This kind of thing had happened before.

In the beginning, when in his teens, Johnson had thought it meant something profoundly important, particularly when it was a girl he abruptly kept on seeing-that was, noticing. Even in his thirties he had been misled by that idea, with Susan. He had realized, after their separation, that what had drawn him to her at first wasn’t love or sex but her own quirkiness and his observation of it. She had worked it out herself, eventually. In the final year of their life together she came to call those he especially studied (including those at Haine and Birch) his “prey.” “Which of your prey are you seeing tomorrow?” she would ask playfully.

Now grasping that it was some type of acuity in him that latched on to certain others in this fashion, Johnson had not an instant’s doubt that he had reacted differently to Biker.

So what was it then, with Biker? What had alerted Johnson there under the streetlamp on that moonless night?

During the next week, Johnson took his washing to the launderette about 6 p.m., and there Biker sat.

Biker was unloading his wash, but raised his eyes. They were very long eyes, extraordinarily clear, a pale, gleaming grey.

“Cold out,” said Johnson, dumping the washing.

“Yeah,” said Biker.

“Damn it, this machine isn’t working.”

“Yeah,” said Biker. He looked up again. “Try kicking it.”

“You’re joking,” said Johnson placidly.

“No,” said Biker, and he came over quite calmly, and did something astonishing. Which was he jumped straight upward with enormous agility and power, and fetched the washer the lightest but most expressive slap with his left foot. Landing, he was like a lion-totally co-ordinated, unfazed. While the machine, which had let out a rattling roar, now gulped straight into its cycle. Biker nodded and returned to his wash.

“Wow,” said Johnson. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I owe you a drink. The girlfriend’s refused to come round till I get these bloody sheets done.”

Biker glanced at him.

Johnson saw there was neither reluctance nor interest in the smooth, lean face, hardly any expression at all. The eyes were only mercury and white china.

“I’ll be in the Victory,” he said.

Once Biker left, Johnson, not to seem too eager, stayed ten minutes with his washing. He had chosen the crank machine on purpose. And what a response he had got! Biker must be an acrobat. At the very least a trained dancer.

Perhaps, Johnson thought, he shouldn’t indulge this. Perhaps it was unwise. But then, he usually did indulge his observation. It had never led to anything bad. Except once.

Had being stabbed and disabled made him reckless? He thought not. Johnson wasn’t reckless. And he could afford the price of a couple of drinks.

When he got into the pub, the place was already full. The music machine filled the air with huge thuddings, while on every side other machines for gambling flashed like a firework display.

He looked round, then went to the bar and ordered a drink, whisky for the cold. He could already see Biker wasn’t there.

Which might mean he had distrusted Johnson, or that something else had called him away. Or anything, really.

Johnson was not unduly disappointed. Sometimes not knowing was the more intriguing state. Besides, going out of the door he heard a man say, as if signaling to him, “Yeah, there’s something out by the old pier sometimes. I seen it too. Big animal. Dolphin p’rhaps. But it was dark.”

Yet another week after the exchange with Biker, Johnson was leaving the smaller Sainsbury, near the Odeon, when he glimpsed his quarry, bikeless, driving by in a dark blue BMW.

Johnson knew he would thereafter keep his eyes open also for the car, whose number-plate he had at once memorized. He was sure, inevitably, that he had often seen the car as well. He was struck by an idea, too, that Biker, in some strange, low-key way, wished to be visible-the bike itself, the car, the habit of the launderette. And that in turn implied (perhaps) a wish to be less visible, or non-visible, on other occasions.

With his groceries Johnson picked up one of the local papers. He liked to glance at it; the doings of the city of Sandbourne amused and puzzled him. Accordingly he presently read in it that another late-season holiday maker had gone missing. There had apparently been two the previous summer, who vanished without a trace. Keen swimmers, they were thought to have fallen foul of the wild currents east of the town. The new case, however, one Alice Minerva McClunes, had been a talented lady from New York. On the south-east coast to visit a niece, she had gone out with her camera and sketch-pad and failed to return. “She wanted to stay on the beach,” the presumably woebegone niece reported, “till moonrise. It was the full moon.” Alice was, it seemed, known for her photography of moonlight on various things.

This small article stayed intransigently with Johnson for the rest of the evening. He reread it twice, not knowing quite why.

Johnson the observer had made no friendships in Sandbourne, but he had by now gained a few acquaintances to say “hello” to.

He went to the local library the next day, then to the fishmarket above the beach. There, in between the little shops, he met the man he knew as Reg. And then Biker appeared walking along from the east end of the town, from the direction actually of the eldritch pier. And Reg called out to him, “Hi, mate. Okay?” and Biker smiled and was gone.

As one might, Johnson said, “You know him? I’ve seen him around-nice bike. Drives a car, too, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s Jason. Don’t know his other name. Lives in one of the rock-houses. Got a posh IT job in London -only goes up a couple of times a week. Oh, and once a month, three days and nights in Nores.” Reg pronounced this neighbouring, still parochial, town in the proper local way as Nor-ez. “Bit of money, yes.”

“A rock-house? They’re the ones built into the cliff, aren’t they?”

“Yep. Caves in back with pools of seawater. Pretty trendy now. Not so good when we get a freak high tide. Flooded out last year, all of ’em. Only, he was off at Nores-three days every time. Thought he might come back to see the damage but he never did. When I saw him he just says, I’ll just buy a new carpet. Okay for some.”

“Yes,” said Johnson regretfully.

But his mind was busy springing off along the last stretch of habitable Sandbourne, mentally inspecting the houses set back into the cliffs. Smugglers had put them to good use in the 1800s. Now renovated and “smart,” they engaged the wealthy and artistic. He was curious (of course he was) as to which house was Jason’s-Jason, who, after all, must be rich. He thought of the pools of sea that lay behind the facades, and the great stoops of bending cliff that overhung them. Johnson had seen photographs of these structures in History of Sandbourne.

He visualized acrobatic Jason leaping straight down into a glimmering, glittery, nocturnal pool, descending like a spear, wriggling effortless and subtle as an eel out through some pipe or fissure, and so into the black-emerald bowel of the sea. He pictured those cold silver eyes under the glazes of blind green water, and the whip of the two legs, working as one, like a merman’s tail. But somehow, too, Johnson pictured Jason as a sort of dog-hairy, unrecognizable, though swimming-as if there had been a dream of this, and now he, Johnson, recalled. As gradually he had remembered, was remembering all the rest, the sightings in launderette, car-all, everything.

Turquoise, blood-orange, daylight snagged the drips of nets under the skeletal arm of the pier. Bottle-green light gloomed through rotted struts, shining up the mud, debris, the crinkle of water like pleated glass…