The Norwegian was curiously gentle with him.

‘She’s not here, Chris,’ he said. ‘And honestly, even if she was, I doubt she’d talk to you.’

‘That’s fine, I uh, I understand. Uh, do you know if she’s gone home? To the house, I mean. I tried her there, not to talk to, only to warn her I’m coming, I mean.’ He heard the choppy stumbling of his own speech and stopped. He rubbed at his face, glad Erik didn’t have videophone capacity. ‘I’m going out to collect the Saab this afternoon. I didn’t want to surprise her, you know, if she didn’t want to, uh, to see me.’

‘She hasn’t gone to the house,’ said Nyquist, and Chris knew then she was there, maybe standing next to her father in the cramped, damp smelling confines of the hall, maybe off in the kitchen, back to it all, trying not to listen.

‘Okay.’ He cleared his throat of an unlooked-for obstruction. ‘Listen, Erik. Tell her. When you see her, I mean, tell her she needs to stay resident in the UK for the next six months. Otherwise, uh, the terms of my will are invalidated. You know, the share options and mortgage insurance on the house? If she’s gone, back to Norway, Shorn’ll get the lot. So, uh. Makes sense for her to stick around, you know.’

There was a lot of silence before Erik answered.

‘I’ll tell her,’ he said.

‘Great.’

More silence. Neither man seemed ready to hang up.

‘You’re going to drive then?’ Nyquist asked him finally.

Chris was relieved to find he could still manage a laugh. ‘Well, let’s just say the other options aren’t great.’

‘You can’t run?’

‘Shame on you, Erik. Run, from the filthy corporate monsters of Conflict Investment?’ He grew abruptly serious, fighting the up-bubbling fear. ‘There’s no way, Erik. They’ve got me checked, filed and monitored. That fucked-up system you’re always raging about? That system’ll be locked up against any move I try to make. Plastic selectively invalidated, corporate police checking ports and airports. To put not too fine a point to it, if I don’t roll out the wheels tomorrow, I’m a common criminal on my way to the jag gurney.’

Nyquist hesitated. ‘Can you beat him? Carla says—‘

‘I don’t know, Erik. Get back to me tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have an answer for you.’

The Norwegian chuckled dutifully. Chris felt his own face take up the echo. He was suddenly, almost tearfully thankful for the older man’s unhostile presence on the line. The instinctive male solidarity, the shoring up of his desperate bravado. He suddenly understood how badly he had failed to do the same thing for Erik at the crisis points in his father-in-law’s life. How he’d taken the Norwegian’s own cornered bravado at face value, failed to see it for what it was, berated him for it and cut him loose to suffer alone. With the realisation, something lodged in his throat.

‘From what I understand,’ Nyquist was saying, ‘we’ll all know by then. In fact we’ll all be watching you crack open the champagne. The networks have been ad-screaming about full coverage since yesterday. Sponsored by Pirelli and BMW, they say.’

Chris’s grin melted into a grimace. ‘So. No prizes for guessing who they think’s going to win, then.’

‘Almost worth beating him just to piss them off, huh?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He could feel another bubble of fear coming up. He cleared his throat again. ‘Listen, Erik. I’ve got to go. Things to do, you know. Got to get ready for all that publicity tomorrow. Interviews, fame, all that shit. It, uh, it isn’t easy being a driving hero.’

‘No,’ said Nyquist very gently. ‘I know.’

He signed the challenge documentation, got the hotel to courier it across to Shorn and sat waiting for receipt confirmation. He studied the route blow-ups and the surface reports with desultory attention, tried vaguely to imagine his way inside something resembling a strategy.

He could not focus on anything. He kept skittering off into daydreams. His thoughts slowed down, fragmented to useless shards.

He heard Carla’s voice.

Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.

Hewitt’s voice.

When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you — when that happens—

He remembered Bryant’s driving. Bryant’s chess playing. Headlong, full on, joyous in its savagery.

Bryant and the car-jackers. The boom of the Nemex, the tumbling bodies.

Bryant and Griff Dixon. Implacable, precise.

Bryant and Marauder, daring the gangwit forward, grinning into the possibility of it.

Bryant on Crutched Friars, walking empty handed into the duel against five men with shotguns.

He stared at it all, behind the curtain of his closed eyes.

And heard Hewitt again.

Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range—while she was injured and trapped in wreckage—the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands—You’re no fucking different to me in the end.

He wondered if she was right.

Recoiled automatically as soon as he thought it.

Found himself lying face up on the bed an hour later, exploring the idea gingerly, like a broken bone or a gaping wound he didn’t dare look at directly.

Caught himself, finally, hoping it might be true.

Because, in the absence of the consuming hatred that had driven him after Edward Quain, he didn’t know what else he could summon to keep him alive tomorrow.

He had the cab leave him at the end of the drive.

It felt strange to walk up the gravel S-curve and see the house emerge gradually through the trees. Just being there felt odd enough - he hadn’t seen the place in weeks, and even then, before his life broke in half, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d walked from the road. One weekend, one evening, out with Carla in the village maybe. Back at the start of the summer. He couldn’t remember.

He reached the turning circle at the top, and the Saab was there, quiet and sequined with rain. He wondered if Carla had looked at it recently, wondered in fact when it had last been moved. He’d need to road-test it. Check it for—

A memory arrowed in past his defences - Carla under the Saab post test-drive, calling out questions about handling, while he stood with a whisky in his hand, watching her feet and answering. Warmth of shared knowledge, shared involvement.

He stared at the Saab, throat aching. The urge to get in and drive somewhere was overwhelming. He stood for a full twenty seconds, like a starving man faced with a large animal that he might just conceivably be able to kill with his bare hands and eat raw. He only moved when the straps on his bags began to cut deep enough into his palms to be painful.

Not yet.

He dumped the bags at the front door while he fished the recog tab from his pocket and showed it to the lock. Shouldered the door aside and moved across the threshold. Inside was cold with the lack of recent occupancy and everything had the skin-thin unfamiliarity of return home after long absence. He stood in the lounge, bags dropped once more at his feet, and Carla’s departure came and hit him like a hard slap across the mouth.

She’d taken very little, but the holes it had left felt like wounds. The green onyx woman-form she’d bought in Cape Town was gone from its place by the phone deck. Two blunt little metal stubs protruded from a suddenly naked patch of wall where the flattened and engraved Volvo cylinder head from her mechanic’s graduation had once hung. On the mantelpiece, something else was gone, like a pulled tooth, he couldn’t remember what it was. The framed photos of her friends and family on the window ledge had been weeded out from others of Chris and Carla or Chris alone, and the remaining crop looked stranded on the white wood like yachts run aground. The bookshelves were devastated, the bulk of their occupants gone, the rest fallen flat or leaning forlornly together in corners.