'Let's talk about him later,' recommended Kearney. 'He's got a great idea for a new drug.' He sat on the end of Meadows's desk. 'Brian Tate is worried about you, Gordon.'

'Is he?' said Gordon. 'I'm sorry if that's so.'

'He says you're progress-chasing. He's worried that you're going to sell us to Sony. We don't want that.'

'I think Brian is-'

'Shall I tell you why we don't want that, Gordon? We don't want that because Brian's a prima donna. You've got to show confidence in a prima donna. Try this thought-experiment.' Kearney held up his hands, palms uppermost. He looked at the left one. 'No confidence,' he said, and then, looking at the right one, 'no quantum computer.' He repeated this pantomime. 'No confidence, no quantum computer. Are you intelligent enough to see the connection here, Gordon?'

Meadows laughed.

'I think you're less naive than you suggest,' he said. 'And Brian is certainly less nervous than he pretends. Now let's see… ' He tapped a couple of keys. Spreadsheets blossomed on his monitor like ripening fruit. 'Your burn-rate's quite high,' he concluded after a moment. He raised his hands, palms upward, and mimicked the way Kearney had looked from one to the other. 'No money,' he said, 'no research. We need fresh capital. And a move like this-as long as we thought it was good for the science-would expand our opportunities, not limit them.'

'Who's "we"?' said Kearney.

'You aren't listening. Brian would have his own department. That would be part of the package. He wonders if you work hard enough, Michael. He's worried about his idea.'

'I think you're getting ready to dump us. Here's some advice. Don't try it.'

Meadows examined his hands.

'You're being paranoid, Michael.'

'Imagine that,' Kearney said.

Valentine Sprake turned away from the darkening view and walked in a jerky, hurried fashion across the room, as if he had seen, out there in the marshes, something which surprised him. He leaned over Meadows's desk, picked up the coffee pot and drank its contents directly from the spout. 'Last week,' he said to Meadows, 'I learned that Urizen was back among us, and His name is Old England. We are all adrift on the sea of time and space here. Think about that too.' He stalked out of the office with his hands folded on his chest.

Meadows looked amused.

'Who is that, Kearney?'

'Don't ask,' said Kearney absently. On the way out he said: 'And keep off Brian's back.'

'I can't protect the two of you forever,' Meadows called after him. That was when Kearney knew Meadows had already sold them to Sony.

Lightweight separators in pastel colours were used to create privacy inside MVC-Kaplan's otherwise featureless tent of bolted glass. The first thing Kearney saw outside Meadows's workspace was the shadow of the Shrander, projected somehow from inside the building on to one of these. It was life-size, a little blurred and diffuse at first, then hardening and sharpening and turning slowly on its own axis like a chrysalis hanging in a hedge. As it turned, there was a kind of rustling noise he hadn't heard for twenty years; a smell he still recognised. He felt his whole body go cold and rigid with fear. He backed away from it a few steps, then ran back into the office, where he hauled Meadows over the glass desk by the front of his suit and hit him hard, three or four times in succession, on the right cheekbone.

'Christ,' said Meadows in a thick voice. 'Ah.'

Kearney pulled him all the way over the desk, across the floor and out of the door. At the same time the lift arrived and Sprake got out.

'I saw it, I saw it,' Kearney said.

Sprake showed his teeth. 'It's not here now.'

'Get a fucking move on. It's closer than ever. It wants me to do something.'

Together they bundled Meadows into the lift and down three floors. He seemed to wake up as they dragged him across the lobby and out to the canal bank. 'Kearney?' he said repeatedly. 'Is that you? Is there something wrong with me?' Kearney let go of him and began kicking his head. Sprake pushed his way between them and held Kearney off until he had calmed down. They got Meadows to the edge of the water, into which they dropped him, face down, while they held his legs. He tried to keep his head above the surface by arching his back, then gave up with a groan. Bubbles came up. His bowels let go.

'Christ,' said Kearney reeling away. 'Is he dead?'

Sprake grinned. 'I'd say he was.' He tilted his head back until he was looking straight up at the faint stars above Walthamstow, raised his arms level with his shoulders, and danced slowly away north along the towpath towards Edmonton.

'Urizen!' he called.

'Fuck this,' said Kearney. He ran in the opposite direction, all the way to Lea Bridge, then got a minicab to Grove Park.

Every murder reminded him of the Shrander's house, which in a sense he had never left. His fall had begun there, his deeply fallen knowledge imprisoned him there. In another sense, the Shrander's pursuit of him in succeeding years was that knowledge: it was the constant fall into the awareness of falling. When he killed, especially when he killed women, he felt released from what he knew. He felt for an instant as if he had escaped again.

Bare grey dusty floorboards, net curtains, cold grey light. A dull house on a dull street. The Shrander, intact, irrefragable, enduring, stood in its upper room gazing magisterially out of the window like the captain of a ship. Kearney ran away from it because, as much as anything, he was frightened of the coat it wore. He was frightened of the smell of wet wool. That smell would be his last unfallen sensation.

The beak opened. Words were spoken. Panic-it was his own-filled the room like a clear liquid, an albumen or isinglass so thick he was forced to turn and swim his way through the open door. His arms worked in a sort of breaststroke while his legs ran beneath him in useless slow motion. He stumbled across the landing outside and straight down the stairs-full of terror and ecstasy, the dice in his hand-into the rainy streets, looking for someone to kill. He knew he wouldn't be saved unless he did. A kind of lateral gravity was in his favour: he fell all the way from the Shrander's house towards the railway station. To travel, he hoped, would be to fall away from falling, at some more acceptable, some more merciful angle.

It was late on a wet winter afternoon. The trains were reluctant, overheated, empty. Everything was slow, slow, slow. He caught a local, grinding its way out of London into Buckinghamshire. Every time he looked down at the dice in his hand, the world lurched and he had to look away. He sat there sweating until, two or three stops beyond Harrow-on-the-Hill, a tanned but tired-looking woman joined him in the carriage. She was dressed in a black business suit. In one hand she carried a briefcase, in the other a plastic Marks Spencer carrier bag. She fussed with her mobile phone, leafed through a self-help book which seemed to be called Why Shouldn't I Have the Things I Want? Two stations further north, the train slowed and stopped. She got to her feet and waited for the door to open, staring at the darkening platform, the lighted ticket office beyond. She tapped her foot. She looked at her watch. Her husband would be waiting in the car park with the Saab, and they would go straight on to the gym. Up and down the train, other doors opened and closed, people hurried away. She looked nervously right and left. She looked at Kearney. In the overheated emptiness, her journey pulled out like chewing gum, then snapped.

'Excuse me,' she said. 'They don't seem to be letting me out.'

She laughed.

Kearney laughed too.

'Let's see what we can do,' he said.

Five or six thin gold chains, each bearing either her initial or her Christian name as a pendant, clung to the prominent tendons of her neck. 'Let's see what we can do, Sophie.' As he reached down to touch with his fingertip the make-up caked in the faint blonde down at the corner of her mouth, the train pulled slowly away. Her shopping had spilled when she fell. Something-he thought it was a shrink-wrapped lettuce-rolled out of the carrier bag and along the empty carriage. The platform slid backwards and was replaced by black night. The doors had never opened.