the dodgems, shooting and loud cheers from the booth where the boys popped off airguns at little balloons, and even a scratchy voice on tape muttering scary stuff from what was left of a burned-out House of Horrors. Brad and I climbed up on horses next to each other on the roundabout. Creaking and out of sync they rose and fell as we shuffled round at an easy pace. Above the sounds of the barrel organs I asked him again: what plans did he have for us?

Eyes rolling, his voice slurred by alcohol, he said: ‘We’re going to kill that fucking Will Adams and the rest of his shitty crowd.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because he locked me up, that’s why!’

‘Not because he killed Herbert?’

Brad grunted and lifted the whisky bottle to his lips. ‘That too. But nobody locks Brad Lowe up. Nobody talks to him like he was a snot-nosed kid. You don’t act like you think you’re a better person, that you’re...’ He made a face and gesticulated, but it wasn’t easy to work out what he was trying to say.

‘Holy?’ I suggested.

‘Yes. Will Adams talks like a priest, but he’s just a fucking...’ He waved the bottle about as though he was trying to catch the word in it.

‘Hypocrite?’

‘Yes!’ He had to grab hold of the horse to save himself from falling off it. ‘Him and those buddies of his, they didn’t just kill, they slaughtered those men Dad sent to rescue me.’

‘They defended themselves, you mean?’

Brad scowled at me and I bit my tongue.

‘How are you going to kill him?’ I asked. ‘I hear he’s turned that place into a fortress.’

‘Yeah, but Brad Lowe has the answer—’ he tapped the mouth of the bottle against his temple — ‘in here.’

‘And that is?’

‘How many bazookas did Ragnar get from my father?’

‘Fifty.’

‘One.’ Brad gave a loud laugh and tossed the empty bottle away; I heard it smash somewhere out there in the dark. ‘One single one is all we need. We fire up through a sewage pipe that goes round into his ammunition dump in the basement. And — kaboom! — the whole house...’ He balanced on the horse as he demonstrated with his hands, arms and puffed-out cheeks.

I nodded. ‘How straight is that sewage pipe? If it’s not straight the grenade will just blow up on the way in.’

‘We’ll find that out,’ said Brad. Already he sounded a little less certain.

I sighed. ‘I suppose you mean I’ll find that out?’

‘Can you?’

‘Who’s the one who always does stuff, Brad?’

‘You, Yvonne,’ he said, and even on a merry-go-round in motion I could feel his stinking alcohol breath on my face. ‘You fix the stuff these other pea-brains here can’t handle.’

‘Give me four days,’ I said.

‘Four? Why...?’

Because the guy I know in the Map and Planning Department is away and he won’t be back until then. I’ll check to see if the pipe goes in a straight line and exactly where it empties out so we don’t blow up the wrong house. OK?’

‘What the fuck would I do without you, Yvonne?’

‘You said it. But are you sure you want to go through with this?’

The lights around us went out, the barrel organ music began to drag, and then went hideously out of tune as the merry-go-round slowed down in the pale moonlight.

‘What the hell?’

‘We’re out of juice,’ I said. ‘But I was asking... d’you really want to kill them? Adams did let you go, after all.’

‘For chrissakes, Yvonne, don’t you get it? That is exactly what pisses me off. I want—’ he swallowed, a drunkard’s tears in his eyes now — ‘I want my father to know that I got the man who humiliated him. Because even if my dad is a bastard I love him. I love my mum and my sister too. But Dad... I’ve been a disappointment to him.’ The horses had stopped completely now, with his in its lowest position, so that I was looking down at him. He straightened up. ‘But once I’ve blown up that fortress and done what he wasn’t able to do himself — then, at last, he’ll see what I’m really capable of. Understand?’

There was a loud bang, a cheer, and the lights and music came back and the merry-go-round began slowly spinning again; Brad was up above me once more on his horse.

That night the whole gang slept inside the House of Horrors. Next morning, as I stood outside in the sharp daylight, Brad came over to me. He was pale and looked badly hung-over.

‘I think I got a bit carried away last night,’ he said as he stood tossing stones at the horses on the merry-go-round. ‘Can we just forget about it?’

‘You mean about Adams? Sure.’ I was relieved.

‘Not that. All that stuff about my dad. Forget it. That’s an order. Just you find out about that sewage pipe.’

My bike and I are finally out of the city and riding along the deserted motorway. The asphalt swallows up all the light coming from the bike and from the moon. I pass the burned-out car wreck that’s been there for the last couple of weeks. Several days pass before someone removed the charred remains from behind the steering wheel. I’m not sure what kind of story that was the end of, but of course the petrol tank was emptied a long time ago. It’s been four days since Brad asked me to find out about the sewage pipe leading into the villa. That’s all been sorted now. The fuel indicator is way over on the left now. It’s finished its story too and is only waiting for the engine to realise it. There are the oil pumps. I slow down. High above me I hear the sound of a helicopter. I glance up and see a light in the sky moving in the direction of the bay. Long before I reach the slaughterhouse I can hear music. There’s a party going on. Another party.

I pull up in front of the hall and see the twins holding up Eric, the guy who had my rifle. Eric’s drunk, swaying about but keeping a tight hold on the bazooka pressed to his shoulder. It looks like the target is a rusting caravan about two hundred metres away.

I drive slowly into the hall. The sound blaring out from the single vast speaker is once again ‘We are the Champions’. God, how I hate it. There are people sitting round the table and singing along. Others are dancing around beneath the meat hooks.

Brad sits alone at the end of the table with his feet up on a chair and a fat doobie in his hand. He looks up at me expectantly.

I take my time. Park my bike. Brush the thighs of my trousers.

‘You’re late,’ says Brad when I sit down next to him.

‘Met a few bumps along the way,’ I reply, recalling the feeling of driving over a guy lying spreadeagled on a spike strip. I nod towards the exit. ‘You’ve seen that the twins and Eric—’

‘They’ve got permission. So?’

‘I got the drawings from my pal in the maps department.’ I open the zip on my leather jacket and hold up the papers I got from Will Adams when I was at the villa, where I got the machine gun, and where I said yes to what he asked of me in return.

‘The sewage pipe goes up to the house in a straight line — all you have to do is stick the bazooka inside it and pull the trigger. I went and had a look around and I found the outlet for the pipe on the slope. The terrain is uneven and there’s a bit of climbing, but we can get there and away again without being seen.’

‘Perfect!’ says Brad with a laugh. ‘So what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘About doing it.’

I shrug. Adams was insistent that I shouldn’t lead Brad on or try to manipulate him. I was to make sure both options were open, so that his choice really was free. Or as Adams put it: as free as we are to choose, being the people we are at any particular given moment in our lives. The point is — said Adams — the choice is Brad’s: he can be his own punishment, or his own redemption.

‘You’re the one who decides,’ I say.

‘We know that, but maybe you’ve heard it said that the sign of a good leader is that they ask for advice. Of course, it’s then up to them whether or not to take the advice.’

‘I can’t offer you any advice when Chaos doesn’t stand to lose or gain anything by this. You’ve got to follow your own heart and your own head, Brad.’

He seems irritated. ‘OK then. I’ve already decided to do it, I just wanted to hear your opinion.’

There’s a loud noise from outside and for a moment there’s silence in the room; even the guy with his ‘Champions’ song keeps his mouth shut for a few seconds. Firelight flares outside the windows and I hear the cheers of Eric and the twins.

‘I thought at dawn,’ says Brad. ‘What do you say?’

‘Dawn sounds good.’

‘But everyone knows that attacks always come around daybreak. Won’t they be especially on the alert, don’t you think?’

‘Could be.’

‘But you still think dawn is best?’

‘Dawn is always best.’

Brad nods. Gives me a long scrutiny before he gets up and shouts: ‘Party’s over, Chaos! Drink up! We ride an hour before dawn!’

Cheers from the stoned gang members. The cheers turn into a foot-stomping chant of: ‘Brad! Brad!’

He smiles broadly and holds his arms out wide in a gesture that both asks them to stop and at the same time accepts their tribute. He looks happy. Really happy. It was the last time I would ever see him look that way.

I wake up. Hear the steady, even breathing from Heidi and Sam. It’s still dark in the cabin, but I can see a strip of grey along the edge of the curtain. It’s no surprise to me that with Colin Lowe’s tickets we’ve got a large cabin with three rooms on the upper deck. Heidi wept with joy. I look at the clock. Soon the sun will start its journey over the horizon.

Heidi snuggles up to me.

‘What’s the matter?’ she whispers sleepily.

‘Just something I dreamed.’

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t really remember,’ I lie.

I dreamed I was standing next to Brad and Yvonne. Brad was laughing and Yvonne looked serious as we stood and watched the burning villa. Brad laughed even louder when he heard the screaming and three people in flames came running through the garden and out towards us, down the slope.

‘Burn in hell, Adams!’ Brad cheered.

I turned and asked him if he couldn’t see who it was who was burning, but Brad could neither see nor hear me. The flaming figures came closer, the tallest one holding two smaller ones close, and they fell to their knees in front of us.

‘Brad,’ said the tallest one. ‘Burn with us. Burn with us.’

And I saw Brad’s eyes open wide. His laughter stopped, his mouth fell open.

He turned. Now he could see me.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You did this.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘All I did was give you a choice. And you chose to start a fire.’

Brad ran forward. He fell to his knees and put his arms around the three of them as though trying to join them in the flames. But it was too late. Blackened and charred they crumbled in his arms. Brad stared at the ash on the ground. Buried his hands in it and screamed as though his very soul was in pain as the wind blew the ash away.

‘But can you tell whether it was a good dream?’ asks Heidi.

I think about it.

‘No,’ I say, and now I’m telling the truth. ‘I can’t. Come here...’

We’re out walking on the deck. I’m carrying Sam, who’s still sleeping. Everything is grey, it’s all either sea or sky, there is no land, no horizon. Single-celled life, apparently that’s how it all began. Then the sun rises up over the rim. As though by magic things acquire form and colour, and a new universe takes shape in front of our eyes.

‘Our first sunrise,’ I whisper.

Heidi repeats it: ‘Our first sunrise.’

A fly lands on the back of my hand. I stare at it. The average lifespan of a fly is twenty-eight days. Does it know that? Does it perhaps wish that life could be longer? If it were offered a longer life in return for wiping out all memory of its loved ones, of all it has achieved, of its best days and moments, what would it choose?

I don’t have time to worry about that right now. I move my hand and the fly takes off.

I need to forget, and I need to do it quickly.

I sit at the desk in front of the shredder. I close my eyes a moment and listen to the humming sound. It could be the fan in the ceiling. It might be coming from the suitcase. Or it could be the people outside on the streets. Then again it could be spy-drones. People say the military still have them.

Anyway, they’ve been on my trail for a long time, and I know that this time I’m not going to manage to get away. It stops here, in a stinking, baking hot apartment in El Aaiún. In the ceiling, between the bullet-holes and the shrapnel damage, a fan slowly rotates. It moves that scorching hot desert air around a bit after the sirocco has brushed aside the heavy Moroccan Berber rugs hanging in front of the windows and the balcony.

In a corner of the apartment, in front of the refrigerator, is a brown leather suitcase. It’s a bomb. When it’s opened, everything will be blown to bits, everything we know and aren’t supposed to know will be gone. But before that can happen, whatever is inside it must be devoured, each brain cell must be consumed, must grow wings. Only then will it be time for the great flight. And before that I must forget everything I know.

But first I have to remember, call up the memories that need to be removed.

The white face on the screen of the shredder looks like a mask in a Greek tragedy. I try not to blink as I study my own reflection and manoeuvre my head so that my pupils are in line with the holes in the mask. Every trace that either directly or indirectly can lead them to the formula must be obliterated. I try to concentrate, because I know that only what I can remember now will be wiped out. Everything else they will be able to reconstruct from my brain, even when I’m dead. And I also know that the most efficient and complete deletion comes when the shredder is fed with memory pictures in chronological order, because then the associative memories are destroyed too. ‘Think of it as like gutting a fish,’ the sergeant who was instructing our research team said. ‘Only the fish is you.‘

OK. First the idea.

The Idea

It came to me in the middle of the night. I’d woken up beside my wife Klara needing to pee. I got up as quietly as I could so as not to wake her and made my way to the bathroom. We were living in Rainerstrasse, in that part of the city that still has electricity and running water. It was raining outside. I know that because I would have remembered if it hadn’t been raining. Half awake, and about to urinate, I noticed I had the beginnings of an erection. I tried to remember what I’d been dreaming but there was nothing there that might have caused sexual arousal. My researcher’s brain simply registered that my body had produced nitric oxide and norepinephrine. As I stood there my thoughts wandered on, created a new dream. I was dead, and my condition was what they referred to during the public hangings that took place directly after the Last War as angel-lust. As a medical student I learned that there was a simple physiological, not chemical, explanation for angel-lust, the fact that some of those on the gallows had erections visible through their trousers: the rope exerted an increased pressure on the cerebellum, and it was this that caused the priapism. Whoever invented the name angel-lust had probably been playing with the idea that there might be pleasure and joy, perhaps even some kind of liberation in death. But only playing. Death is, after all, the ultimate seriousness. The enemy who is always on our trail, whom we spend our lives fleeing from but who will, sooner or later, find us. It’s just a question of when.

The reason my thoughts went looking that night for a connection between lust and extinction, desire and death, was obvious. For some time now our research team had been working to find a cure for hadesitt, the deadly sexual disease that had broken out just before the war, decimating the population of Africa before reaching us in both the western and eastern confederations, as HIV had done almost a century earlier. We had already managed to prolong the lives of certain patients with the medicine HADES1, and slightly lowered the mortality rate in other groups, but it was still up at 90 per cent and we were working with what we hoped was an improved version, HADES2. In connection with this we had been looking into the ways in which the disease spread. It came as no surprise for us to discover that those who had oral sex often, and frequently changed partner, ran a markedly greater risk of being infected with hadesitt than others. It was not until I began to analyse the second column of figures that a further — and quite remarkable — aspect of the study struck me.

We had assembled a smallish group of deceased prostitutes and porn actors, some of whom had died of hadesitt, others from different causes, in search of signs that the mortality rate and the danger of infection had fluctuated over time. The reason for this was that the hadesitt virus had not only developed a resistance to medicines but other survival strategies too, as every living organism does in the compulsive pursuit of eternal life. Since, as previously noted, the death rate from hadesitt was over 90 per cent, it was surprising to note that those who had more than the average amount of sex seemed also to have a longer average lifespan than the rest of the population. Bearing in mind both that this group was more vulnerable to hadesitt and the unhealthy lifestyles of many prostitutes one would have expected them to live shorter, not longer lives.

Of course, it’s not unusual for researchers to see mystical connections and patterns in their data, often related to something that has no connection at all with the hypothesis being tested. Many of my colleagues have been quite properly ridiculed for pursuing research they’ve come across in this way. If you throw a dice to test out a hypothesis that you can influence telepathically to land on four, and it turns out that it lands with an unnatural regularity on five, then there is an obvious temptation to claim that what you were testing was whether the dice would land on the number you were thinking of, plus one. Ethically speaking, of course, that would be rubbish. The rule is: test what is to be tested, answer the question that has been asked. Any answer can be misused by changing the question so that it fits the result, thereby giving the researcher an apparently sensational breakthrough in a wholly different field. And that was exactly what happened to me that night.

I thought of nitric oxide and norepinephrine and in a dreamlike and yet clear-sighted moment spotted a connection. A connection I knew I could not dismiss, not even if it meant falling headlong into the classic trap. I also knew I could not tell anyone about the researcher’s sin I was about to commit.

I flushed the toilet and went to the living room. Light from the last working street lamp on Rainerstrasse filtered in through the rain that ran down the glass. It fell onto the photograph of my brother Jürgen on the wall, onto the elephant rifle hanging above the fireplace, and on the pen Klara had given me as a birthday present one year. I picked up the pen, found a sheet of paper and noted down my wild ideas. Then I crept back to bed, where Klara was still sleeping in peaceful innocence. I looked at her face — calm and still beautiful — but ageing much too fast, before turning the alarm clock back an hour and a half, as though it were a symbolic act.

After I let myself into the laboratory the next morning, before anyone else had arrived, I at once began studying the figures more closely to test out my new hypothesis.

The Hypothesis

Three months after the night I had first thought of the link between sex and increased lifespan I was sitting in the office of my boss Ludwig Kopfer, the administrative director for Antoil Med. He had been listening to me for some two hours, almost without interrupting. Now he clasped his hands together and looked at me over the tops of his spectacles. They were without arms, the kind that just pinch over the nose; I think Sigmund Freud wore a pair.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Kopfer said, the way he always does, and without any suggestion that such an interruption would in fact be tolerated. ‘But what this boils down to is that a compound of nitric oxide and norepinephrine can retard the ageing process and combat disease. And this is something that happens at the cellular level. That in theory this component can completely halt the ageing process.’

‘We know that nitric oxide and norepinephrine affect the blood vessels in the genitals of both men and women during sexual arousal; but they’re also important for the autoimmune system. It’s the combination of norepinephrine and a couple of other substances that retards the ageing process. And I haven’t found any reason why the right combination shouldn’t be able to halt the process completely.’

‘As in—’ he whispered the word — ‘immortality?’

I coughed. ‘As in preventing the body from degenerating with age and ultimately dying from some otherwise harmless illness. There are numerous other ways in which to die.’

‘Immortality,’ Kopfer said again, as though he hadn’t heard me, leaning back in his high-backed chair and looking thoughtfully through the window. ‘The search for the holy grail!’

For a long time neither of us spoke. Outside, the smoke from Dusseldorf’s factory chimneys rose silently into the air. It was strange to think how, fifty years ago, these had almost disappeared. Finally Kopfer spoke.

‘You realise what you are asking for, Herr Jason?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You risk ruining the reputation of the whole company.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘So what if I say no?’

‘Then I’ll hand in my notice and take the material to one of our competitors.’

‘You can’t do that — the data you’re basing this on is the property of Antoil Med and we’ll sue not just you but the company you take this to.’

‘Naturally, I won’t use any of the material from here, I’ll get new data. And now that I know what I’m looking for, better data. And no one can take the idea away from me, because that’s in here.’ I tapped my temple with my index finger.

I could see Kopfer muttering something inaudible, and then he sighed loudly. ‘But eternal life. Good God, Herr Jason.’

‘Of course, there are years of research remaining before we’ll know whether I am right,’ I went on. ‘But I’m willing to stake my reputation and my career on it.’

‘Of course you are, and if you are right then a Nobel Prize in either medicine or biology awaits you, probably both. And if you’re wrong, then you can just start all over again. But for the company...’

‘The company won’t double its value times a hundred if I’m right, it will do so a thousand times. In other words, if there’s a two per cent chance I’m right then it makes rational financial sense to go for it.’

‘For the Eggen family and the other stockholders maybe. But to put the livelihoods of our workforce at risk like that...’

‘The risk to workplaces here will be greater if a competitor gets to develop the medicine. It will replace between sixty and seventy per cent of all other medicines. The branch is facing a bloodbath. The only question is, Herr Kopfer, which side of the bloodbath will you be on?’

Kopfer had a way of rubbing the palms of his hands through his curly grey hair when he wanted to think, as though the static electricity activated his brain. And he did this now. ‘If,’ he sighed, ‘if I allocate you the resources you’re asking for, then it must be on terms of such secrecy that no one, not even husbands and wives, knows what it is you’re working on.’

‘I understand that.’

‘I’ll be talking to Daniel Egger, and he can decide whether or not the rest of the board should be informed. In the meantime, this has to stay between you and me, Jason.’

‘Of course.’

Four days later I was summoned to Kopfer’s office again.

‘Egger and I are agreed that this must be kept under the radar for the time being,’ he said. ‘That goes for internally too. The fewer who know anything at all, the better. I can’t hide a project as heavy on resources as this in the budget; we’ll have to pretend it’s about something else.’

‘I understand.’

‘It will appear to be a development of the hadesitt project, and for practical reasons be relocated to Africa.’

‘Africa?’

‘We own a building in El Aaiún, in the Spanish Sahara. It’s Off-Broadway. Avoid the prying eyes of industrial spies and the media. We’ll explain that it’s closer to the source.’

‘I see. Like the Manhattan Project, a lot of brains isolated in a desert.’

‘Yes,’ he said and looked out of the window. ‘Only that was to invent a bomb capable of wiping out the human race. While this is—’ he looked directly at me — ‘the exact opposite, right?’

The Bomb

The smell of diesel and bars of white sunlight each time the wind moves the carpets. It’s been many years now since the last electric car ended up on the scrapheap and they reopened the oil wells in the Sahara. Somewhere out there a siren is wailing; I don’t know if it’s an ambulance, a police car or one of the military emergency-response vehicles.

Two bangs, in quick succession. Fire and answering fire, or a double puncture at one of the roadblocks? Hopefully it’s about the colonial overlords chasing the guerrillas, or the other way round, and not about me.

El Aaiún always has more questions than answers.

The watch on my wrist is ticking. A present from Klara on our wedding day. I know it’s slow, but it’s not slow enough.

Three months after the company’s decision I, along with twenty-two hand-picked researchers and three semi-trailers filled with laboratory equipment, was in place in El Aaiún. Officially the project was known as HADES2, internally it was referred to as Ankh. Researchers are used to working under conditions of confidentiality, and no one knows more than they need to know to do their jobs, but I was aware that they knew the price they could ask for disclosing information about the project to one of our competitors might be temptingly high. For that reason I had, through the chairman of the board Daniel Egger, a former colonel who still had connections in the military, acquired a memory-shredder which had made the trip out with us. Each member of the team had signed a contract agreeing to subject themselves to it once they had submitted their final reports. The memory-shredder had been developed during the Great War, when the military were given exclusive rights to develop and use technology above the third degree. It was used by officers who possessed information they no longer had any use for, but which could be exploited by the enemy if the officer were taken prisoner. Because even if the officer could withstand the torture or followed standing orders and took his life with the cyanide pill they all carried, our enemies in the Russo-European Confederation had developed Exor, which was even then capable of extracting the memory from a dead and physically destroyed brain. The memory-shredder versus Exor. It was like an image of the technological warfare, move and counter-move, that had brought the world to such a wretched state, and led to the banning of technology in civilian life after the war. Yes, those of us in the health service are occasionally permitted to use the memory-shredder to remove memories in the psychiatric treatment of trauma patients, but this only ever applies to a member of the elite.

Research projects are like films or building projects; they’re never finished on time, or within the budget.

But Ankh was.

That was chiefly because I, as head of the project, had at two critical junctions taken risky decisions concerning the way forward, and focused all our resources on these. If just one of them had turned out to be a blind alley it would have killed off the whole project. My assistant as head of research, Bernard Johansson, who was the only one besides me who had enough of a total overview to question my decisions, asked: ‘What’s your hurry, Ralph?’

He thought both times that we should have split into two groups at these crossroads, the way things had been done in the Manhattan Project. And he was right; we had the personnel, the money and the time for it. They had the time for it. The fact that I didn’t have wasn’t something I could share with Johansson. What I could share with him was the euphoria once we realised we had found it, the ultimate medicine.

It was — as is so often the case once you’ve got your answer — surprisingly simple. But complicated too, in that it demanded a new way of thinking. Evolution’s way is for certain species to survive through producing new, healthier, better adapted individuals, with the older variants getting scrapped and dying out. But if the cell renewal in an existing individual is so comprehensive that the ability to learn is also updated then, metaphorically speaking, there is nothing to prevent an individual from giving birth to itself over and over again. Where normally a baby has to be taught everything from scratch, this reborn individual will appear complete with experiences that give it a crucial advantage in the struggle for existence. So why didn’t such a species already exist? I think perhaps the answer is that it has taken time to develop a species intelligent enough to solve the mystery, but since all mysteries are solved sooner or later then we — meaning nature — have all along been on the right track. Intelligence is natural, the survival instinct is natural, ergo eternal life is natural.

That, at least, was what I was trying to convince myself of as I raised my head from the microscope at six o’clock one ice-cold morning in El Aaiún, looked at Bernard Johansson and whispered: ‘We’ve found it.’ And at the same time sublimated the question: ‘Exactly what have we done?’

We pulled back the curtain and looked out over the desert. As the shimmering red rim of the sun rose over the horizon Johansson said that this was the dawning of a whole new day for mankind. While I thought how that sun must have looked like the flash from the first successful detonation of an atom bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945.

‘Nobel Prize?’ said Johansson.

Maybe. Definitely. But a whole new day for mankind wasn’t what I was looking for.

We dismantled the laboratory at top speed, left just a few things behind, including the shredder, crated up the mice and headed back home to Europe.

The Mice

‘These,’ I said into the darkness, ‘are the twenty African pygmy mice used in the test.’

I depressed the lever on the projector and a new image appeared on the screen. ‘When the experiment started they were all one year old, which corresponds to the average lifespan of the pygmy mouse. We gave ten of them injections. Two months later they were all still alive, while the ten who did not receive injections were all dead.’

There was a coughing from the darkness. Kopfer and I were the only ones in the company boardroom, the other eleven chairs for the time being unoccupied. And yet he’d seated himself some distance away from me.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Jason, but what this boils down to is a chemical formula. A long one, certainly, but all the same, a formula.’

‘The formula contains one hundred and fifteen symbols,’ I told him.

‘And this is not written down in some scholarly paper or on a computer, it’s only—’ in the darkness I caught a movement, as though he were tapping his index finger against his temple — ‘in your head.’

‘Everything from El Aaiún has been shredded, including the memories of those who did not have A-code clearance. Which means, everyone except me, Bernard Johansson and Melissa Worth.’

‘Melissa...?’

‘Worth. The laboratory head.’

‘OK. But I hope you realise the board is not going to stake the whole of the company’s future on the fact that you have managed to prolong the lives of a handful of mice by a few months.’

‘They’re still alive,’ I said. ‘In human terms that means they’re over a hundred and fifty years old. All ten of them.’

‘Or risk ending up with nothing because you’ve forgotten the formula or been killed in a traffic accident. It is highly unusual not to have proper documentation of the work.’

‘But we do, Kopfer. I have signed an agreement that in the event of something unforeseen arising, you can use the bio-memory downloader on me.’

He snorted. ‘Bio-memory downloaders don’t exist any more.’

‘At least one does.’

‘Exor?’ He snorted. ‘Do you know what it costs to use it, and how long it takes to do a complete search of even a single adult human?’

‘Yes, and I know the rumours about it rusting somewhere in the ruins of Paris. But it works, and the army has people with the technological know-how to operate it. So as long as you have my brain, you’ll find my formula in there. Actually, you don’t even need the entire brain — a fragment will do.’

Ludwig Kopfer grunted something, and I saw him raise his arm to look at his watch. He’d gone back to using the kind of analogue watch with a radioactive content that had been banned in the 1960s once they discovered improved and less carcinogenic ways of making the hands luminous, a discovery that had since been lost. ‘Let’s see what the board has to say, Ralph. I’ll call you after the meeting.’

At eleven o’clock that evening Klara and I sat on the sofa drinking white wine and watching Titanic on TV. It’s strange to think that a ship that sank over a hundred and fifty years ago is still lying on the bottom of the ocean. And that there was once a time when it was still possible to make films like that. When progress in technology, knowledge and civilisation was something that was taken for granted. Most had obviously forgotten the dark middle ages, in which, among other things, we had forgotten how to make concrete.

Klara wiped away a tear, the way she always did every time Leonardo DiCaprio gave Kate Winslet that last kiss. Klara had told me that the reason she cried was because they had just met each other, the loves of their lives, and only had these few hours and days together as they headed towards inevitable catastrophe.

Klara had entered my life and our house when I was eighteen years old. She came with my brother Jürgen, three years older than me, who proudly presented his new love to the family. Klara had curly blonde hair, a lively personality and a smile that could melt a stone. Polite, helpful, sympathetic, easy company, the whole family fell for her at once. But not, of course, in the same way I did. Klara had an innocent charm, she had no agenda, she didn’t play little games, and yet just occasionally I sensed a touch of some darker, passionate depth behind those flashing blue eyes when she laughed in my direction. But I never dared to think that it might be related in some way to me. In the first place, I was a loyal brother. Secondly, I was not the kind who was used to arousing this type of feeling in women. The exception had been a couple of colleagues who, I presume, fell for what they took to be a certain intellectuality and a pleasing calmness, perhaps allied to a degree of self-irony and an almost self-negating tendency to be of service. Whatever, throughout Klara’s marriage to my brother she and I adhered strictly to our allotted roles as brother- and sister-in-law. For twenty years I hid my undying love for her, and she did the same. I offered my sympathies when it turned out she and Jörgen couldn’t have children, and I exaggerated my concern when Jörgen fell ill. Just ten years earlier there had still been medicines on the market that could have saved him, and I know that through my connections in medical research, or via some illegal channel, I could probably have managed to get hold of something from the reserves stockpiled for central figures in the worlds of politics, research and the military. But I did not make the attempt, telling myself by way of an excuse that not only would I risk going to prison but that it would also be immoral and egotistical of me to take care of my own family like that when there were others in need who were much more important for the future of society.

In the days and weeks and then months that followed Jörgen’s burial I hardly left Klara’s side. We did everything together. Ate, read, went to the cinema, went walking. Travelled to Vienna and Budapest where we visited restaurants, cafes and museums, including the museums of technology that documented the naive faith of earlier generations that the future was heading only one way. During the evenings we walked the cobbled streets of these decaying cities, hand in hand, talking of everything and nothing. We were both approaching fifty, but while I still had a full head of dark hair, Klara’s had turned silvery grey, and her bright smile and shining eyes were framed by deep furrows. I attributed the early onset of these signs of ageing to grief at the loss of her husband.

It was on the way home from one of these trips, standing alone in the bow of a riverboat, that I told Klara how I felt about her. How I had always felt about her. She told me she had always known, and she felt the same way too. When I kissed her it was with a deep, trembling feeling of happiness, accompanied by a curious melancholy. Melancholy because it had taken us twenty years, or almost half the expected lifespan in the Russo-European Federation, to find happiness.

Four years had passed since Jörgen’s death, but still, out of consideration for the family, we waited a further year before marrying.

I was as happy as a man can be, at the same time as my research into telomeres, the white regions at the end of the chromosome that appear to determine the maximum potential lifespan of the human being, had come to a standstill. Maybe it was my frustration while working at the laboratory, in such sharp contrast to my joy at being with Klara, that meant I began working shorter days. Or did I have some premonition, did I recognise in Klara some of the symptoms we had encountered in the children with Hutchinson — Gilford syndrome whom we had studied, so-called progeria or hyper-ageing, in connection with our research? But I dismissed that thought; the syndrome is genetically determined, and something known about from the moment of birth.

When Klara began having problems with her hips and came home and said that the doctor who had examined her asked if she was really only forty-nine, I gave him a call. And he confirmed that the X-rays had shown him the body of someone he thought must be in her eighties. I arranged for Klara to see a specialist, who confirmed the presence of Werner syndrome, another cause of hyper-fast ageing, but one that can occur later in life. The specialist gave Klara another five years before she died of old age, just fifty-four years old.

Klara accepted her fate with resignation.

I did not.

‘We get the time we get,’ she consoled me, though it did nothing to stop my tears. ‘And if we don’t get the longest time, what we do get is the best, right?’

I gave up my job to spend more time with Klara, but then changed my mind after a couple of months. Longevity was my special field; surely there had to be something I could do beyond simply sitting and watching my beloved crumble away before my very eyes? So I began to work longer hours and with greater intensity than ever before, at one and the same time hunter and hunted. Then the board decided that the economic downturn meant the company could no longer afford to finance something that offered little hope of short-term profits, and I was diverted to the hadesitt research programme.

I had not told Klara about my discovery. Like the relatives of the rest of the research group, she believed I had gone to Africa to find a cure for a sexual disease. She was just glad to have me home again, and as we sat on the sofa and watched the unsinkable ship sink, I sent a stolen glance in her direction. Saw her lift the cup of tea I had made her to her lips as she wiped another tear from her lovely blue eyes.

The telephone in the hallway rang.

I went out and took the call.

‘The board is giving you the go-ahead,’ said Kopfer.

I exhaled deeply, only then realising I had been holding my breath.

‘But they have certain concerns.’

‘Which are?’

‘They say that as long as the medical commission has no written documentation of the contents of the drug, the proceedings could be long-drawn-out, and it might take several years before they give us the go-ahead to begin testing on humans. Bearing in mind the size of the investment, the uncertainty and the time frame before the medicine starts to generate income...’

‘They want me to tell them the formula?’

‘Yes.’

I looked at Klara in the living room, her neck bent to drink her tea. Self-delusion, naturally. By now I was used to it. For Klara’s neck was constantly bent, its elegance a thing of the past.

‘And if documentary proof that it works on humans already exists?’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if I am already in a position to prove to you that the compound stops the ageing process in humans?’

I heard Kopfer stop breathing at the other end.

‘Can you do that?’

Klara put down her cup. She loved the tea I made, especially the new flavour I had brought back from Africa.

‘Soon,’ I said, and hung up.

From the street below I hear loud, angry voices. Spanish, Arabic, Berber. But I can’t think about that now. Should I have brought the elephant gun with me, now hanging uselessly over the fireplace back home? No. I’m alone and have no chance to defend myself, no chance of getting away. People want to live, no matter what the cost. Or so they think. For they don’t know the price, they don’t know what the consequences will be. And the humming from the suitcase is getting stronger, more insistent. Tick-tock, the seconds pass, the walking stick approaches. Everything they can take has to go. Scorched-earth policy. Not just for Klara’s sake. Or for mine. But for humanity’s sake. I’m ashamed of myself, but this act of betrayal is the only decent thing I’ve ever done in my life.

The Betrayal

Kopfer continued to press me to divulge the formula, excusing himself by saying that he was under pressure himself from the board. But I remained adamant that the risk of someone leaking it for financial gain was just too great.

‘Ralph, making that assessment is not your call.’

‘Maybe so, but I’m doing it anyway.’

‘What I mean is that it is not your right. Your duty is to—’

‘My duty is to God and to the human race, Ludwig.’ I saw how Kopfer almost fell out of his chair at my use of his forename. ‘Not Antoil Med. Not even REC. This discovery is bigger than any company or any individual country. The first to get hold of this formula will try to monopolise it and use it for political gain. The only place I could have gone with this would be the United Nations, if it still existed. I’d rather die than hand over the formula.’

Kopfer looked at me for a long time before rising from his seat and leaving.

I stayed where I was, nervous and shaking.

There had been something sorrowing, almost suffering in that look of his. The same look I had seen on the faces of those doctors who came to us with blood samples from their patients, and we had to tell them they were suffering from hadesitt.

I took regular blood and tissue samples from Klara, lying to her and saying I was sending them to a colleague who was working on a cure for Werner syndrome. In the laboratory I was able to see that the medicine was having the same effect as on the mice; the ageing process was not merely retarded, it appeared to have come to a complete stop.

But the medicine also had a side effect we had first observed in the mice. Melissa reported that they were less active, that they stopped visiting the communal cage, and seemed lethargic. The only lively reaction we got from the mice was the way they bared their teeth at the research assistants when they were being fed. I don’t know to what extent African pygmy mice are disposed towards depression. Nor Klara, come to that. For a while I supposed that her abrupt changes of mood, her apathy and general lack of initiative were due to the thought that she would soon be dead. But I hadn’t noticed any of this before I began putting the medicine in her tea, and if the change didn’t exactly occur overnight it was nevertheless so rapid and obvious that I decided to reduce the dosage. With no apparent effect. On the contrary, it seemed as though her mood swings and her pessimism only increased, and that she had developed an addiction to the medicine. Melissa, too, reported that reducing the dosage of Ankh to two of the mice, which she had done on my advice, had had no effect on their behaviour. This only occurred once we started giving them antidepressants. Fortunately the same result was evident in Klara after I began putting a similar mixture in her tea.

One day Daniel Egger, the white-haired chairman of the board, came to my office. The Egger family owned 60 per cent of the shares in Antoil Med, and I had never seen the head of the family wearing anything other than a tweed suit and trainers and carrying a walking stick, the function of which remained unclear, since Daniel Egger trots rather than strolls when walking.

He sat down, placed his hands on the smooth top of his stick and just looked at me.

‘Imagine,’ he said after a while, smiling and displaying a row of teeth so pearly white you might almost think pearl was what they were made of. ‘In the brain directly opposite me now lies the solution to the question that mankind has been asking itself since the dawn of time. How to avoid death.’

‘Maybe so,’ I said.

‘But that is not the most surprising thing, Herr Jason.’ Egger produced a handkerchief and began to polish the tip of his cane. ‘The most surprising thing is that you are a scientist, a researcher who is prepared to betray the most important principle of science: that knowledge is there to be shared.’

‘You think Oppenheimer and his research team should have shared their knowledge of the atom bomb with Hitler and Stalin?’

‘Oppenheimer at least shared it with his superior, the president of the Western Confederation. And you are under the same obligation, Jason. It is the board and the head of this company which has provided you with the means to make your discovery and paid your wages. Your discovery is our property.’

‘My obligation is to—’

‘God and the human race. Kopfer told me what you said.’

‘Of course, I will have to reveal the formula before I die. When that time comes.’

‘That time—’ said Egger, pushing the handkerchief back into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket — ‘might come sooner than you imagine, Jason.’

I noticed that two large men, both wearing suits too small for them, were standing outside the door of my office.

I coughed. ‘Are you threatening me, Egger?’

He looked blankly at me. ‘I gathered from Kopfer that you are prepared to die in order to keep your secret.’

‘Naturally I’m worried that the discovery might do more harm than good if it falls into the wrong hands. Three world wars have been fought for less, Herr Egger. One single life isn’t so much.’

He sighed. ‘God and martyr. Diametrically opposed, and yet mankind’s two favourite roles. You’re trying to play them both, Jason. It’s not right. You’re welcome to play God, but you’re going to have to let someone else play the martyr.’

‘What do you mean?’ I felt a dark foreboding.

He smiled. ‘I think Klara Jason would make a perfect martyr.’

It only took a second for my mouth to dry up. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘If the previous God could sacrifice His son to save mankind, you ought to manage to sacrifice your wife. Right?’

‘I still don’t understand...’

‘I think you probably do,’ said Egger, and pointed to the top of his cane. ‘You know what this is? No, of course you don’t. It’s bone from the black rhinoceros. The black rhinoceros is—’

‘I’ve seen pictures.’

‘— extinct. This is from one of the last of them. I inherited the cane from my grandfather. He had no trouble walking either. Like me, he used it as a reminder that nothing has eternal life, everything disappears, for good and ill. Or all things shall pass, as the Jews said, at least those of them who lived in the USA. But now that death is no longer a certainty, an early death is all the more bitter. Whether it’s your own or that of someone you wanted to spend the rest of eternity with.’ He looked at me, and there was ice in his grey stare. ‘You’re going to give me that formula, Jason. Here and now. If you don’t, then you’ll find when you get home to Rainerstrasse that your wife isn’t there. When you eventually do find her — if you find her — she will be crucified. And I am not speaking metaphorically. She will be suspended in a forest, nailed to a cross of wood by her hands and feet, a crown of thorns on her head, the whole works, apart from that business about resurrecting on the third day. So what do you say, God?’

I swallowed. Looked at him, the way one poker player looks at another who has gone all in. Was he bluffing? I couldn’t quite believe that Daniel Egger, one of the city’s most prominent and respected citizens, a real pillar of society, was threatening me with criminal methods that might have come from a Mafia boss. On the other hand, he had been an officer during the war, and isn’t that exactly what gives society’s alpha males and females their positions? That they’re willing to go further than others.

I nodded in resignation, took a sheet of paper from my desk drawer and began to write.

It took me almost four minutes to write down the formula using the chemical codes in which the world is boiled down to elements, molecular connections, pressure and temperature.

I handed him the sheet of paper.

His eyes scanned the symbols.

‘The Holy Writ,’ he said. ‘But what’s this?’ He pointed to the title, a symbol like a T with a loop above it.

‘The hieroglyph Ankh,’ I said. ‘The symbol for eternal life in ancient Egypt.’

‘Elegant,’ he said, as he folded the sheet of paper with infinite care and placed it in the inside pocket of his tweed jacket.

I watched him as he disappeared down the corridor. He was swinging his stick, and it made a cheerful clicking sound each time it hit the parquet floor. Like the second hand on a clock.

The countdown had started.

I didn’t know how long it would take Egger to find out I had tricked him. Not even the researchers on my own team would be able to dismiss what I had written on Egger’s sheet of paper as nonsense, since their knowledge was only partial. But given time, they would of course put two and two together and discover that the formula on the page did not add up to four.

It took me a week to find somewhere to hide Klara.

As a young medical student I had once, along with some other students, been shown round a mental hospital. It was a place in which the associations with hell could only have been matched by the nightmares and hallucinations of the inmates who lived there. The dark corridors reeked of sterilising fluids and excrement, and from behind locked doors came heart-rending shrieks and groans. Looking in through the food-delivery slots I saw pale faces, empty and terrified, gazing as though hypnotised into the darkness and confusion of their own souls. The person who showed us round, realising from our horrified expressions what we were feeling and thinking, told us that things hadn’t always been this way, and that prior to the Last War the state had had the money and the technology to give the mentally ill a more dignified life.

The place I found for Klara seemed to offer just that. Dignity.

It called itself a convalescent home and was located on a hillside overlooking the sea. Clean, pure mountain air, spacious grounds, large, airy rooms, two nurses to each patient, and daily conversations with a psychiatrist. And — what was even more important — it was in the area formerly called Switzerland and had preserved a form of autonomy that gave it certain privileges. For example, the privileges of discretion, which meant they did not have to report the identities of their patients to the authorities or anyone else. Naturally, it was a service designed for the elite. And the elite were the only ones able to afford the price.

Even using all my savings I would not have been able to afford to keep Klara there for long. Then I thought of our house in Rainerstrasse. It had been in the family for generations, and Klara and I simply adored it. But it was large, and could and indeed should have been home to a family with children. Two rooms and a kitchen were all Klara and I needed. And each other.

‘Now let me show you the gym,’ the female superintendent continued.

‘Thank you, Fru Tsjekhov, but I have seen enough,’ I said. ‘Let’s get the papers signed and I’ll bring her in tomorrow.’

The desert wind whispers a secret, a formula out there. The way Klara now and then could lean into me and whisper forbidden words, words meant for my ears alone, a formula of her own that opened up the gates and made the nitric oxide and norepinephrine start to flare inside me. That for a moment gave eternal life. I don’t want to think about those other words of hers, the hate-filled ones she hurled at me when I came to fetch her. But I must. I must think of her rage, how she spat at me, scraped at the wallpaper with her fingernails and screamed that she had to get out, her eyes rolling wildly. Think how I finally managed to get enough sedatives down her to get her into the car. But also think of her peaceful face as she slept in the back seat while I drove through the night. The car began to overheat on the winding, uphill road leading to the home, but we made it. When I left Klara stood on the steps in front of the home, a nurse at each side ready to restrain her. But Klara didn’t move. Her arms dangled by her sides. Big, heavy teardrops rolled from her eyes as she whispered my name, over and over again — I kept hearing it all the way back. Twice I was on the point of turning round and driving back to fetch her.

I need to think of all this. Think it so that it can be deleted from my brain, so there are no memory traces left to lead them to where Klara is. And I need to think it quickly, with no unnecessary digressions, complete in every respect, so that everything, absolutely everything, will be gone. Because my watch is ticking louder and louder now. Tick-tock. Daniel Egger’s walking stick is getting closer. So I need to think about the visit.

The Visit

Late one evening, two weeks after I had driven Klara to Switzerland, there was a ring on my doorbell. Already it had been a bad day. Fru Tsjekhov had telephoned and explained that their own doctors wanted to stop administering the medicine that I, as Klara’s doctor, had left them, with instructions that it be administered by injection every evening. I had explained that it was to counter Werner syndrome, but now they were of the opinion that it was in fact these injections that were the cause of her psychotic episodes, and that if they didn’t stop dosing her with what was, for them, an unknown medication, then there was a real danger she would descend into a life of full-blown schizophrenia.

The endless acid rain poured down, etching itself into the roof tiles, eating up our house inch by inch. I had put the place on the market — there was even a board out on the lawn — and my first thought, as I heard the doorbell ring through the sound of the drumming rain, was that it must be a potential buyer. That Daniel Egger could not possibly have had time to work out that the formula I had given him was not genuine.

But when I opened the door slightly and saw Bernard Johansson standing there I realised that this was not, in fact, impossible.

‘Well?’ he said, rain dripping from his smooth and strangely egg-shaped skull. ‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’

I opened the door and he stepped inside, took off his coat, shook it lightly and I watched the drops fall onto the Turkish rug Klara had bought when we were in Budapest. We sat in the living room, he on the sofa where Klara and I used to sit.

‘So, how can I help you?’ I asked.

Johansson laughed. ‘Christ, that sounds awfully formal, Ralph.’

‘Maybe, but let’s get to the point, shall we?’

He sat up straight. We could, of course, pretend that it was the most natural thing in the world for him to drop in just like that of a Friday evening, but given that neither this nor anything else remotely resembling social intercourse had ever taken place between us in the fifteen years during which we had worked together, I could see just two possible reasons for his visit. One was that he — the only person on the planet who in under three weeks could have realised the formula was faked — wanted to warn me. The other was that he wanted to exploit it.

Naturally, it was the latter.

‘I have a business proposition that could make us both rich.’ His smile was strained, as though his discomfort was as acute as mine.

He explained to me that when Egger had come to him with the formula I had written down, he had initially — based on his almost complete knowledge of our research — been convinced that it had to be genuine and had told Egger so.

‘But as I continued to work on this so-called formula, I began to realise that you had done what any good liar would do and kept as close as possible to the truth. The omitted elements, however, are so crucial to its success that only someone with my knowledge of the material would be able to fill in the blanks or correct the deliberate mistakes.’

‘With all due respect I doubt it, Johansson.’ I did not, however, see any reason to deny that the formula was defective. Chemistry is chemistry, after all, and Johansson was no idiot.

He nodded slowly. ‘If I were to travel to Shanghai and offer an almost complete version of the formula to Indochina, they would not only give me unlimited resources and the best research team in the world, they would also pay me a fortune to solve the puzzle for them.’

‘But you can’t be certain you will succeed.’

‘Give us time and sooner or later we will.’ He sipped his tea. ‘With you aboard things will move much quicker, and they will pay more. So what I’m offering you is a partnership. We split fifty — fifty.’

I had to laugh. ‘Has it not occurred to you that if I wanted to get rich I would have done as you suggest, only gone it alone?’

‘Yes,’ said Johansson. ‘And for that reason I know that temptation is not enough. I need threats as well.’ His tone of voice was regretful, his expression hangdog.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘If you decide to reject my offer then, first of all, I will sell the project to Indochina. They will then make public what they are working on in order to stimulate the stock market, so that by an emission they can raise enough capital to fund the project. And once it is made public, I shall inform the board of Antoil Med that it is you who have sold the formula. And unlike you, who has shown no inclination to cooperate, I will be believed. Egger’s response will be...’ Johansson took another sip of his tea. Not just for effect — I think he actually enjoyed being as brutal as the situation demanded. He put down the cup as though he no longer liked the taste. ‘...quick, and not necessarily painless,’ he concluded.

‘You’ve thought it through thoroughly, Johansson. But there’s one thing you’ve forgotten. Suppose I’m not afraid to die? Or more accurately: what if Ankh is as important for mankind as the splitting of plutonium was a hundred and fifty years ago, offering the chance to make a better world, but also the possibility of destroying it overnight? There isn’t enough dreyran in the soil or the atmosphere to produce enough Ankh for everyone. So who is to decide who shall have eternal life? Who could accept not being among those chosen? With a population that dies only as a result of accident, suicide or murder, draconian legislation will be required forbidding the birth of children if the earth is not to be over-populated in the course of a single generation. And who is to decide who should enjoy the privilege of procreation, and who not? In short, if Ankh is not administered by a global authority then it will be not merely be confederation against confederation but every man for himself, the war of all against all in which neighbours and families turn on one another. My death is just a drop of blood in the ocean. But if I release the formula it’s an ocean of blood. So go ahead, Johansson.’

He nodded as though all this had already occurred to him. Or at least thought that it must have occurred to me. ‘Ralph, for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a utilitarian. And of course it’s a noble idea, that the individual should sacrifice himself for the greater good, as they say in the Western Confederation. That’s why I’ve always admired not just your intelligence but also your character and your ability to love others besides yourself. Where is Klara, by the way?’

I didn’t answer, showed absolutely nothing.

‘I see,’ he said quietly. ‘They will find her. And they will find the formula. They will use Exor on you. They will vacuum your brain.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said.

‘Is it?’

All that could be heard in the room for the next few seconds was the rain beating onto the permanently brown lawn out there. Exor was controlled by the army. It was rumoured to be in a bunker where the Louvre had once stood, guarded by an entire squad. That it didn’t need a whole brain to extract memories but that, using only microscopic fragments, it could interpolate its way to the whole memory bank. On the other hand this could take well over a year and cost the same as it cost to provide a big city with energy over the same period of time. Nevertheless, as was also usually the case in matters of technical research, Johansson was right. Offered the chance of a medicine that could give the generals eternal life, of course they would use Exor.

My brain approached the problem in the way prescribed by Descartes, using first intuition and then deduction. The conclusion that emerged was disheartening, but therefore also — strange as it may sound — liberating. Because there was so obviously only one solution there was no need to torment my brain with doubts, deliberations and procrastination.

‘You know, in former times hunters used to bring trophies home with them from Africa,’ I said as I stood up. ‘They used to mount the heads of rhinoceroses, zebras, lions and antelopes up here,’ I said, pointing to the wall above the fireplace. ‘But since there are no longer any large mammals left in Africa, this is what I took instead.’

I lifted down the heavy old elephant gun I had bought in a bazaar in Marrakesh. ‘The seller claimed that it was used to kill the last elephant in Africa. And I liked the irony of having a rifle above the fireplace instead of a lion’s head. A dead rifle that no longer has any function, that has been overcome and now hangs on the wall, an object of general ridicule. We all die, but what if, before that, we are able to do something that is useful for the whole flock, for the community? Yes, I probably am a utilitarian. I really do believe that we have a duty to carry out any act that benefits rather than harms mankind, whether we want to or not.’

I pulled on the breech. The rusty mechanism obeyed with a grating reluctance. I stared into the barrel.

‘Ralph,’ said Johansson, his voice uneasy. ‘Don’t be stupid, shooting yourself won’t help. You might mean it to be a utilitarian act, but Exor can extract data from your brain long after you’re dead.’

‘What I was trying to say,’ I went on, ‘is that the correct moral action does not necessarily need to be morally motivated. This action, for example, is primarily motivated by my egotism, my love for my wife, and my hatred of you.’ I turned the rifle on Bernard Johansson, aimed at his head and fired. The report was loud, but the hole left in Johansson’s forehead surprisingly small considering the heavy calibre of the bullet.

‘And yet it is, from a utilitarian perspective, correct,’ I said, walking round the body and registering the fact that Klara’s sofa would never be quite the same again.

It’s been a long journey back to the Spanish Sahara. For several days now I’ve been hearing the low, crackling sound of the larvae’s hungry chomping, not knowing whether it came from the suitcase or from my own head. But then it fell silent, the way a coffee pot does just before the water begins to boil. Then a low rumbling. Rising and rising. And now finally it’s boiling, Klara, my beloved. I hear voices and heavy, shuffling footsteps on the staircase. They aren’t afraid of me, they know they have all the superiority they need, but not all the time. None of us has that. From the moment we’re born we start to die.

These are the last thoughts, they’re about the letter. About the mice. About Anton. About the decision. And so, Klara, I have to leave you.

The Decision

Waking in the bed Klara and I had shared as the day broke, my first thought was that it had all been a nightmare.

But Klara was gone, and the body of Bernard Johansson lay on the sofa in the living room.

I had thought about it all night and slowly begun to realise that getting rid of a body is a very difficult thing to do. That in preparation for obvious solutions such as dumping the body in the sea, or burying it in a wood, there are any number of practical logistical problems which can seem almost trivial but which, taken together, impose a dauntingly high risk of being caught.

What bothered me most was not being convicted of murder, but the thought that, lacking my brain, they could use Exor on Johansson’s. Because even though that wouldn’t give them the whole formula it would get them so close that — as he had correctly pointed out — sooner or later they would find the solution.

I looked at the clock. There was every reason to suppose that Johansson — who was, in most respects, a completely typical young researcher — had kept his criminal plans and his visit to me secret, so it would probably be a while before they started looking for him.

I dragged the body into the bathroom, hauled it up into the bathtub and covered it with the Turkish rug.

Then I headed off to work.

I sat in my office staring at the keyboard of my typewriter. Newspapers lay next to it, the headlines all about the planned meeting between the four confederations at Yalta. Of course the thought had occurred to me. I had dismissed it, thought it again, dismissed it. And now thought it yet again. I had even put paper in the typewriter and was ready. Because Egger had been right. It really is second nature for a researcher to want to share his knowledge. And if Ankh was to benefit all mankind then it could only happen one way: if everybody, absolutely everybody, was given the formula at the same time, so that no one could exploit the knowledge to further their own power. Of course, there might still be war over access to resources such as dreyran, but if I were to give the world leaders the formula while they were gathered at Yalta, and they realised that the only alternative to chaos and violence was if they reached an agreement, passed laws and ensured a fair distribution of resources, then it still might end well.

It was just a question of faith in human nature. Like Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. You needed to persuade yourself to believe something that all experience and logic told you it was impossible to believe. Because there was actually no alternative. If I — a very good but not exceptional researcher — could stumble across the formula for prolonged and in theory eternal life, someone else would be able to also, regardless of whether or not I kept it secret. It’s chaos theory. Anything that can happen, will happen.

So: one text, four copies, one to each of the four confederation leaders. One formula with an explanation of what it was, and why it was being sent out to everyone. It wouldn’t necessarily get there quickly. Things weren’t like they used to be in the days when the internet existed. But my letter-heading and my signature, Head of Research at Antoil Med, would at least ensure that it would be read by the confederations’ experts. And they would immediately realise what it was they held in their hands, and that it was urgent. It would have to happen at Yalta.

I pressed down the first key. My office door opened.

Normally I would have reprimanded my subordinates for entering without knocking, but when I saw the distraught expression on Melissa Worth’s face I realised it wasn’t a simple oversight. I steeled myself. This could only be about one thing: Bernard Johansson’s mysterious absence.

‘The mice,’ said Melissa, and now I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears. ‘They. They’re...’

‘They’re what?’

‘They’re killing each other.’

Melissa and I ran to the laboratory and found the other members of the team gathered round one of the large communal cages where we had allowed the mice to socialise, before they had started to show signs of aggression.

Six of the mice lay bloody and lifeless in the sawdust, the four others were locked in their individual cages.

‘We were just following the programme,’ said Melissa. ‘We reduced the injections to a minimum, and because the mice had stopped showing aggression when we fed them in their individual cages we opened up the slides to the communal cages, just like we all agreed. They went straight for each other, all of them, as though they’d just been waiting. It happened so quickly we didn’t have time to get them back in their cages before...’ Melissa’s voice cracked up. She had been there from the very beginning, one of those who had seen the miracle take place, who had given her time, her whole life to the project.

‘Take them out,’ I said. ‘Freeze them.’

I returned to my office, intending to complete my letter to the confederations.

But instead I sat there, staring at the blank sheet of paper, seeing the dead mice in my mind’s eye. I wasn’t particularly surprised by what had happened — but why wasn’t I? It was one thing that the aggression in the mice appeared to have been a side effect of Ankh, another thing altogether for the mice to continue to be aggressive even after the doses were reduced. Was it possible that the medication brought about a permanent change in the chemistry of the brain? Other questions arose: among mice there can hardly be a complex scale of aggression, and the difference between hissing at another mouse and killing it are probably minimal. What effects might Ankh have on the behaviour of humans? Klara’s behaviour was an isolated case and could well be the result of completely different factors. Nor had she developed murderous tendencies. Or had she? What would have happened if I had stopped giving her the antidepressants along with the Ankh?

And so, as the sun sank below the rooftops, reddened by the factory smoke, I had still not begun my letter. Instead I started going back over our research material. Might it be something in the Ankh that was causing the aggression? And if so, could it be removed without affecting Ankh’s power to retard the ageing process?

At ten o’clock that evening, after the others in the team had gone home, I went to the laboratory and took blood samples from two of the dead mice. I then took one from myself and ran tests. Read the results and concluded that it was as I had thought. The active ingredient that retarded the ageing process was the same as that which triggered the aggression. One and the same thing, two sides of the same coin.

But the blood-analysis machine showed something else too. That the level of Ankh in the mice’s blood was lower than it ought to have been, given that they had been injected that same day. I took one of the capsules from the fridge and put it under the microscope. In less than a minute I had located the two holes in the lid, invisible to the naked eye but in the microscope enormous craters. Someone had punctured the capsules with a microscopically small hypodermic needle. Through one of the holes they had withdrawn Ankh from the capsule, and through the other replaced the stolen medicine with some other fluid, probably water.

As Head of Research I had access to my team’s clock-cards and I checked these to see if there was a pattern, if the same person had been clocking out last from the laboratory recently. Because Ankh had a very limited shelf life and wasn’t needed in large quantities for the African pygmy mice, the medicine was in continuous production, but in extremely small quantities. In other words, a thief would need to operate in the same way, continuously, and on a very small scale.

I found what I was looking for. A name. Anton, a quiet and shy individual who, although thirty-nine years old, still worked as a research assistant. I don’t know whether it was lack of ambition or because he had never taken the last part of his biology exams. Or it could have been for health reasons — over the last couple of years he had been off sick for long periods at a time. Whatever, on account of his long tenure and responsibility for tidying the laboratory at the end of the day, he was a keyholder, and from the others’ clock-cards I could see he had been alone in the laboratory for at least two evenings every week over the last year.

I mulled it over for a while before calling Kopfer and telling him what I had discovered.

Then I turned out the light and went home.

Two hours later I was sitting on the sofa with a beer watching the TV when it came on the news. A reporter standing in the street in front of a squad car with a flashing blue light said that the police had tried to arrest a thirty-nine-year-old man in his home, suspected of stealing from the company where he was employed, and that the suspect had attacked the two policemen with a knife, critically injuring one of them. The man had now barricaded himself inside his flat. Armed police had arrived and were trying to engage him in dialogue, but the thirty-nine-year-old had shown no willingness either to communicate or to give himself up. The excitable reporter pointed to a house and explained that the man had just been seen in a window, waving a bloody knife and shouting threats and obscenities. At this point the anchorman in the studio interrupted and gravely announced that they had just heard from the hospital that the badly injured policeman had been declared dead.

I stared at the TV pictures. The police stood sheltering behind their cars, their guns pointed in the direction of Anton’s house. If they didn’t already know it, they would soon find out that he had killed their colleague. It was as though I could see their fingers squeezing a little harder on the triggers. I didn’t need to watch any more; the outcome was a foregone conclusion and I switched off the TV. I put the empty beer bottle on the table and looked at the syringe that lay there. That I myself had taken Ankh home was hardly a question of theft. It had been done to speed up the testing on humans, on Klara. And, after she had responded positively, although with what might look like unfortunate side effects, on myself. I had been taking Ankh for a month and a half now and hadn’t noticed any sign of depressive thoughts or increased aggression. But of course, it could well be the case that the individual involved is not aware of his own feelings, that he or she rationalises them away and regards the situation itself as difficult or demanding of a violent response, that the cause is not to be found in his or her own psyche or behaviour.

I thought of the body in the bathtub.

I, who had never laid a hand on another person, not even as a child, had killed a man.

Ankh. If I hadn’t seen it before it was clear enough to me now. Ankh was not a recipe for eternal life, it was a recipe for chaos and death. Fortunately, for the time being at least, the recipe was a secret, the formula that gave more than just the ingredients involved but also the correct procedures, pressures and temperatures necessary, and that could not be reproduced by an examination of the material itself; for that they would need to get hold of me, find the recipe in my brain.

The memory-shredder. It was still in El Aaiún.

I called the airport. And found I was in luck. If I could make it to Vienna the following day I could get a seat on board the weekly flight to London, and from there the Madrid plane that departed every other day. From then on I would have to improvise. I booked the ticket.

Afterwards I called Switzerland. I got Fru Tsjekhov on the line, apologised for ringing so late and explained that Klara should be completely taken off the medicine I sent them. That I had discovered it might be the direct cause of her mental condition. And that we could only hope the damage wasn’t permanent, but that it would probably take some time before she was herself again.

I went up to the bedroom and packed a bag. Some clothes, the few roubles I had, and a wedding photo of Klara and me. If I drove all night I could make Vienna by daybreak.

When I entered the bathroom to get my toiletries I stood looking in the mirror at the bath behind me.

I turned, pulled away the rug and looked at Bernard Johansson. At the hole in the forehead. The coagulated black blood that had run over the bottom of the bathtub. I might perhaps manage to delete myself, but once they found the body of my closest associate they would definitely put his brain through Exor. How long would it take them to fill in the remainder of the formula? A hundred years? Ten years? One year? But it was too late to hide the body now.

The dead man appeared to be staring at a point in the ceiling above me, as though still waiting for the angels to come and take him away. Fly off with his soul.

Fly off.

I swallowed.

It had to be done.

I went back up to the bedroom and took out an old leather suitcase.

Then I went down to the cellar and fetched the saw.

The Journey

From out in the corridor a voice shouts my name.

Something hard pounding on the door. Could be the butt of a gun.

The journey. I must remember the journey. Vienna. London. Madrid. Then a transport flight to Marrakesh and from there hitched a ride on a lorry.

The driver spoke a little Russian and wondered what I had in the suitcase that smelled so bad. I told him it was a human head, that I had opened the cranium up with an axe and left it out in the sun for three days to attract the flies. That flies had crawled into every orifice and laid eggs that had turned into larvae and were now eating up the brain. The driver laughed at my joke, but still wanted to know why.

‘So that he can get to heaven,’ I said.

‘So you’re religious?’

‘Not yet. First I need to see his ascent to heaven.’

After that the driver didn’t speak any more, but when he let me off at El Aaiún and I gave him the last of my roubles he leaned out of his window and said in a quick, low voice: ‘They’re on your trail, señor.’

‘Who is?’

‘I don’t know. I heard in Marrakesh.’ Then he put his lorry in gear and disappeared in a cloud of black diesel smoke.

I let myself into the flat and the stuffy air hit me like a wall. For months I had lived and worked here. I had suffered, hoped, rejoiced, wept, taken wrong turnings and still achieved the miracle. But most of all I had longed to be at home with Klara. I opened the windows and doors and dusted off the memory-shredder. Switched it on and breathed a sigh of relief: the batteries were still able to provide power. I took the wedding photo out of the bag, put it on the table next to the shredder, sat down, took a deep breath, concentrated. The desert wind moved the heavy rugs in front of the windows. Then I began at the beginning.

So that’s how it is. The snake bites its own tail and the circle is closed.

I shut my eyes. Everything’s inside now. Everything that must be wiped out, deleted, vanished. Including Klara. My darling, darling Klara. Forgive me.

As the door crashes open I press the large button on which it says DELETE. After that I remember noth—

I’m staring up at a large fan in the ceiling. It’s turning slowly, but I can’t move. I hear two sounds: a low humming, and a regular tapping sound. Two faces enter my field of vision. They’re wearing sand-coloured camouflage uniforms and pointing at me with machine guns. I have so many questions, and I know the answer to at least two of them. The humming I can’t identify, but the tapping is easy to recognise. It has to be the walking stick belonging to Daniel Egger, chairman of the board at Antoil Med, the company I work for.

‘Release him,’ says a voice. And sure enough, it’s Egger’s.

I’m able to move again, so I sit up. Look around. I’m sitting on the floor in a room in semi-darkness. Light leaks in between the hanging rugs. Where the hell are we?

Egger sits in a chair directly in front of me. He’s in uniform, like the others. It’s a little too new-looking to be his old colonel’s uniform from the days before he took over the family concern. The face is lightly sunburned. He leans his chin against the smooth, black top of the stick and directs his cold, intelligent gaze on me.

‘Where is the formula?’ he asks. His voice sounds hoarse. Maybe he has a cold.

‘Formula?’

‘For the medicine, idiot.’

He says it calmly, as though it’s my name. Idiot? Have I done something wrong?

‘But it’s in the reports I sent to Kopfer,’ I say.

‘What reports?’

‘What reports? The research reports on HADES1, they’re submitted every week and—’

‘Ankh!’ snarls Egger. ‘I’m talking about Ankh.’

I look at him, look at the armed men in the room. What’s going on?

‘Ankh?’ I repeat, as my brain searches for a place where this word might have hidden itself.

Egger looks at me expectantly. And then my brain finds the word in there, in the drawer in which it’s hidden.

A drawer from my childhood, when I read about Egypt. ‘You mean the hieroglyph for eternal life?’

Egger’s sunburned face glows even redder. He turns to the desk behind him. There’s a machine there, I don’t know what it is. It looks like one of those personal computers, from the days before the collapse of civilian technology. Egger picks up something next to the machine and holds it up in front of me.

‘If you don’t give me the formula we’ll find her and kill her.’

It’s a photograph in a wooden frame. I recognise myself, of course, but not the woman in the picture. We’re dressed like a bridal couple and I try to recall the occasion. Perhaps it was at a carnival, or some kind of practical joke. I really try, but the pretty, if ageing, face of the woman doesn’t excite any associations. And yet it seems as though Egger is serious about his threat. Can’t help wondering if maybe the man isn’t quite all there.

‘I’m really sorry, Herr Egger,’ I say. ‘But I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

It’s hard to interpret exactly what it is I see in his look. Rage? Hatred? Bewilderment? Fear? Like I said, it’s hard.

‘Boss,’ says a voice. I look towards the end of the room where a man is standing with a sergeant’s stripes on his chest. He points at a worn leather suitcase with his gun. ‘There’s a humming noise coming from this.’

I see that the other men start backing off towards the walls.

‘Brown!’ barks Egger. ‘See if that’s a bomb.’

‘Jawohl!’ A man steps forward. He’s holding a metallic object that resembles what people used to call a mobile phone. Runs it along the side of the suitcase. And now I recognise the suitcase. It’s the one I inherited from my brother Jürgen. Did I bring it here myself? And suddenly it dawns on me, why nothing dawns on me, why I have this feeling of staring at a jigsaw puzzle in which not just individual pieces are missing but the whole puzzle. Because that apparatus with a screen on the desk, doesn’t that look like the apparatus I once saw used on a patient suffering from trauma, a so-called memory-shredder? A machine that shreds certain parts of the memory, eliminating specific thematically connected memories but leaving the rest untouched? Have I used such a machine on myself? Egger was asking about a recipe. Have I removed a recipe from my memory? For a bomb? Is that a bomb inside the —?

‘The suitcase is clean,’ says the man with the metallic object.

‘Open it,’ says Egger.

The men around him press their backs against the walls. My heart beats faster.

‘We’ll all die if we don’t find the formula,’ hisses Egger. ‘Now!’

The sergeant steps forward, flips up both locks on the suitcase and looks to be taking a deep breath before he flips the lid open.

The humming is now deafening, and it is as though we are staring into a black storm, a night in motion. It takes a second for me to realise what this is. Then it rises up towards the ceiling in a single dense mass, there to break up into black sections that again divide into even smaller sections. Flies. Fat, heavy flies. And now that they’re all over the room, attention focuses on what is revealed inside the suitcase.

A human head.

The skull has been split open. Eyes, lips, cheeks, all the soft parts are gone, probably eaten up by at least one generation of larvae now matured into grown flies. But all the same, perhaps because of the bare and unusually egg-like shape of the head, it seems to me that I recognise the extremely intelligent researcher I once employed as my deputy and assistant, Bernard Johansson.

A breath of wind causes the rugs to flap into the room, sunlight floods in, a puff of warm air strikes my face.

‘The flies!’ shrieks Egger. ‘They’re heading for the light! Catch the flies!’

The men stare at him in puzzlement. Look up towards where the swarm has already magically disappeared; only a few flies are left now around the slowly rotating ceiling fan.

One of the men opens fire on them.

‘No!’ Egger shouts. He’s almost crying.

No one stops me when I get up, walk over to the window and lift aside one of the rugs.

I’m looking out on a hillside. There are roofs below me, and the settlement continues all the way down to a point where it suddenly stops, and desert takes over. And beyond that: just sand, and a sun that is either risen and on its way up through the sky, or setting and on its way down, it’s hard to tell when you don’t know which direction you’re looking in. It’s very beautiful. And speaking of the sky, I think of the flies which are now, for the first time in their short lives — the lifespan of the average fly is twenty-eight days — free and on their way up into the heavens, taking with them what they’ve consumed of Bernard Johansson’s head. I close my eyes and feel a remarkable freedom, in spite of the men with the guns behind me. I don’t know what it is, only that I’ve unburdened myself of something, and now feel myself as light as a... well, as a fly.

If they don’t intend to lock me up, are they going to shoot me now? Maybe, and if so then it’s for something I’ve forgotten, something I found it necessary to shred; that at least is the only image that emerges when I join up the dots linking the few clues I find here in this room. And if I were to summarise my allotted span before they shoot, what could I say? That I have used my life, my twenty-eight days, to develop HADES1, a medicine that might be the start of something that will reduce the suffering of humanity. So no, it cannot have been a completely wasted life. That’s fine. There’s nothing I miss.

But still I feel a curious emptiness somewhere inside me. As though an organ has been surgically removed, I can’t find any other way to express it. And there, in that emptiness, I feel that yes, there really is something I miss.

I miss having known love. Having had a woman in my life.

Part 1: The Opening

‘You can feel your eyelids getting heavy,’ I said.

The pocket-watch — maker unknown but weighted by sufficient gold to keep it swaying steadily for some time — had been in the family’s possession since 1870.

‘You are feeling tired. Close your eyes.’

The silence was complete. The street-facing windows were triple-glazed, so that not even the chiming from the mighty bells of the Duomo di Milano penetrated. It was so quiet that the absence of ticking was noticeable. The hands were splayed out on each side from the moment the watch breathed its last. Now the mute object was minus the function a watch is meant for.

‘When you wake up you will not remember that you were gravid or that you’ve had an abortion. The child never existed.’

I felt suddenly on the verge of tears. When I lost my own child I also lost what we psychologists call my affective control, meaning that I could whimper and blubber over the slightest thing that reminded me of it. I pulled myself together and continued: ‘It will seem to you as though you came here to be cured of a nicotine addiction.’

Ten minutes later I carefully woke Fru Karlsson from her trance.

‘I don’t feel any craving at all,’ she said as she buttoned her mink coat and looked at me.

I was sitting behind my desk and taking notes with the Montegrappa pen I had come across many years ago in an antiques shop. Patients like to see you making notes, it makes them feel a little less like something on a conveyor belt.

‘Tell me, Dr Meyer, is hypnosis difficult?’

‘It depends what you’re hypnotising,’ I said. ‘As film directors say, the hardest to work with are children and animals. And it’s easiest with a receptive and creative spirit like yours, signora.’

She laughed.

‘There are rumours that you once managed to hypnotise a dog, Dr Meyer. Is that true?’

‘Just rumours,’ I smiled. ‘And even if I had, I have a vow of confidentiality as regards all my patients.’

She laughed again. ‘But what power it gives you!’

‘I’m afraid I’m as powerless as anyone else,’ I said, searching through the desk drawer for an ink cartridge to replace the one in the pen, now empty. The leader of a local chess club I used to belong to once said to me that the reason I always lost was not that I didn’t know what I was doing, but that I sabotaged my own chances of winning through my bewildering weakness for the weak. He suspected that I would prefer to sacrifice a castle rather than a knight because I liked the knight better. Or because I thought of myself as a knight.

‘They’re pieces, Lukas,’ he said. ‘Pieces! The knight is the least valuable, and that is a fact, not preferences.’

‘Not in every position. The knight can get himself out of some pretty tight situations.’

‘Knights are slow and always arrive too late to save anyone, Lukas.’

I found the ink cartridge, a narrow metal sleeve the same length as the pen, and with a thin steel tip like a hypodermic syringe. I realised it would be my last one, that Montegrappa pens and cartridges were no longer produced. Like so many other uselessly beautiful quality products it had vanished beneath the merciless pressure of global competition.

I wrote slowly, reverently, careful not to waste my words. Fru Karlsson would start smoking again. And she’d tell all her friends that Dr Meyer was no good so I’d spared a rush from that quarter. She wouldn’t remember she’d had an abortion. If she ever did it would be because something had overridden the hypnosis. A special word, a mood, a dream, it could be anything. As in my case. At times I’ve thought I might like to obliterate Benjamin and Maria from my memory. At other times not. Anyway, it’s been a long time now since I had the ability to hypnotise myself. One learns too much about it. Like the conjuror no longer able to enjoy being fooled, even when one wants to be.

Once Fru Karlsson had gone I packed my beautiful black leather Calvino bag. I’d bought it because it had the same name as the anti-Fascist rebel Italo Calvino. And, of course, because I could afford it.

I knotted my Burberry scarf and walked into the reception area. Linda, who was the receptionist for me and the two other psychologists in our joint practice, looked up.

‘Have a nice day, Lukas,’ she said with an almost inaudible sigh and a scarcely noticeable glance at her watch which showed, as usual, that it was still only three. She used this Americanism not, primarily, to bless the remaining hours of daylight, or until I went to bed, but to point out the injustice in the fact that my working day was so much shorter than that of my two colleagues, and therefore hers. I think she believed — or thought she believed — that my not taking on more patients showed a lack of solidarity, but there was no way she could know that in recent years the psychology practice had become secondary and functioned more or less as a cover for my other, real job. Which was to kill people.

‘Have a nice day, Linda,’ I said as I strolled out into the lovely December sunshine.

I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind whether or not Milan is a beautiful city. It has been in the past, you only need to look at the pictures from back then, when Milan was a city in Italy, and not in Capitalia, as I call the stateless condition the world is in today. Of course, before the last of the physical world wars it had been almost supernaturally beautiful, but even after the bombs the city has preserved a discreet but distinct elegance in which the fashion houses in particular had influenced the style and taste, and vice versa. In the days before the sixteen giant business cartels assumed control of Europe, North America and Asia, factory emissions were subject to central authority regulations, which meant that even in Milan, with one of the worse air-pollution problems in Europe, one could still on a good day see all the way to the white peaks of the Dolomites. Now it lay over the city in a constant veil, and those who could not afford the overpriced air conditioners now in the hands of a monopoly lived lives that were short and sickly.

The cartel-run media tell us that people are richer than ever before and prove it by presenting us with statistics showing the real income per inhabitant. The reality is of course that the creators and directors of the cartels earn a thousand times more than the average worker. Eighty per cent of them are on temporary contracts with no chance to plan for the long term. They have to live in the ever-expanding slum that surrounds the city on all sides save in the north.

After Milan became the centre of European finance, with the Borsa Milano and the headquarters of seven of the cartels, the population exploded. The city was now not only the largest in Europe but also harboured the world’s third-largest slum. I’m no socialist, but you don’t need to be one to feel a longing for a time when incomes were lower but distributed more evenly, and there was a functioning state which did its best to help those who were struggling.

I passed the Duomo di Milano. In front of the imposing cathedral, queues of the tourists and the faithful extended into the large square of the Piazza Duomo. At the other end of the square I passed the tables of what those of us working in the business call Café Morte, Café Dead. The men sitting there — and they were exclusively men — had newspapers and phones in front of them while their eyes swept the square in search of possible employment. The market for contract killing had grown exponentially once the cartels and an unregulated open market took over, and those offering the service could principally be divided into two classes, a bit like prostitution. Café Morte was the outdoor market, for the street-walkers. Customers using the place could get a job done for a fee in the region of 10,000 euros. The quality was variable, as was the discretion offered; but in a society in which both the police and the authorities were drastically reduced and institutionally corrupt the risk of being caught was acceptably low. So the response of the family members or the employers of a target was quite commonly to arrange a contract killing. It meant that the business — like gun running or drug smuggling — was expanding.

The first cartel killings, in which personnel from rival cartels were killed in order to weaken their competitors, were carried out by taxi drivers, and it’s generally believed that that’s why we’re referred to as ‘drivers’. But you’ve got those who wait for their fares at a taxi rank like the Café Morte, and then you’ve got the limo drivers, the ones who work the indoor market, the luxury prostitutes, the ones you need to approach through a middleman called a ‘fixer’. Drivers like that have reputations and can cost as much as ten times what they charge at the Café Morte, but if you want to take out some well-protected employee from one of the cartels then these are the ones you need to hire. People like me.

I had no idea I had a talent for work of this kind, would even have thought the opposite. But a high degree of empathy can also help in understanding how an opponent thinks. In the two years I’d been in the killing business I’d become one of the most in-demand names. Income from my psychology had been sinking from the day my son turned eight years old and died, and after Maria committed suicide it dried up completely. But money wasn’t the reason I became a driver. As a psychologist I’m used to deducing people’s simple and often banal motivations, and that includes my own. And my motive was revenge. I was able to live with the fact that my child had been born dumb. That was just mere chance, no one’s fault, and it didn’t spoil anyone’s happiness. But I couldn’t live with what had taken Benjamin’s life: human greed, businessmen who had worked out that if they took a few discreet shortcuts around the expensive fire regulations required for their electrical products they could sell them cheaper than their competitors and still increase the profit margin. I realise it might seem a bit strange to claim that a defective bedside lamp could be the cause of a man abandoning his humanity and embarking on a career as a spreader of death. And I use the word ‘spread’ advisedly; because I didn’t have one name to focus my anger on I had to take revenge on all of those who ran the cartels and took those kinds of decisions, those whose unscrupulous worship of Mammon had taken Benjamin and Maria from me. The way a terrorist whose family has been killed by a bomb will fly a plane into a skyscraper full of people he knows aren’t personally responsible for his loss but who are still complicit in their death. Yes, I knew exactly why I had become a man who murdered prominent members of the cartels. But such knowledge doesn’t change anything; insight like that doesn’t necessarily lead to a change in behaviour. Spreading death did nothing to slake my thirst for revenge — I had to keep going. I could of course have ended my own life, but the sudden realisation that life is meaningless doesn’t necessarily mean that people want to stop living. People like Maria are, after all, the exception.

I carried out a test which I did at regular intervals, letting my gaze sweep across the pavement tables outside the cafe. Noted that I still did not register any flicker of recognition in the gazes that met mine. They simply recorded the fact that I was not a customer and moved on. Good.

To carry on making a living in the limousine trade it was imperative that no one — not even the customer — should know your face. The fixers took twenty-five per cent of the fee and they were worth it, if for no other reason than that we could hide ourselves behind them. Among those who got taken in the limo branch — and by ‘taken’ I don’t mean by the police — there were more fixers than drivers. You only had to look at the gravestones in the Cimitero Maggiore to know that.

In addition to my unquenchable thirst for revenge I had certain other advantages as a driver. One of them was Judith Szabó, known simply in the business as the Queen. She was one of the three or four best fixers and her abilities were legendary. People said the Queen never left a boardroom meeting without a deal, and at this moment in time I was her only regular client. And only lover. I think. Of course, I can’t be certain — her previous steady client also believed he was her only lover. Another advantage was that unlike many of the other drivers I had a credible cover, at least I did as long as I had enough patients not to make it seem odd that I should keep on turning up at the office. My third and most important advantage was that I had a murder weapon the others didn’t. Hypnosis.

I stopped at a pedestrian crossing and waited for the light to change from red to green, all senses on the alert. I no longer like standing still in a public setting without knowing who the people around me are. A rifle with a telescopic sight and silencer behind one of those French balconies, a knife in the back as the lights change to green, the blade up into the kidneys so the initial pain is so great the victim is unable to make a sound but is left lying there as the crowds move on.

There was a time when drivers were at the top of the food chain, or at least had no need to walk in fear of their lives. This was before the cartels began employing the best of them on a permanent basis, so that the drivers themselves became key employees and, as such, legitimate targets. The cartels had organised their own militia which were in practice above the law, and competition for the markets — meaning principally technology, entertainment and medicine — was becoming more and more reminiscent of old-fashioned wars than old-fashioned capitalism. I had recently read an article that compared the situation with that of the Opium War of 1839, when the British East India Company, with the support of the British government, went to war against China to defend their right to export opium to the Chinese, on the basis of the mercantile principle of free trade. Today it was no longer about opium but technology, entertainment, a kind of mild stimulant known as artstimuli, and medicines that extended one’s lifespan. The strange thing was that while the markets were deregulated and the competition in every way tougher, the number of actors had fallen, not risen, and the incidents of mono- and oligopoly more frequent as a result of the acquisitions. Because as they say in the world of the sharks: size is everything. Or rather, size won’t help if you’ve got no teeth. The teeth were the best brains, the best inventors, the best chemists, the best business strategists, and in due course these rose to the same status and wage levels as the top footballers. But after a while those companies that were unable to afford these wages — and were unscrupulous enough — began to kill the best brains of the others as a way of lowering the standards and enabling themselves to compete. The best companies had to respond in kind in order to remain market leaders, and the best chemists, inventors and leaders were replaced by a new aristocracy: the best contract killers. It looked as though the company with the best killers would, in the long run, turn out winners. And that’s what started the cannibalising process we’re in the middle of now. Companies hired killers to kill their competitors’ best contract killers.

And that’s why I froze when I heard the voice behind me, and a little to my left, in what is so aptly called the driver’s blind spot. It wasn’t because I recognised the voice — I didn’t — and yet I knew it had to be him. Partly because he spoke the Neapolitan variant of the Calabria dialect, which was why they called him ‘il Calabrese’ (Broccoli). Partly because I had been halfway expecting him to appear sooner or later. Partly because no other driver but Gio ‘il Calabrese’ Greco could have sneaked up on me like that. And partly because I could see, reflected in the windscreens of the passing cars, that the man behind me was wearing a white suit, and Greco always wore a white suit when out on a killing.

‘Now that’s quite an achievement,’ said the voice into my ear.

I had to steel myself not to turn. I told myself there would be no point, that if he was going to kill me he would already have done so or would do before I could do anything about it. Because what we are talking about here is the best driver in Europe. This is not a matter of opinion. For several years Greco had been the highest paid driver in Europe, and we live in an age in which it is generally accepted that the market is always right. According to Judith, when she was Greco’s fixer she could get double what Thal, Fischer or Alekhin were paid.

‘Think you’re better than me, Lukas?’

I stepped back half a pace as a trailer whizzed by in front of my face and made the ground shake.

‘To the best of my knowledge they pay you three times what they pay me. So no.’

‘What makes you think I’m talking shop, Lukas? I’m wondering if you think you fuck her better than me?’

I swallowed. He laughed. A hissing laughter that began in a T and then turned into a long, jerking S.

‘I’m joking,’ he said. ‘I am talking shop. The killing of Signor Chadaux. The board of his company couldn’t decide whether it was a traffic accident or a suicide. So they called in an expert on death. Me. Because on the footage from the traffic-monitoring camera—’ he pointed up towards the facade on the other side of the road where I knew the cameras were mounted — ‘you see Signor Chadaux standing with the other pedestrians waiting for the red light right where we’re standing. But when the lights changed to green and everyone began to cross, Signor Chadaux was left standing here alone. He looks like he’s asleep on his feet as another crowd of pedestrians comes up alongside him. But then the lights change to red, he closes his eyes and moves his lips, as though he’s counting inwardly. Have you seen the recording?’

I shook my head.

‘Then perhaps you saw it when it actually happened?’

Again I shook my head.

‘Really? Then let me describe it for you. He steps straight out onto the pedestrian crossing. Know how many cars ran over him before they managed to stop the traffic? No, then you probably don’t know that either. Let me tell you something they didn’t put in the newspaper, and that is that Signor Chadaux had to be scraped off the asphalt like chewing gum.’

‘Did they find out whether it was an accident or a suicide?’

Greco laughed that thin, hissing laughter of his. Softly, but so close to my ear I could still hear it above the traffic.

‘Chadaux’s company is a competitor of one of the companies you’re working for. You believe in coincidence, Lukas?’

‘Sure. They happen all the time.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Greco wasn’t laughing any more. ‘I studied the video a few times, then I came down here to take a closer look. In particular I checked that traffic light that you can see in the video Signor Chadaux has his eyes fixed on.’

Gio Greco pointed to the set of lights directly opposite us. ‘It has screwdriver markings on it. And when I checked the security camera it turns out it was down for about an hour the previous night, not that anyone could explain why. How did you do it, Lukas? Did you install a screen in the traffic light which you could use your phone to communicate with to hypnotise Signor Chadaux? Did you tell him when to step out into the road, or was there a trigger? The red light, for example?’

Through the winter cold I could feel the sweat breaking out over my whole body. I had only ever spoken to Greco twice before, and I was afraid both times. Not because there was anything to be afraid of — this was before drivers were used to liquidate each other out. It was just his aura. Or rather, the absence of an aura, the way cold is just the absence of warmth. The way pure evil is just the absence of mercy. As I see it, a psychopath is not a person possessing a special quality, but someone just lacking something.

‘Have they put you on to me?’ I asked. ‘Chadaux’s company?’

On the traffic lights in front of us the red figure gave way to the green, and on either side of us people streamed across. If I moved, would I get a bullet in the back?

‘Who knows? Whatever, you don’t sound as if you’re all that afraid to die, Lukas?’

‘There’s worse fates than leaving this vale of tears,’ I said as I watched the retreating backs of the pedestrians who had left us alone on the pavement.

‘Better than being left — I think we can agree on that, Lukas.’

The first thing that occurred to me was, naturally, that he was talking about how Judith had left him. It would have been naive to suppose that he wouldn’t find out somehow or other that I had taken his place as both her client and her lover. But something in the way he said it made me think he might have been referring to me. That it was me who had been left by my son Benjamin and by my wife. I had no idea how he might have come by such information.

‘Hello, I’m...’ he said in English. The words came slowly, rhythmically. I stiffened.

‘Relax,’ he said with a soft laugh. ‘I’m not going to shoot you here right in front of the security cameras.’

I forced one foot forward, then the other. I walked on without looking back.

The most obvious reason Milan has become the capital for Europe’s drivers is, of course, that it has become a centre for technology and innovation. The best brains are here, the richest companies. The city is a watering hole on the savannah where animals of every kind congregate; apart from the handful of herbivores so large they’ve got no need to worry, most of us are hunters, prey or scavengers. We live in a symbiotic relationship of fear from which none of us can escape.

I walked along one of those narrow cobbled pedestrian lanes that twist slightly so you can’t see far ahead. Maybe that’s why I always choose this route to my office: I don’t have to see everything that lies ahead.

I passed the small, exclusive fashion shops, some of the less exclusive, and the workshops housing the craftsmen who experienced a renaissance after the mass production of so many goods came to a standstill as a result of the shortage of raw materials.

My chessboard was waiting at home for me, set up for my favourite game, Murakami versus Carlsen. It was a game from the years after Carlsen peaked, but well known because in the very early stages Carlsen wandered into a trap so obvious and yet so cunning that it was afterwards called the Murakami Trap and became as famous as the Lasker Trap. Murakami would later use a brutal variation of the trap in an even more celebrated game of lightning chess, against the young Italian comet Olsen, from right here in Milan.

My heart was still pounding after the encounter with Gio Greco. I knew, of course, that murder in the street wasn’t his style; he left that kind of thing to the drivers. But when he had said ‘Hello, I’m...’, I had felt certain my time was up, and I would soon be meeting Benjamin and Maria again. I don’t know whether it’s because Greco is a fan of Johnny Cash, but his calling card, his farewell to his victims is, according to legend, ‘Hello, I’m Greco.’ I know some people say he only began saying that after the legend arose. If he wasn’t actually present, that is. Because he was capable of remote killing too, as the case of the spectacular attack on the Giualli family in the Sforzesco Castle the previous year showed.

I knew no one was following me, but naturally I couldn’t help wondering why he had suddenly appeared like that and given me just half of his famous line. Because Greco had been right; I didn’t believe in coincidences. Was it a threat? But why should I take the threat seriously when both he and I knew he could have done the job there and then; it would have been a perfect opportunity. What was he planning? Maybe he just wanted me to believe he was planning something, maybe that was just an old lover wanting to make sure the new one didn’t sleep too well at night.

My thoughts were interrupted by loud voices and shouts ahead of me. A crowd of people were gathered in the narrow street, standing with their heads looking upwards. I looked up too. Black smoke was belching out from a French balcony on the floor below the top. Behind the balcony bars I saw something, a pale face. A boy. Eight maybe? Ten? It was hard to tell from below.

‘Jump,’ shouted one of the onlookers.

‘Why doesn’t someone run up and get the boy?’ I asked the man who had shouted.

‘The gate’s locked.’

Others came running. The crowd doubled, trebled in size and I realised I must have arrived just after the fire had been discovered. The boy opened his mouth, but no sound came out. I should have realised at once, and maybe I did. It probably wouldn’t have changed anything; I could feel the tears welling up inside.

I ran to the gate and hammered on it. A small aperture opened and I was looking into a bearded face.

‘Fire on the sixth!’ I said.

‘We’re waiting for the fire brigade,’ the man answered, his voice suggesting a line already learned and rehearsed.

‘That’s going to be too late — someone has to rescue that boy.’

‘The place is on fire.’

‘Let me in,’ I said quietly, though everything in me wanted to scream.

The gate opened slightly. The man was tall and broad, with a head that looked as if it had been beaten down between his shoulders with a sledgehammer. He was wearing an ordinary driver’s uniform, a nondescript black suit. So when I pushed my way in and past him, it was because he allowed me to do so.

I sprinted up the stairs, the toxic air scorching my lungs as I ran, counting each floor. When I stopped on the sixth there were two doors. I grabbed the handle of the one on the left. It was locked, and I heard the furious barking of a dog within. Then I realised the balcony was on the right side of the front of the building and tried the handle of the second door.

To my surprise it opened and smoke came billowing out. Behind the black wall I glimpsed flames. I pulled a piece of my woollen coat up over my face and went in. I couldn’t see much, but it seemed to be a small apartment. I headed in the direction the balcony had to be and banged into a sofa. I shouted, but there was no reply. Coughed and headed on. Flames licked from an open fridge door and on the floor in front of it lay the twisted and charred remains of something. A bedside lamp?

As I say, I don’t believe in coincidences, and this was an orchestrated replay, arranged for my benefit alone. Yet I still had to do what I knew I was expected to do — I could see no alternative.

A sudden gust of wind briefly wafted the smoke away from the balcony door and I saw the boy. He was wearing a dirty blazer with a badge on it, a stained, threadbare T-shirt and trousers to match. He stared at me with wide-open eyes. His hair was fair, just like Benjamin’s, but not as thick.

I took two quick steps forward and wrapped my arms around the boy, lifted him up and felt the small, warm fingers grab the skin at the back of my neck. I raced towards the front door, coughing smoke. Found it after feeling my way along the wall, tried to locate the handle. Couldn’t find it. I kicked at the door, put my shoulder to it, but it wouldn’t budge. Where the hell was the door handle?

I got my answer when I heard the hissing from the fridge, like the sound of air escaping from a punctured hosepipe. Gas streamed out, igniting the flames and illuminating the whole apartment.

The door had no handle. No keyhole, nothing. Directed by: Gio Greco.

Without letting go of the boy I ran back to the open balcony door. I leaned over the wrought-iron railings on the shallow balcony.

‘Breathe,’ I said to the boy, who was still staring at me with his wide-open brown eyes. He did as I instructed, but I knew that no matter how far out I held him, we would both soon die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

I looked down at the crowd in the street below, the faces staring up open-mouthed. Some were shouting, but I heard nothing, their words were drowned by the raging of the flames behind us. Just as I didn’t hear the sirens of the approaching fire engines. Because there were none.

The man who had opened the gate for me, he wasn’t just wearing the same suit as the others at the Café Morte; his face also had the same cold, closed expression, as dead as his victims.

I looked to my right. There was an ordinary balcony there, but it was too far away, there was no chance of reaching it. No balconies to the left, but there was a small ledge leading to the nearest window in the neighbouring apartment.

There was no time to lose. I held the boy a little bit away from me and looked into his brown eyes.

‘We’re going there, so you’re going to have to sit on my back and hold on tight. Understand?’

The boy didn’t answer, just nodded.

I swung him over onto my back and he held around my neck and wrapped his legs around my stomach. I stepped over the railing, holding fast to the rail as I placed one foot on the ledge. It was so narrow there was room for only a small part of one shoe, but fortunately they were my thick winter shoes, stiff enough to provide some support. I let go of the railing with one hand and pressed it against the wall.

People down below were screaming up at us, but I was hardly aware of them, or of the height. Not that I’m not afraid of heights, because I am. If we fell we would die, no question. But since the brain knew that the alternative to balancing on the ledge was burning alive it did not hesitate. And because balancing requires more concentration than the summoning of desperate powers, the brain temporarily closed down the fear side since that served no useful function in the current situation. In my experience, both as a psychologist and as a professional killer, we human beings are surprisingly rational in that respect.

With infinite care I let go of the railing. I was standing with my chest and cheek pressed in against the rough plaster and felt myself in balance. It was as though the boy realised he had to remain quite still on my back.

There was no longer any shouting from the street below; the only sound was that of the flames that were now outside on the balcony. In a sort of slow shuffle I started to move carefully to my right along the small but hopefully solid ledge. Solid it wasn’t. To my alarm I saw it disintegrating in gel-like pieces beneath my feet. It was as though the pressure from the shoes created a chemical reaction in the ledge, and I could see now that it was a slightly different colour to the rest of the facade. Since I was unable to stand in the same place for more than a few seconds before the ledge began disintegrating I kept moving. We were already so far from the French balcony that retreat had become impossible.

When I was close enough to the window in the neighbouring apartment I carefully loosened my Burberry scarf with my left hand while holding on with my right to the protruding windowsill. I had been given the scarf by Judith as a fortieth birthday present, along with a card on which she had written that she liked me a lot, a joke referring to the strongest word I ever used to express devotion to her. If I could manage to wrap the scarf around my hand I could break the windowpane, but one end of it was trapped between the boy’s arm and my neck.

The boy gave a start and moved as I jerked the scarf free, and I lost my balance. With my right hand gripping round the windowsill and only my right foot on the ledge I swung out helplessly from the facade like a barn door on hinges, almost fell, and then at the last moment managed to grab hold of the window ledge with my other hand.

I looked down and saw the Burberry scarf gently drifting down towards the ground. The height. The hollow feeling in my stomach. Got to keep it out. I raised my bare right fist and punched the windowpane with all my might, trying to tell myself that by hitting so hard I was reducing the risk of cuts. The glass shattered in a shower of shards and I felt the pain race up my arm. It wasn’t from the cut but because my fist had hit something hard. I grabbed hold of whatever this hard thing was, leaned to one side and saw that my punch had landed on a metal grid. It was hinged on both sides and locked in the centre with a large padlock. Who puts wrought-iron bars on a sixth-floor window?

The answer was obvious.

Through the bars I looked into a small, bare, dimly lit apartment. No furniture, only a large fire-axe hanging on the wall directly facing me, as though on exhibition. Or to put it another way, as though Greco wanted me to see it immediately.

Scrabbling, scraping sounds. A dark figure ran over the floor snarling and jumping. I felt the wet jaws and the teeth across my fingers holding round the bars. Then it dropped down to the floor and began howling furiously.

Instinctively I leaned backwards as the dog jumped up at me, and now I could feel the boy’s small hands slipping down my neck. He wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. We had to get in there, quickly.

The dog — a Rottweiler — sat on the floor directly below the window, slathering from its open jaws with white, glistening teeth. It stood up on its hind legs and leaned them against the wall, but its snout kept butting up against the bars and it was unable to reach my fingers. As it stared at me with a cold, expressionless hatred I noticed something dangling from the collar around its thick neck. A key.

The dog gave up. Its forepaws slid down and it sat on the floor, barking up at me.

The boy tensed his legs and tried to ride higher up my back. He was whimpering softly. I stared at the key. At the fire-axe. And at the padlock.

Greco was willing to sacrifice a piece.

That’s what the great chess players do. Not to give the opponent an advantage but to improve their own position on the board. At that exact moment I couldn’t see what his plan was, but I knew he had to have one. During a chess tournament in Nottingham in 1936 Emanuel Lasker, the German world chess champion, watched his opponent think for half an hour before finally offering him a major capture. The German declined the offer but went on to win the game. When he was asked afterwards why he hadn’t taken the piece he replied that when an opponent as good as his thinks about a move for half an hour before deciding that the sacrifice is worth the reward, then he certainly wasn’t going to respond by making the exact move his opponent had been expecting of him.

I thought about it. Ran through it. And made the move my opponent had been counting on.

I squeezed my left arm between the bars. It was so tight the sleeves of my jacket and shirt were pulled up exposing the naked, bloodied skin. My offer to the dog. Which responded silently and at lightning speed.

It twisted its lips and I could see the teeth sink into my underarm. The pain didn’t come until it clamped its jaws. I pushed my right arm through, but as my hand stretched for the key around its collar the dog pulled my left arm down towards the floor in an attempt to get away from my free hand.

It isn’t true that certain breeds are able to lock their jaws, but some bite harder than others. And some are more intelligent than others. Rottweilers bite harder and have a higher IQ than most. So high in fact that I chose a Rottweiler when I made a bet with two other psychology students that I could make an animal perform simple tasks — such as nodding several times, for example — under hypnosis. But the only thing I managed was to get it to sit quite still, and there was nothing new in the fact that a few simple techniques can get animals — everything from dogs and chickens to pigs and crocodiles — to lie motionless and apparently under deep trance. The hypnotist can only take partial credit for this catatonic state, which is due as much to the instinct to ‘play dead’ in situations in which flight is impossible. The aim is to arouse the predator’s reluctance to eat something that is already dead and possibly diseased. But it was obviously new enough for my two friends, who handed the money over and earned me an undeserved reputation as the great animal hypnotist. And at that stage of my life I couldn’t afford to turn down either one.

I forced my right hand in between the bars until I could reach down to the dog and let my hand rest lightly on the animal’s forehead. Moved it slowly and rhythmically back and forth while keeping up a stream of low talk. The dog looked up at me without releasing its jaws. I don’t know what it was feeling. A hypnotist is not, in virtue of his trade, any kind of sage. He’s just someone who’s learned certain techniques, an average chess player lacking in any particular insight who makes the opening gambits he has seen praised in some book. But obviously there are both good and bad hypnotists, and I was, after all, one of the good ones, perhaps even one of the best.

Even in humans, what hypnosis does is leapfrog over the slow cognitive processes, which is why it works so surprisingly quickly, quickly enough for a man waiting at a pedestrian crossing to be manipulated by simply looking into a traffic light for a few seconds and seeing there some previously implanted trigger.

I saw the dog’s eyelids half close and felt the jaws relax. Continuing to speak slowly and calmly I moved my right hand to the chain-collar, released the key and pulled it towards me. At that same moment I felt the boy’s grip loosen and his body start to slide down my back. I reached out behind me, grabbing across the little body and caught him by the lining of his trousers before he fell off. I held on to him but knew I wouldn’t be able to do so for long.

I had managed to hold on to the key by pressing my thumb inside the key ring; now I had to work it out and get it in the padlock in the middle of the bars. It couldn’t be done with one hand. The bite was almost completely relaxed now and carefully I pulled my arm away, feeling at the same time how I was also pulling at the dog’s head. The teeth of a predator incline backwards, I reflected. It’s logical, so that they can hold on to their prey. So very carefully I pushed my arm a little further inwards before lifting it, and this time my hand came free. The blood ran down my forearm and into my palm so that I almost slipped off as I gripped round one of the bars with my little finger and ring finger.

‘Hold on tight for ten seconds,’ I said loudly. ‘Count out loud.’

The boy didn’t answer but renewed his grip around my neck.

I let go of him and using the other three fingers and my right hand I managed to get the key in the padlock and turn it. The hasp sprang up. I pushed one side of the grid open and turned so that that the boy could climb off me and get in through the window.

From the street below came the sounds of applause and bravos. I entered the apartment. The dog sat quite still, staring off into space, or perhaps deep into itself, who knows? I don’t read the professional journals any more, but I do recall a listing once of animals believed by researchers to experience an ‘I’, and that list didn’t include dogs.

The door was lined with a blank metal plate and like the door in the neighbouring apartment it had no handle. To make sure it was actually locked I gave it a little shove with my foot before lifting the fire-axe down from its two hooks on the wall. I tested its weight and studied the door.

Blood from my arm dripped onto the wooden floor below me with a deep, sighing sound. I heard another sound and turned to the window.

The boy was standing directly in front of the dog. He was stroking it!

I saw the muscles tense beneath the dog’s smooth dark fur, saw its ears prick up. The trance was over. I heard a low growling.

‘Get away!’ I shouted, but I knew it was too late. The boy managed a half-pace back before his face was splattered with blood. He sank to his knees, a look of shock in his eyes. The blade of the axe was wedged into the wooden floor directly in front of him, and between the blade and the boy lay the decapitated dog’s head with its twisted lips. The heart pumped two final spurts of blood from the mutilated body.

For a second or two I simply stood there. And only now did I realise that so far not a sound had come from the boy’s lips. I dropped to my knees, right in front of him. Took off my coat and wiped the blood from his face with it before placing a hand on his shoulder and making eye contact with him, then shaping my words with my hands:

You’re a mute, is that right?

He didn’t respond.

‘Are you a mute?’ I asked in a loud, clear voice.

The boy nodded.

‘I had a son who was a mute too,’ I said. ‘He used sign language, so I can understand that. Do you know sign language?’

The boy shook his head. Opened his mouth and pointed in towards the gap. Then he pointed to the axe blade.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I said.

The phone rang.

I took it from my jacket pocket. It was a FaceTime call, unknown number but I had a hunch who it was. I pressed the answer button and a face appeared on the screen. It looked like a Guy Fawkes mask, the mask once used by idealist revolutionaries the world over to protest against the powers that be, the nation state. With the thin moustache, the goatee beard and the unfailingly ironic smirk that contracted the eyes, Gio Greco looked a bit like a pig.

‘Congratulations,’ said Greco. ‘I see that the two of you have made it to the torture chamber.’

‘At least there’s no fire in here,’ I said.

‘Oh, when you see what I’ve got lined up for you’ll be wishing you’d died in the fire.’

‘Why are you doing this, Greco?’

‘Because the Abu Dhabi cartel are paying me two million. You should feel honoured, it’s a record price for a driver.’

I swallowed. Acquiring a reputation as a top driver carries its own risks, greater and smaller. Greater, because the price on your own head goes up; smaller, because other drivers won’t take a job where they know there’s a good chance they’ll be the ones that end up in a grave. I’d been relying on that smaller risk to give me some protection.

‘I could actually have pushed the price even higher,’ said Greco. ‘If they’d been the ones who approached me.’

‘So you were the one who went to them?’

‘The job was my suggestion, yes. And I knew I could offer them a price they couldn’t refuse.’

The sweat was prickling all over my body, as though it thought that getting rid of liquid like this would improve my chances of survival.

‘But why... all this? You could have just shot me at the pedestrian crossing.’

‘Because we had the budget for something a little more extravagant than a bullet, something that would get us talked about in the business. Creating a reputation is, after all—’

‘Why?’ I had shouted, and saw the boy looking at me with frightened eyes. There was silence at the other end, but I could almost hear his contented smiling.

‘Why?’ I said again, struggling to keep my voice calm.

‘Surely you must know that. You’re a psychologist, and you’re fucking the Queen.’

‘Is it jealousy? Is it as simple as that?’

‘Oh, but jealousy isn’t simple, Lukas. See, after Judith left me I sank into a pretty deep depression. I ended up seeing a psychologist, and he told me that in addition to depression I was suffering from narcissism. I don’t know whether it makes sense to say someone suffers from having a well-founded self-image, but I told him anyway I’d come for some happiness pills, not to get a fucking diagnosis about completely different things.’

I said nothing, but what Greco told me was classic narcissism, where the narcissist refused to recognise the personality disorder or seek treatment for it, and that it was typically through depression that those of us in the health service got to meet the half per cent of the population the diagnosis applied to.

‘But he wouldn’t stop, the idiot,’ Greco sighed. ‘Before I shot him he managed to tell me that a characteristic of narcissists is they have a highly developed sense of envy. Like the first narcissist in literature, Cain. You know, the guy in the Bible who killed his own brother out of jealousy. Well, I guess that just about sums me up in a nutshell.’

I didn’t know whether this shooting his psychologist was a joke, and I had no intention of asking. Nor did I propose to point out the futility of taking revenge for something you know you can never get back. Maybe because that was exactly what I was doing with my own life.

‘Now do you see, Lukas? I am the victim of a personality disorder that makes me want to see you suffer. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘I suffer every day, Greco. For God’s sake, kill me and let the boy go.’

He smacked his lips three times, the way a teacher responds when a pupil gets the addition wrong on the blackboard.

‘Dying is easy, Lukas. And your suffering is less now, because the Queen is good medicine, don’t you think? OK, I want to open that wound up again. I want to see you squirming on my fork. I want to see you trying to save the boy. And failing again. I hear that when your son had smoke poisoning you drove him to the hospital but you got there too late.’

I didn’t answer. When we smelled the smoke in the middle of the night and ran into Benjamin’s room where he was lying next to that smouldering bedside lamp, he’d already stopped breathing. I drove as fast as I could, but I’m no racing driver and the hospital was too far away and as usual I was a knight on the wrong side of a chessboard.

‘The boy’s vocal cords,’ I said. I had to swallow. ‘Was it you who cut them?’

‘To make him more like your son. So blame God for the fact that your wife gave birth to a mute.’

I looked at the boy.

Where had Greco found him? Probably in a slum on the outskirts of the city, a place where the sudden disappearance of a small child wouldn’t excite much attention.

‘I can just jump out of the window,’ I said. ‘And put an end to the whole game.’

‘If you do the boy’s guts will be destroyed by gas.’

‘Gas?’

‘Just one touch on the keypad.’ Greco held a small remote control up to the camera. ‘It’s a new invention by one of the cartel’s chemists. A type of mustard gas that slowly corrodes the mucous membranes. It is extremely painful and can take several hours. You puke up your own guts before you bleed to death internally.’

I looked around the apartment.

‘Forget it, Lukas, it’ll come through the ceiling and the walls, you won’t be able to stop it. In one hour exactly I’ll press the start button. Sixty minutes, Lukas. Tick-tock.’

‘Fire engines are on the way — the firefighters will hear us shouting.’

‘The fire’s already out, Lukas. It was only a thin coating of spirits across a fire-retardant plus a burning fridge. No one’s coming. Believe me, the two of you are alone.’

I believed him. I looked at my watch and coughed. ‘We are all alone, Greco.’

‘You and I are alone at least, now that she’s been taken from us both.’

I looked up at that Guy Fawkes face of his again. Taken from us. What did he mean?

‘So long, Lukas.’

The connection was broken and I was staring at a blank screen. Things freeze from the outside, but the cold I felt came from inside and was spreading outwards. He couldn’t have...?

No. It had to be something he wanted to trick me into believing.

But why?

So I’d get on the line to Judith at once to check that she was safe, so that he could trace the signal to her hiding place? No, he knew enough about things to know that, like him and like Judith, I had a phone that could switch arbitrarily between such a large network of the cartels’ satellites and private base stations that it would make the signal impossible to track.

I stared at the ceiling and the walls. Looked at my watch, at the second hand that jerked remorselessly onwards.

Tried to think clearly, to work out my next move, but it was impossible to know if my brain was functioning rationally, like the climber on Everest, knowing that the lack of oxygen at altitude enfeebles his powers of judgement and yet not being helped by that knowledge, confusion is confusion.

Sixty minutes. No. Fifty-nine.

I had to know.

I called her number, my heart pounding furiously as I waited.

One ring. Two.

Pick up. Pick up!

Three rings.

Part 2: The Middlegame

In another of Murakami’s games his opponent lost it all in the middlegame. Not because Olsen played badly, but because he was under pressure after falling into the Murakami Trap in the opening. The pleasant-mannered but always silent Olsen had used up valuable time in trying to work out his response and it left him struggling against the clock as well as Murakami’s strongly positioned and numerically superior major pieces. A frequently rehearsed argument revolves around the issue of whether Olsen sacrificed his queen, or Murakami took it. Most people, myself included, think it obvious that Olsen would not voluntarily have sacrificed her, and that all he achieved when Murakami took the piece was a postponement of the inevitable. In an ordinary game Olsen would have resigned and handed the victory to Murakami, but in lightning chess there’s always the chance your opponent will be stressed into making a catastrophic mistake. So Olsen chose to suffer on and allow himself to be cut up, piece by piece; all the while his one remaining black knight hopped about like a headless chicken. Playing that game over again, move by painful move, was like enduring a Greek tragedy. You know how it’s going to end; the object is only to find the most beautiful way of getting there, what the drivers call the scenic route.

I met Judith Szabó while she was still Gio Greco’s fixer and girlfriend. It was at a ball at the Sforzesco Palace that Luca Giualli, head of the Lombardy cartel, had purchased from the commune and turned into his own private fortress. In addition to hiring a small army to take care of the family’s security he had employed me to look for holes in the security routines and pick up signs of any imminent planned attacks.

I was standing by the piano in the atrium looking out across the crowds of the rich and the powerful in their tuxedos and ballgowns. I noticed her, even though she tried to carry herself just like any other guest. Not only because she was so strikingly beautiful in her bright red gown and long, raven-dark hair, but because she had been unable to resist approaching me like a professional.

‘You’re not doing your job especially well,’ was the first thing she said to me.

She was a couple of centimetres taller than my 175.

‘You must be Judith Szabó,’ I said.

‘See, that’s better. How did you work that out?’

‘I hear things. And you walk around like a queen and look around like a driver. Your name isn’t on the guest list, so how did you get in?’

‘I am on the guest list. As Anna Fogel, from the Tokyo cartel. There’s an invitation in the same name. It was just too easy to hack the system, and the check on my fake ID was embarrassingly feeble.’ She flashed a bank card at me.

I nodded. ‘And why wouldn’t I just sound the alarm now and have you cuffed?’

She smiled briefly before nodding in the direction of Luca Giualli, who stood conversing with the mayor of Milan, a man who had spoken enthusiastically of returning to the city-state model of Italy.

‘Because—’ said Judith Szabó, and I knew more or less what she was about to say — ‘to do so would reveal that you had allowed a potential assassin to get so near your employer that she — had she so wished — could have killed him.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘To deliver a message. From you know who.’

‘The Greek. Broccoli head.’

She smiled thinly. ‘He just wants to find out whether you’re as good as they say you are.’

‘Better than him, you mean?’

Her smiled broadened. Her eyes were so lovely. Cold and blue. And I thought at the time, she has a psychopath’s pulse, her heart would beat slowly in a life-or-death situation. Later I would discover I was mistaken, that she was simply a consummate actress. And that the reason she was able to act the psychopath so well was that she was living with one.

‘And now at least we know you aren’t the best, Herr Meyer.’ She looked into my eyes as she brushed something from the lapel of my Brioni tuxedo, though I knew there was nothing there.

‘Excuse me, Herr Meyer, I’ve got someone waiting for me.’

She must have seen how I lifted my gaze above her shoulder and slowly shook my head, because she tensed, turned and looked up at one of the interior balconies in the atrium. It was too dark for her to see whether there was anyone in the darkness behind the open balcony door, but when she lowered her gaze she saw the red dot of a laser beam dancing across her gown.

‘How long has that been there?’ she asked.

‘Red on red,’ I said. ‘I doubt whether any of the guests have noticed it yet.’

‘And how long have you known that Anna Vogel doesn’t exist?’

‘Three days. I asked for every name on the list to be double-checked, and when Anna Vogel cropped up and there’s no one of that name in the Tokyo cartel it naturally made me curious about who you might be. And it looks as if my guess was right.’

That smile of hers was no longer quite so steady.

‘What happens now?’

‘Now you go back to the person waiting for you and tell him that he’s the one who’s been sent a message.’

Judith Szabó stood there, studying me. I knew what she was wondering about. Whether I had planned to let her go or had made my mind up on the spot.

Whatever, two weeks later I would have reason to regret that decision.

Fourth ring.

She always has a phone close by, always. Please, Judith.

Fifth ring.

Don’t be dead.

I called her two weeks after that meeting at the Sforzesco Palace.

‘Hello,’ was all she said.

I recognised her voice at once. Probably because I’d been thinking about her.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m calling because you rang this number. Can I ask how you got it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But you can ask if I’m free for dinner this evening.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. The table’s booked. Seven o’clock at Seta.’

‘That’s early. Will I survive?’

‘If you’re punctual.’

I smiled at what I took to be a joke.

But I was on time. And she was already seated at the table when I arrived. As before, I was struck by the austerity of her beauty. No sweetness, just healthy, symmetrical and properly proportioned. But then those eyes of hers. Those eyes...

‘You’re a widower,’ she said, once we had got a little shop talk out of the way without revealing any secrets.

‘What makes you think that?’

She nodded in the direction of my hand. ‘No driver wears a wedding ring. It tells you something about them. It makes them potentially vulnerable, knowing that there’s someone they love.’

‘Maybe I wear it as a distraction. Or maybe I’m divorced.’

‘Maybe. The pain in your eyes tells me something different.’

‘Maybe that’s from all the victims I have on my conscience.’

‘Is it?’

‘No.’

‘Well then?’

‘Tell me something about yourself first.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘There’s probably quite a difference between what I want to know and what I’m permitted to know. Start anywhere you like.’

She smiled, tasted the wine and nodded to the wine waiter who, without asking, had known who would be doing the tasting.

‘I’m from a well-to-do family. My every material need was met, but none of my emotional needs. The closest to that was my father, who abused me regularly from the age of eleven. What d’you think a psychologist would make of that and my ending up in this business?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I’ve got three university degrees, no children, I’ve lived in six countries and always earned more than my lovers and my ex-husband, and I was permanently bored. Until I started in this business. First as a client. Then as... a little more. Right now I’m Gio Greco’s girlfriend.’

‘Why not the other way round?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Why don’t you say Gio Greco is your boyfriend? You use the passive form.’

‘Isn’t that what strong men’s women usually do?’

‘You don’t strike me as someone who’s easy to dominate. Right now, you say: that makes it sound like a purely temporary arrangement.’

‘And you sound like a person preoccupied with semantics.’

‘The mouth overflows with what the heart is full of — isn’t that what they say?’

She raised her glass and we drank a toast.

‘Am I mistaken?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Aren’t all relationships temporary arrangements? Some end when the love is gone, or the money, or the entertainment value. Others when there’s no life left. What happened in your case?’

I twirled the thick-bellied wine glass between my fingers. ‘The latter.’

‘Competitors’ drivers?’

I shook my head. ‘It was before I entered the business. She took her own life. Our son died in a fire the year before.’

‘Grief?’

‘And guilt.’

‘And was she? Guilty?’

I shook my head. ‘The guilty one was the maker of the Mickey Mouse lamp in the bedroom. It was made of a cheap and highly inflammable material in order to undercut the competition. The maker denied any guilt. He was one of the richest men in France.’

‘Was?’

‘He died in a fire.’

‘We aren’t by any chance talking about François Augvieux who burned to death on board his yacht in the harbour at Cannes?’

I didn’t answer.

‘So that was you. We always wondered who it was. There was no very obvious client. An impressive debut. Because it was your debut, wasn’t it?’

‘The world doesn’t need people who refuse to use their power to do something good.’

Again she put her head on one side, as though to study me from another angle. ‘Is that the reason you’re in this business? To kill unscrupulous profiteers and revenge your son and wife?’

It was my turn to shrug. ‘You’d have to ask a psychologist about that. But tell me, what would the Greek make of you and me sitting here and dining together this evening?’

‘What would? What makes you think he doesn’t know?’

‘Does he?’

She smiled quickly. ‘He’s out on a job. And I’m on a job too. I’d like to have you in my stable.’

‘You make me sound like a racehorse.’

‘You got anything against that?’

‘Not the analogy. But I don’t need a fixer.’

‘Oh, but you do. You’re too easily outmanoeuvred without one. You need someone who’s got your back.’

‘The way I recall it, you were the one who got outmanoeuvred.’

‘I hope you don’t take this personally, Lukas, but you shouldn’t be here right now, you should be with your client.’

I could feel my pulse quicken.

‘Thanks, Judith, but Giualli’s safe enough in his fortress; and there are no traitors in our crew, I’ve made sure of that personally.’

Judith Szabó took something out of her Gucci bag and placed it on the tablecloth in front of me. It was a drawing or a print. It showed a cat running with something that looked like a lit explosive charge fastened to its body. In the background was a castle.

‘This is a 500-year-old illustration of an offensive tactic used by the Germans back in the sixteenth century. They would capture a cat or a dog that had found its way out through one of those little escape routes animals always find as a way out of the fortress or village they come from, then tie an explosive charge to it and drive it home. And hope the animal would get back up through its tunnel before the fuse burned down.’

I felt a prickling between my shoulder blades. I already had a pretty good idea of what was coming next. It was something I hadn’t — and should have — thought of.

‘Gio is...’ She seemed to be looking for the words. And as well as not being weak, Judith Szabó didn’t strike me as a person who had trouble finding her words. When finally she did, she spoke quietly, and I had to lean forward to hear.

‘I’ve got no problem with the method as such — it’s our job, after all, and we do what we have to do. But there are limits. At least, there are for some of us. Like when that boy who lives with his mother at Sforzesco, Anton...’

The name made me jump. Paolo Giualli and his wife, twenty years younger than him, were good people. Good, at least, considering how rich and powerful they were. They had three well-brought-up children who treated me with a distant courtesy which I reciprocated. Things were a little different with Anton, the five-year-old son of the cook, who lived in one of the service flats below stairs and was so like Benjamin I had to make a conscious effort to control my feelings for him. Judith Szabó stopped, maybe noticing that the name had a particular resonance for me. She coughed before continuing: ‘So Anton is going to be the cat,’ she said.

I was already halfway out of my seat.

‘It’s too late, Lukas. Sit down.’

I looked at her. Her voice was steady but I thought I could see tears in those blue eyes of hers. I knew nothing. Only that I was, once again, the knight.

Several days would pass before the testimony of witnesses and forensic examinations revealed what had happened. The Giualli children were accompanied by bodyguards wherever they went — at home, at school, at ballet, at karate, visiting triends — but the same thing didn’t apply to children of the staff. All employees were searched on arrival and departure — for treachery is, after all, a part of human nature. But the chances of their being kidnapped were regarded as remote, especially since all employees had signed a contract which clearly stated that, in any such eventuality, their employer was absolved of any responsibility.

When Anton returned home from school that afternoon, an hour later than usual, he was in a state of exhaustion and told his mother how he’d been stopped by a man on his way through the Sempione Park. The man had held a cloth against the boy’s face, everything went black and Anton said he had no idea how long he’d been out before waking up beneath one of the bushes in the park. His neck and throat were hurting, but apart from that he was feeling as well as could be expected. When asked to describe the man all Anton could remember was that, in spite of the heat of the day, he had been wearing an overcoat.

His mother had straight away spoken to Luca Giualli who at once rang the police and the doctor. The doctor had said the pains and the swelling around the neck could indicate that something — he declined to speculate on what it might be — had been forced down the boy’s throat. But he couldn’t say any more until he had taken a closer look.

According to the police report, four officers had been approaching the entrance to the fortress when the explosion occurred. The charge contained in the gelatine bag in the boy’s stomach would not have been powerful enough to kill Luca Giualli and his wife had they been in their part of the fortress and Anton in the service flat. But they were — as we said — good people, and they were not merely close by but actually in the same room, so that there was little left of any of them once the police and the fire brigade had made their way through the ruins.

These details were still unknown to me as I sat that evening in one of Milan’s best restaurants looking into Judith Szabó’s blue eyes. What I knew for sure was that Anton was dead, and probably Luca Giualli too. That I had failed to do my job, and that it was now too late. I realised too that Judith Szabó had not been joking when she said I might be dead if I turned up late.

‘At that ball,’ I said, ‘I should never have let you go.’

‘No, you shouldn’t have. But you wanted to send a message to Greco, didn’t you?’

I ignored that. ‘You invited me here so I wouldn’t be at the castle when the boy came home. Why?’

‘At the ball I realised you were good. You would have smelled the fuse and possibly saved Luca Giualli.’

‘Was it Greco’s decision to get me out here tonight for this meal?’

‘Greco takes all the operational decisions.’

‘But?’

‘But this was my suggestion.’

‘Why? As you see, you’ve overestimated my ability to sniff out anything at all. When you invited me here, I thought—’ I stopped and pressed my thumb and index finger into my eyes.

‘Thought what?’ she said quietly.

I breathed out heavily. ‘That you were interested in me.’

‘I understand,’ she said, and laid her hand over mine. ‘But you aren’t mistaken. I am interested in you.’

I looked down at her hand. ‘Oh?’

‘The main reason I got you out of the way is because I didn’t want you to die too. You let me go the last time we met. You didn’t need to — I don’t even think it was something you planned. So it was my turn to show a little mercy.’

‘Showing mercy is not the same as being interested.’

‘But I’m telling you I am. I need a new client. I think I’ve just lost the one I had.’

She looked down without moving her hand from mine. With her other hand she lifted the serviette from her lap and held it out to me.

‘You’re crying,’ she explained.

That was how things started between me and Judith. With tears. Was that the way it was going to end too?

Six rings.

Seven.

Eight.

I was about to hang up.

‘Hey, lover boy. I was in the shower.’

As I breathed in hard I realised I had been holding my breath.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, worried, as though she’d read my silence.

‘I’m in a locked apartment with a mute boy—’

‘Gio.’ She said it before I’d finished my sentence.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was afraid he’d traced you too.’

‘He can’t find me here, I’ve already told you that.’

‘Everybody can be found, Judith.’

‘Where are you?’

‘That’s not important, you can’t help me. I just wanted to hear that you’re OK.’

‘Lukas, tell me where—’

‘Now you know he’s trying to reach you by using me. Stay hidden. I...’

Not even now, in this situation, could I make myself say it.

Love.

That was a word reserved for Maria and Benjamin. Over the course of the year in which Judith and I had been together it had occurred to me that maybe one day I would be able to say it and mean it. But no matter how much Judith fascinated and interested me and in all sorts of ways made me happy, that was one door that seemed locked shut.

‘...am so fond of you, my darling.’

‘Lukas!’

I hung up.

Leaned against the wall.

Looked at my watch. It was working against me, that much I realised. But why had he given me all this time? Why run the risk of my calling up my allies and summoning them to come to my assistance, rescue me? Or perhaps even the police?

Because he knew I had no allies, or none willing to go up against someone like Gio Greco. As for the police, when was the last time they got involved in a stand-off between drivers, with or without an innocent boy as bait?

I beat the wall with the palm of my hand and the boy looked startled.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to think.’

I put my hand to my forehead. Greco wasn’t crazy, not in the sense that he acted irrationally. It was just that with his particular personality disorders — a more precise diagnosis would probably be malign narcissism, which isn’t far away from psychopath — he operated with a rationale that was completely different from that of so-called normal people. If I was to predict his next move then I needed to understand him. We were revengers, both of us, but that was where the similarity ended. My crusade against the cartels was not just a form of spiritual cleansing, a way of muting my own pain; it was also principled: I wanted to tear down a world order in which the greediest and most unscrupulous profiteers had all the power. Greco didn’t want to torture me as a matter of principle, but for the brief, passing and sadistic pleasure it gave him. And in pursuit of that pleasure he was prepared to sacrifice the lives of innocent people. That was it. That had to be the reason why he didn’t just start the torture or the killing straight away; the pleasure would have been too brief. He wanted first to enjoy the knowledge that I knew what lay in store for me. This — my fear — was just his starter.

I went over my reasoning again.

There was something there that didn’t quite add up.

The direction in which I was thinking, that he just wanted to see me suffer — that was something he’d planted, it was exactly what he wanted me to think. It was too simple. He wanted something more. What does a narcissist want? He wants affirmation. He wants to know he’s best. Or, even more important, he wants everyone else to know he’s best. Naturally. He wants to show the whole business, the whole cartel world, that he’s better than me.

So far he’d managed to make me go along with everything he’d planned. I had run up the stairs to rescue the boy. I had managed to get us over to the other apartment. I had used the axe the way I was supposed to use it. I had...

I froze.

I had called Judith. He’d arranged it that way. He wanted me to call her. Why? Phone calls couldn’t be tracked and phones located the way people once could be. Silence.

I took the phone out again, tapped in her name. Pressed the phone to my ear. Silence.

The phone wasn’t ringing. I looked at the screen. The symbol showed not just a bad connection, it showed no connection at all. I crossed to the window, held the phone. Still no connection. We were in the middle of Milan, it wasn’t possible. Or, of course, it was possible. If someone installed a jamming apparatus in a room they could turn the jamming signal on and off at will.

I stared at the walls, trying to see where Greco might have hidden the box. On the ceiling, maybe? Was the box there to ensure I couldn’t call anyone once I had — predictably enough — called Judith? Greco probably thought that after all there just might be someone I could call who could possibly do something to upset his plans.

Accept. I had to accept that that possibility no longer existed. And I had to stop thinking about why it was he might possibly have wanted me to ring Judith, because there was nothing at all I could do about it. At least now she knew he was on the warpath, and I had to believe her when she said that she couldn’t be traced through the phone, and that he didn’t know where her apartment was, because not even I knew that.

I looked at my watch. And at the boy.

I had no doubt at all that Greco would use gas; he’d done so before. When the most brilliant inventor in the largest of the three electro-cartels took his vehicle in for repairs Greco had bribed a mechanic, entered the place by night and simply installed a gas pellet in the gearbox that would break open when the inventor put the gear lever into overdrive. The cartel’s security people had come for the car the following day, checked it for any explosive devices and then driven it through the heavily trafficked city streets to the house where he lived. It wasn’t until a few days later, when the inventor drove to his country home by Lake Como, that the car was out on a motorway and in due course he moved up into overdrive. The car went off the road close to one of the large bridges, rolled over and was crushed against the cobbles of a village square directly below. The death was recorded as a road accident. Not that insiders didn’t know gas was involved, for the death of everyone who is important for a company’s competitive success is always regarded as suspicious and involves an autopsy. But according to Judith the electro-cartel was anxious to play down the vulnerability of its security system as being bad for its reputation. The irony of it all was that within the drivers’ world I was the one given the credit for the attack, merely because on one occasion I had answered a query from another limo driver about how to eliminate this chemist who had an army to guard him and who rarely left his fortress home, and then only in a bulletproof car with his own personal driver and bodyguards for a skiing trip to the mountains at Bergamo. I suggested that one should track down the personal driver and hypnotise him without his knowing it, simply prime him with a trigger word which — when he heard or read it — would immediately put him into a trance. This type of hidden hypnosis leaves the person apparently exactly the same, and he feels exactly the same too. I suggested the trigger word should be a place name he would be bound to see along one of the fastest and most dangerous stretches of road between Milan and Bergamo.

I don’t know whether Greco was ever told of my suggestion and that was what inspired him, or what he thought about me being given the credit for the attack. The point is, I would never have carried out such a mission; I never do jobs in which innocent people can die.

Again I looked at my watch. The problem wasn’t that time was moving too fast. It moved slowly, but I was thinking even slower.

I had to get the boy out of the apartment before the gas was released.

If I could get the people down in the street to tear down one of the shop blinds, might they possibly be able to use it as a jumping sheet?

I crossed to the window and looked down.

A man in police uniform stood down there. Apart from him the street was empty.

‘Hey!’ I suddenly shouted. ‘I need help!’

The uniformed man looked up. He neither responded nor moved. And although he was too far away for me to see his face clearly, I noticed that the big man’s head seemed to have been beaten down between his shoulders. The pedestrian precinct was closed at both ends of the block by security tape, presumably fake too, like the uniform. I closed my eyes and cursed inwardly. Big as he was, and wearing that uniform, he probably had little trouble telling people to move on. The drama moreover was at an end; the fire had been put out and the boy and I presumably rescued. I looked across to the other side of the street. Tried to estimate the distance in metres. The fake policeman crossed the street and disappeared through the gate directly below me.

I stepped back inside and studied the apartment again. With the same result. There was just us in here, the four walls, a fire-axe and the decapitated body of the dog. I walked round the walls, hitting them with my fist. Brick.

‘You know how to write?’ I asked.

The boy nodded.

I took the Montegrappa pen from my inside pocket and handed it to him.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, pulling up the sleeve of my coat so that he could write on the cuff of my white shirt. But it was saturated with blood from the bite wound, and before I could pull up the other sleeve he had turned to the wall and was writing on the pale blue wallpaper.

‘ “Oscar, eight years old”,’ I read aloud. Then I said: ‘Hi, Oscar, my name is Lukas. And you know what, we’re going to have to get out of here.’

I’d worked it out already. It was about eighteen metres down to the street. Tying together the coat, the shirt and my trousers I would be able to lower Oscar four metres down. Using his own clothes would make that six metres. I could probably let Oscar go from a height of four metres without him getting seriously injured. But even for that I would need another eight metres. And where was I going to find that in an apartment that had been completely stripped?

I stared at the dog. We had not had much anatomy during our psychology studies, but one of the things I did notice — apart from the paper-thin bone between the eye socket and the brain — was that the human body contained eight metres of intestines. Or intestine. Because from the anal aperture to the throat is one long tube. How much weight could an intestine bear? I thought of my uncle in Munich who served sausages linked in their skins and how as a kid I used to try to pull them apart. In the end I always had to use a knife.

I picked up the axe.

‘Think you can help me, Oscar?’

The boy looked wide-eyed at me but nodded. I showed him how I wanted him to hold the dog’s body between his knees and hold the front paws out to the sides and back, so that the dog’s stomach lay open and distended in front of me.

‘Close your eyes,’ I said.

It’s remarkable how delicate we mammals are. All I had to do was draw the sharp edge of the axe up through the fur and the belly opened, and the guts tumbled out. So did the stench. I immediately began to pull the intestine out, concentrating on breathing through my mouth.

It was hard to see in all the blood and slime, but I located what looked to me like two ends and cut them off. Tied a knot in each end to seal off the openings. It didn’t look like eight metres, hardly even five. But the material seemed flexible, so maybe with a little weight on one end it would stretch to eight?

I took off my clothes and tied them together using a reef knot. It took a while, since it was a long time since I had practised the knots I learned from my father, in the days when I thought I was going to go in for competitive sailing, as he had done.

After several failed attempts I finally got it right, but when I tried to secure the intestine to the sleeve of the coat the two wouldn’t connect; the sleeve simply slipped out through the knot. I tried to think hard as I sat there on the floor in only my underwear, shivering in the cold draught coming from the window. It just didn’t work. I swore out loud and looked at my watch. It was now more than half an hour since Greco had begun his countdown.

I had another go, this time using a longer section of sleeve; but again the slippery, slimy gut just glided out through the knot. I threw the gut and the coat aside, lay back on the floor, pressed my stinking bloody hands to my face and felt the tears welling up.

He had me exactly where he wanted me.

A small hand lifted my own from my face.

I looked up and there was Oscar holding something up in the air. The gut and the coat sleeve. Knotted together. I took hold of it and pulled at the two ends, but they held fast. I stared in disbelief at the knot. And then I recognised it. It was a sheet bend. And I remembered what my father had said when I told him that Maria and I were going to get married. That with certain women the knot to use was a bowline, easy to tie and easy to untie. But getting married, the knot to use then was a sheet bend; the harder you pulled, the tighter it got.

‘Where did you learn...?’

Oscar saluted with two fingers held to his forehead.

‘Cubs?’

He nodded.

Just then the phone — which I had placed on the floor, along with my keys and wallet — began to vibrate. I picked it up. FaceTime again, and once again I had a full-strength signal.

I pressed Take Call and again Greco’s face filled the screen.

‘Hi, Lukas. She’s on her way. Look, she’s just parked outside.’

He held the phone up to a computer screen. I saw a street, obviously in a fashionable residential area, and the door of an Alfa Romeo opening. I felt as though someone had injected iced water into my chest. The woman who got out and crossed the road moved like a pro. And like a queen.

Greco spoke from behind the phone: ‘When you can’t find them, the thing you have to do is make them come to you.’

Judith was wearing the red coat she always wore when attending business meetings. When she was going to war, as she used to say. She removed it before the meeting started and wore beneath it a snowy white blouse. That symbolised a blank sheet of paper, she said. A willingness to compromise. And before she put her coat back on again she had always got a deal for her client. Always. It was so obvious when I thought about it now, the way you understand every genius chess move once it’s been shown to you.

Gio Greco had been Judith’s lover longer than me, he knew her better. He was also a better chess player than me. He knew I would call her when he said those words: ‘You and I are alone at least, now that she’s been taken from us both.’ And he knew what she’d do once she realised Greco had me in his power; go and see him and do what she was best at doing: negotiate a deal.

Greco’s grinning face filled the screen again: ‘You look like you realise what’s happening here, Lukas. The Queen is going to die. All is lost. Or is it?’ He lowered his voice dramatically, like a game-show host on one of those franchises spewed out by the Tokyo cartel. ‘Maybe you can save her after all. Yes, you know what: I’m going to give you one last chance to stop me. You can use your weapon. The great Lukas Meyer will hypnotise the terrible Gio Greco and save the day. Come on. You’ve got about fifteen seconds before she gets here.’ Greco opened his eyes wide as though to show how ready and responsive he was.

I swallowed.

Greco raised a slender, shaven eyebrow. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Listen—’ I began.

‘Can’t do it, Lukas? Performance anxiety? Do you get that too when she needs fucking?’

I didn’t answer.

‘OK, that wasn’t really fair,’ said Greco. ‘See, that psychologist I was telling you about, he suggested hypnosis as a cure for depression, but when we tried it, it turned out I’m not a good subject. He said it was because of my so-called personality disorders. I’m immune to it. I mean, there must be some advantages to being insane.’

Laughter. The T and the long S again, like the hiss of a punctured bicycle tyre. Then he was gone from the screen. The phone appeared to be placed on a shelf or suchlike, and I saw something that looked like a hallway and an oak door with an entryphone. There was a jarring, ringing sound. Greco appeared on the screen again, his back to me, his white suit gleaming. He seemed to be holding something up in his hand so that I couldn’t see. He picked up the entryphone with his free hand.

‘Yes?’ Pause. Then, in a surprised voice: ‘No, is that you, darling? How lovely, it’s been such a long time. Well, well. So at least you still remember where you used to live.’

He pressed the button on the entryphone. I heard a distant buzz and then the sound of a door opening. I was clutching my own phone so hard I thought I might crush it. How could Judith, who was so intelligent, who knew Greco so well, fail to see that he had smoked her out from her hiding place by using me? The answer came back as quick as the question. Of course she knew. And still she’d come. Because there was no alternative — this was her only chance to save me.

I wept. No tears came, but my whole body was sobbing. I wished I’d lied to her. Told her I loved her. Given her that at least. Because she was going to die. And I was going to watch.

Greco turned his piggy face in triumph towards me. And now I was able to see what he was holding in his hand. A karambit. Curved handle and a short blade bent like a tooth. A knife with which to slash, chop or stab. And which, once it’s in, does not let go.

I wanted to break the connection but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Greco turned towards the door and opened it, holding the knife in the hand behind his back so only I could see it. And then she came in. Face pale, her cheeks a feverish pink. She embraced him, and Greco let her do it without taking his hand from behind his back. Now I could see them both in profile.

‘Run!’ I shouted into the phone. ‘Judith, he’s going to kill you!’

No response. Greco had probably put his phone on mute.

‘How nice,’ said Greco in a voice that sent a short, hard echo round the hallway. ‘To what do I owe this visit?’

‘I regret it,’ said Judith, out of breath.

‘Regret?’

‘Regret leaving. I’ve thought about it for a long time. Will you have me back?’

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Even before you’ve taken off your coat?’

‘Will you?’

Greco bobbed up and down on his heels.

‘I—’ he said, and sucked on his upper lip — ‘will take Judith Szabó back.’

She breathed quickly and put a hand against his chest. ‘Oh, I’m so happy now. Because I want you, Greco. I know that now. It’s just that it’s taken me some time. And I’m sorry about that. I hope you can forgive me.’

‘I forgive you.’

‘Well. Here I am.’ She took a step towards him, her arms wide. Greco stepped back. She stopped and looked at him in confusion.

‘Show me your tongue,’ he said quietly.

For an instant Judith looked as though someone had just slapped her. But she recovered quickly and smiled.

‘But, Greco, what—’

‘Your tongue!’

It looked as though she had to concentrate, as though this involved a highly complicated locomotor operation. She half opened her mouth, and then out came her pale red tongue.

Greco smiled. He looked almost mournfully at the exposed tongue. ‘You know very well I would have taken her back, Judith. Her. The one you were. Before you turned into someone else and betrayed me.’

The tongue disappeared.

‘Greco, darling...’ She reached out to him, and he took another step back.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Are you afraid of me? Your people searched me at the door.’

‘I’m not afraid. But if there was anyone I was afraid of, it would be you. All I can do is admire your courage. But then, you have always defended the one you love. That’s why I was certain you would come. That’s your method, after all: go directly to the root.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on, Judith. You’re a better actress than that.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Greco.’

But I did. That was her mantra as a fixer. Go directly to the root. When she was contacted with a commission, something which, for obvious reasons, almost always happened via a middleman, she always made it her business to find out who the real customer was and pay a visit to that person. It was always a risky business. She might lose the commission, or expose herself to danger, but she insisted on going directly to the root in order to fix a price and agree on the conditions. She always got a better price, she maintained, because she could do without all the middlemen taking their cut, and there were no misunderstandings about what was included in the service and what was not. And I supported her tactic of going directly to the root method because I wanted to know the reason for the commission, what the intended result of it was. My road to heaven was paved with the evil intentions of others, and I just wanted to make sure that the greater evil didn’t win out.

‘Maybe, maybe I want this, Judith Szabó. I like your tongue. You’ve come to negotiate. So make a start. What are you offering to spare his life, your psychologist?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s been out of my life a long time, Greco. But yes, of course, I expect you not to harm him.’

Greco put his head back and laughed his T and S laugh until his piggy eyes disappeared behind his round cheeks. ‘Come on, Judith, a negotiator has to lie better than that. You know what I wish?’

I shuddered as he reached out a hand to stroke her cheek.

‘I wish you’d have loved me enough to do what you’re doing for him.’

Judith stared at him, her mouth open. One hand continued towards her cheek. The other tightened its grip on the handle of the knife behind his back. I could see the tears welling up in her eyes, the way her body seemed to collapse inside; she was already moving her hands up to protect herself. She knew pretty well what was about to happen. That this had always been the likely outcome. And that now it was too late for regrets.

‘Hello...’ he said.

‘No!’ she shouted.

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘...I’m Greco,’ he said.

He swung the knife in a tight arc so swiftly it seemed to leave a trail of silver through the air.

Judith stared at him and at the knife. The blade was clean. But her throat had opened. Then came the blood. It splashed out, and she raised her hands as though to prevent it falling onto her coat, her present. But as she pressed her hands to her neck the pressure increased and blood sprayed from between her fingers in thin jets. Greco backed away but not quickly enough; blood splashed on the sleeve of his white suit jacket. Judith’s legs gave way and she fell to her knees. Already her eyes were glazed; oxygen was no longer reaching the brain. The hands fell lifelessly from the neck, already the volume of blood had diminished. For a second or two her body balanced on the knees, and then she collapsed forwards, her forehead hitting the stone floor with a soft thud.

I screamed into the phone.

Greco looked down. Not at Judith, but at the sleeve of his jacket as he tried to wipe away the blood. Then he walked over towards the phone, and I didn’t stop screaming until his Guy Fawkes face filled the whole screen. He looked at me without saying anything, with a sort of mild solemnity, like a mourner. Was that what he was? Or was he acting the sympathy in a parody of the undertaker’s professional solemnity?

‘Tick-tock,’ said Greco. ‘Tick-tock.’ Then he broke the connection.

I tapped in the police emergency number and pressed Call. But of course I was too late, I no longer had a signal.

I collapsed onto the floor.

After a while I felt a hand on my head.

It was stroking me.

I looked up at Oscar.

He pointed to the wall, to the words he had written there.

It wil soon be beter.

Then he put his arms around me. It was so unexpected I didn’t have time to push him away. So I simply closed my eyes and held the boy. The tears came again, but I managed not to sob.

After a few moments I held him a little away from me.

‘I had a boy like you, Oscar. He died. That’s why I’m so sad. I don’t want you to die as well.’

Oscar nodded, as though to convey that he agreed with me, or understood me. I looked at him. At the dirty but fine blazer.

And then, as we carefully made our knotted rope of clothes and guts, I told him about Benjamin. The things he had liked (old things like big picture books, gramophone records with funny covers, Grandad’s toys, especially marbles; swimming; Daddy’s jokes), the things he didn’t like (fried fish, going to bed, having his hair cut; trousers that made him itch). Oscar nodded and shook his head as I went through the list. Mostly he nodded. I told him one of Benjamin’s favourite jokes and that made him laugh. Partly because it’s stupid not to laugh when there are only two of you, but mostly, I think, because he thought the joke was pretty funny. I told him how much I missed my boy and my Maria. How angry it made me. The boy just listened, responding now and then with facial expressions, and it occurred to me that now he had taken over my job as the mutely listening psychologist.

I asked him to write something about himself on the wall while I tightened all the knots and got our rope ready. He wrote in keywords.

Brescia. Grandad blazer factory. Nice house, swimming pool. Men with guns. Daddy Mummy dead. Run. Alone. Doghouse. Dog food. Football. Black car, man in white clothes.

I asked questions. Joined up the dots. He nodded. Large, shiny child’s eyes. I gave him a hug. That warm little chin nestling in the pit of my neck.

Looked at the dog’s head lying on the floor behind him. Dog’s eyes. Child’s eyes. Pig’s eyes. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I closed my eyes.

Opened them again.

‘Oscar,’ I said. ‘Get out the pen. We’re going to try something a bit weird.’

He took out the Montegrappa pen. The kind of beautiful thing they don’t make any more.

Part 3: Endgame

Once Olsen’s queen was off the board and the decision had been taken it was as though Murakami gave his opponent a short breathing space. He could afford it — Olsen was the one running out of time — and it looked as though Murakami, instead of bringing matters to a quick conclusion with a coup de grâce, preferred instead to take the opportunity to show off to his audience, the cat’s last sadistic moments of play with the mouse. The even-tempered and silent Olsen had completely abandoned his bloodied defence of the king and instead moved his black knight to the other end of the board, as though in denial of the grim reality of his situation, a general playing a round of golf as the bombs rain down around him.

‘Don’t be afraid, Oscar. You won’t fall.’

I spoke calmly. Established eye contact. My heart was beating hard, probably as hard as his was. The gut was fastened around his chest in a bowline knot. He’d taken off his outer clothes and we had attached them to the end of the line, and now the half-naked child’s body, still wearing his shoes, was dangling above the cobblestoned street below, his hands holding tight around the balcony railings.

‘Now I’m going to count to three,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. ‘And you let go on three? OK.’

Oscar stared at me, panic in his eyes. He nodded.

‘One, two... three.’

He let go. Brave boy. I stood with one foot braced against the wall by the window and felt his body-weight stretching the intestine downwards. It held. We’d tested it inside the apartment and I knew there was no reason it wouldn’t hold now, just because it was eighteen metres above ground. I’d wrapped the gut around my wrist twice in order to brake, but still I could feel it begin to slip. That was all right — the idea was to lower him down, only it mustn’t happen too fast. I would have to brake when I reached the join with the coat, and if that was too abrupt then the whole gut might snap.

Oscar slipped down and away from me. All the time we kept our eyes on each other.

At the junction with the coat I had to brake and saw how the gut stretched like an elastic band. I was certain it wouldn’t have held my eighty kilos, but the boy can’t have weighed more than twenty-five. I held my breath. The gut swayed and stretched. But it held. I continued paying out the rope, quickly, before it could change its mind. On reaching the last item of clothing, the boy’s blazer, I leaned out as far as I could to make the drop to the street as short as possible for Oscar, holding on to the sleeve with one hand and with the other around a railing.

‘One,’ I said loudly. ‘Two, three.’

I let go.

Oscar landed feet first, I heard his shoes hit the cobblestones. He fell over. Lay there a moment or two, as we had agreed on beforehand, to check that he was uninjured. And then he stood up and waved up at me.

I hauled up the rope and untied his clothes. Dropped them down to him, and he quickly put them on. I saw him checking the blazer pockets to see if everything was there; the pen, the money I had given him, and the key to my apartment. I knew it was a vain hope, but at least that was what it was: a hope.

It didn’t last long.

Two men in black drivers’ suits emerged from the gateway, one of them the big man with no neck. They started chasing Oscar and caught up with him before he reached the security tape. They carried him, jerking and struggling, over to an SUV that stood illegally parked in the pedestrian street.

I didn’t shout. Just watched in silence as the car disappeared.

I had done what I could. At least the boy wouldn’t die breathing in Greco’s hellish gas. He might even let Oscar go. Why not? Once the king has been checkmated, the other pieces can stay there untouched. And drivers — most of them at least — don’t kill just for the sake of it.

I went back inside the apartment, untied my own clothes from the gut and started to dress. The dog’s head looked up at me, one eye gouged, the other one whole.

Did I believe that? That Greco would take pity on Oscar?

No.

I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes to go before the gas came billowing out into the apartment. I sat on the floor and waited for the phone call.

Outside, it was growing dark.

Greco rang two minutes before time was up.

The phone was probably mounted on a tripod and the screen showed what appeared to be his room. Bricks, wood. Large white surfaces. Outside, on a large terrace, a Christmas tree with its lights lit in the evening dark. At the veranda door two armed guards, muscles bulging beneath tight-fitting black drivers’ suits. Greco sat on a white leather sofa, and beside him, legs dangling, was Oscar. His blazer was buttoned up wrong, the Montegrappa pen visible, clipped to the breast pocket. He looked frightened and exhausted from crying. On the coffee table in front of them was a chessboard that looked, from the position, as though it was nearing the endgame. Next to it lay the karambit and the remote control for the release of the mustard gas.

‘Hello again, Lukas. An eventful day, don’t you think? And that’s probably a good thing, since it’s your last.’

Greco rubbed the sleeve of his jacket with a cloth. That bloodstain. He couldn’t seem to get rid of it.

‘I just hope it’s over soon,’ I said.

‘Actually, I had thought of putting our boy here in a bedroom with a bedside lamp and pressing the button. But it was too much... bother. And I like this knife.’ He reached out for the karambit.

‘Don’t you understand how sick you are, Greco?’ My voice was tight and hoarse now. ‘This is a child. An innocent child.’

‘Precisely. That’s why it surprises me you didn’t take your own life while you had the chance. All this—’ he gestured broadly with his hands — ‘would have been completely unnecessary if you’d had the brains and the balls to jump out the window.’

‘But you would have killed the boy anyway.’

He grinned broadly. ‘Why on earth should I do that?’

‘Because you are who you are. You have to win. If by taking my own life I had saved the boy the victory wouldn’t have been yours alone, it would have been a draw.’

‘Now that,’ laughed Greco, ‘is sick. And you are, of course, absolutely right.’

He picked up the knife and turned towards Oscar, who sat with eyes closed, as though the light were too bright, or to shut out the world. Greco put his other hand on the boy’s head. Long S-sound. Then he coughed and began:

‘Hello...’ he said, in that familiar, slow, clear, sing-song voice.

I forced myself to keep my eyes open and watch the screen.

A spasm passed through Oscar and his hand went up to his breast pocket, took out the Montegrappa pen clipped there and opened it in a single, fluid practised movement. Greco observed him with an amused smile.

‘...I’m Greco,’ he concluded, stressing each syllable.

Oscar had taken out the needle-shaped cartridge and was holding it upside down in his little hand. The whole thing had taken less than three seconds, same as the last few times we’d rehearsed the sequence of moves. And now he swung his hand. He was a bright boy and by the time we’d finished he was hitting the eye in the dog’s head every time, even when I held it high above him and moved it about. Hit it again and again, as calm and collected as a robot, the way hypnotised people are. Until we were down to two and a half seconds from when I gave him the trigger words, ‘Hello, I’m Greco,’ to him taking the pen out of his breast pocket, removing the cartridge and stabbing.

I saw the point of the cartridge penetrate Greco’s eye, and could sense how it slipped through the paper-thin bone at the rear of the socket and on into the brain. Oscar’s small, balled hand against Greco’s face like a growth, like broccoli. Greco was staring with the other eye, not at Oscar but at me. I don’t know what I saw there. Astonishment? Respect? Fear? Pain? Or perhaps nothing. Perhaps those muscular spasms passing across his face were the result of whichever centre of the brain the cartridge point penetrated, as I recalled from my student days how we could get dead frogs to move their legs by stimulating the nervous system.

Then Greco’s body suddenly relaxed, and he exhaled in a long gasp, his last S, and the light in the remaining good eye went out, like the red light on a piece of sloppily produced electronic equipment. Because in the final analysis perhaps that’s all we are. Frogs with conduits that transmit impulses. Complex robots. So advanced we even possess the power to love.

I looked at Oscar.

‘Hi, I’m Lukas,’ I said.

He emerged immediately from his trance, dropped the cartridge and looked at me. Next to him, his head lolling on the back of the sofa, lay Greco, the cartridge sticking out of his eye as he stared up at the ceiling.

‘Keep looking at me,’ I said.

I saw the men behind Oscar who had raised their machine guns but who now stood as though frozen to the spot. No shots had been fired. For there was no longer any danger to be averted. No longer a boss to be protected. And, their brains were telling them, though they could not have formulated the thoughts themselves: no one left to pay them for killing this boy, this child whose body would haunt them for the rest of their nights were they to kill him.

‘Stand up slowly and walk outside,’ I said.

Oscar slid down from the sofa. Picked up the two parts of the Montegrappa pen from the floor and put them in his pocket.

One of the men had approached the rear of the sofa. He lay two fingers against the corpse’s carotid artery.

Oscar headed for the hallway and the front door.

The men exchanged quizzical looks.

One of them shrugged. The other nodded and spoke into the microphone on his lapel.

‘Let the kid go.’

A short pause as he adjusted his earpiece.

‘The boss is dead. What? As in finished, yes.’

Greco lay staring up at the heaven he’d never get to. A solitary red tear ran down his cheek.

It took me almost three hours to cut my way through the metal-reinforced door, by which time the blade of the axe was so dull it functioned more as a sledgehammer.

I saw no one either in the entrance or outside as I walked into the street. They had probably been informed the operation was cancelled. Were probably already on their way to other jobs for other bosses, other cartels.

I made my way through the dark streets without looking over my shoulder. I thought of the chessboard on my table back home, where Carlsen had just stepped into the Murakami Trap and in eighteen more moves would resign. As I walked along there I couldn’t know that in twelve years’ time I would be watching that famous game in which Olsen, who has likewise fallen into the Murakami Trap, moves his black knight to F2 and looks over in silence at the disbelieving and despairing Murakami.

Reaching the block where my apartment was I rang the bell. There was a click from the entryphone, but no voice.

‘It’s me, Lukas,’ I said.

A buzz. I pushed the door open. Going up the stairs I thought of all the days after Benjamin and Maria were gone, when I had dragged my feet up these steps and dreamed they would be standing in the open doorway waiting for me. As I stopped on the final landing, suddenly so tired it was like a pain in my chest that almost dropped me to my knees, I looked up. There, in backlit silhouette in the doorway, I saw that little figure, I saw my son.

He pointed to his eyes and looked at me. I smiled and felt those lovely warm, wet tears rolling down my neck and in beneath my shirt collar.

Oscar and I walked through the ruins of Brescia, hand in hand. It had been a poor city, actually one of the poorest in Italy, although being in a rich part of the country it wasn’t easy to tell from the outside. But Brescia failed to survive the collapse of the nation state and in time had become a slum.

We stood in the street and looked through the fence at the old clothing factory, which was now just an abandoned site, a burned-out shell that appeared to be home to a pack of wild dogs. I had had to fire a warning shot towards them to keep them away.

We walked through the gateway of a house that had clearly once been beautiful. Not ostentatiously large, and built in a tasteful art deco style. The white walls had brown damp stains on the outside, the windows were broken, and a sofa dragged halfway out through one of them. From within came the echo of a dripping sound, as though from a grotto. We walked round the back, where snow still lay in patches on the grass, faded brown after the long winter.

Oscar stood at the edge of the empty swimming pool full of snow and rubbish. The tiles were cracked and the rim of the pool a dirty brown.

I saw Oscar’s eyes fill with tears. I pulled him towards me. Heard the quick, short snuffles. As we stood there the sun broke through the mingled clouds and smoke and warmed my face. Spring was on its way. I waited until he’d finished snuffling, then held him away from me and told him in the sign language we’d been practising that the summer wasn’t far away, and then we’d go to the coast and swim in the sea.

He nodded.

We didn’t go into the house but I saw the name plate on the door. Olsen. Despite the adoption we’d decided that Oscar would keep the name. In the car driving back to Milan we ate the panzerotti I had bought in Luini, and I turned on the radio. They were playing an old Italian pop song. Oscar drummed away energetically on the dashboard, miming the words to the song as he did so. The news came on afterwards. Among other things there was an item about how the now forty-year-old Murakami had once again defended his world title. We could see the outlines of Milan as Oscar turned towards me. I had to slow down to read all the signs he was making, concentrated and careful:

‘Can you teach me to play chess?’