‘Been looking for you everywhere, man. Hi, Liz.’ The conjunction appeared to strike him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘What are you guys doing out here?’

‘Talking,’ said Liz, unruffled.

Chris scrambled for cover. ‘Book deal.’ He made a gesture at Liz that felt like a warding off. ‘She says.’

‘Yeah?’ Bryant gave Liz an unfriendly look. ‘Well, my advice is don’t tell her anything too realistic. You wouldn’t want to get labelled an animal.’

Liz, smiling to herself, turning away, unfolding herself from the swing. Chris shut it out and focused on Bryant.

‘So what’s happening?

‘Ah, no big deal. Troy needs a favour. Liz, you want to give us a little privacy?’

‘Already leaving, boys. Already leaving.’

They both watched her walk back down the garden and into the house. Mike turned and mimed a pistol at Chris’s face. He wasn’t smiling.

‘Hope you know what you’re doing here, Chris.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mike. I’m married. She just wants another half-million advance from her publishers.’

‘I wouldn’t count on that being the whole story.’

‘Mike, I am married.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ Bryant rubbed at his face. ‘Not like you, though, huh?’

‘You said that, not me.’

‘Yeah.’ Bryant smiled sadly and slung an arm across the other man’s shoulders. ‘You’re a good guy, Chris. You’re a good fucking guy.’

Chris stowed the unease slithering through him.

‘So. What’s the deal with Troy?’

It was all in the zones.

Mike said he’d drive, though Chris wasn’t convinced he was in any way the more sober or straight of the two of them. They went out to the car together with Troy, who for the first time since Chris had known him seemed angry and uncomfortable.

‘I’d come with you, Mike ...’

‘I know you would, man. But you can’t.’ Mike held up his corporate plastic. ‘We’re the only ones can do this for you. You know that.’

The Jamaican shook his head. ‘I owe you for this. Big time.’

‘You don’t owe me shit, Troy. Remember Camberwell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Right, well as far as I’m concerned, I’m still paying off the interest, ‘kay? Now give Chris the camera.’

Troy Morris swallowed and handed over the shoulder set. His features were knotted up with rage and frustration. Chris remembered him at the Falkland, the sawn-off shotgun propped against his shoulder as he left laughing, the sense of street competence that radiated off the man. It was a brutal transition to the Troy he saw before him now. Chris felt a jagged pang of sympathy. He knew the feeling of sudden impotence from his own youth, knew how it could cook your brains in your head, chew up your insides until you couldn’t sleep.

He got in the car. Stowed the shoulder set in the back seat.

‘Be back before you know it,’ said Mike as he swung himself in the driver’s side. The engine rumbled awake. Gears engaged and the BMW swept out into the street.

‘What was that about Camberwell?’ Chris asked, as they came up on the checkpoint lights.

‘Yeah, first time I met Troy. About ten years ago, back before he had this place. I was out in the zones, hitting the whiff pretty hard, went home with the wrong woman.’

‘For a change,’ said Chris sourly.

Mike chuckled. ‘Yeah, guess you never can get all the spots off the tiger, huh?’

‘Leopard.’

‘What?’ They pulled in beside the checkpoint. A nervous-looking kid in guard uniform came out of the cabin and glanced into the car. He seemed unsure of himself. Mike leaned out and handed over his plastic.

‘Leopard,’ said Chris, while they were waiting. ‘Tigers used to have stripes, not spots. Leopards were the spotted ones.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, saw it on some nature digest a while back. They used to be able to climb trees, just like a real cat.’

‘What, tigers?’

‘Leopards.’

The young guard finally got his hipswipe unit to work and Mike’s card chimed through. The barrier rose and they were waved across.

‘I swear these guys get younger every time we do the zones,’ said Chris. ‘I mean, is it really a good idea to give automatic weapons to teenagers like that?’

‘Why not? They do it in the army.’

They hit their first pothole. Mike took a left. Around them, the housing grew increasingly haggard.

‘So yeah, Camberwell. This was before I met Suki. I was pretty wild back then. Pretty stupid. Used to get through a can and a half of Durex a month, easily. And the drugs, ah, you know how it is when you’ve got money. Anyway, this tart wasn’t really a tart, or maybe she was a tart and she changed her mind, I don’t know. End result, there were these three guys waiting outside her apartment. They threw me down a flight of stairs and started dancing on my head. Troy was living in the apartment downstairs, he heard the noise, came out and chased them off.’

‘All three of them?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. He’s pretty fucking hard, Troy is. Or could be he faced them down. Don’t know, I was out by then, semi-conscious. But, yeah, maybe he just talked them out of it. See, they were black, I was white, Troy was black. That maybe had something to do with it. Or maybe not. Anyway, the guy saved me getting hospitalised for certain, maybe saved me from a wheelchair. I owe him forever, and then some.’

They drove in silence the rest of the way, parked outside a nondescript little row of three-storey houses and sat for a moment. Mike hauled the camera out of the back seat and dumped it in Chris’s lap.

‘Okay, now just follow my lead. Back me up.’

They got out of the car, went through an ungated garden gateway and up a short, decaying concrete path. The door was cheap beige impact plastic, scarred and ugly. A Sony securicam lens and speaker grille gleamed incongruously from the chest-high panel in which it had been set. The installation looked professional. Mike touched the edge of the panel with one finger.

‘See. Going up in the world. Just like the man said.’

Chris shook his head and whispered. ‘I can’t believe—‘

‘Believe it.’ Mike hit the doorbell. ‘Now turn that thing on.’

Chris found the on-off in the camera’s grip. A cone of hard light leapt out of the front end and splashed on the scarred plastic of the front door. He wondered if this was going to play. Most state-of-the-art shoulder sets these days would shoot the whole range from infra-red to ultraviolet with no external lighting at all.

Movement behind the door. He shouldered the set and tried to look like a cameraman.

‘You know what fucking time it is?’ said a female voice from the speaker grille. ‘This had better be fucking important.’

Mike pitched his voice media bouncy. ‘Ah, Mrs Dixon? This is Gavin Wallace from Powerful People. Is your husband home?’

A silence. Chris imagined her peering into the securicam screen at the two expensively-dressed men on her doorstep. The voice came, tinged with suspicion.

‘You from TV?’

‘Yes, Mrs Dixon, that’s what I said. Your husband has been selected from—‘

A second voice, male and further from the speaker pick-up. The woman’s voice faded as she turned away from the door.

‘Griff, it’s the TV. Powerful People.’

Another pause, laced with muffled voices. Someone had a hand over the pick-up. Mike looked at Chris, shrugged and put on the media voice again.

‘Mr Dixon, if you’re there. We don’t have a lot of time. The helicopter has already left Blackfriars, and we need to get through the preliminaries before it arrives. We’re on a very tight schedule.’

It was the right chord. Half the draw of Powerful People derived from the breakneck pace the programme sustained from the moment the names came out of the studio computer. There was much aerial footage, cityscapes tilting away beneath the swift-flying pick-up copters, locator teams sprinting through the zones in search of the night’s contestants—