'Back off there! Get in the next line!'

Green uniform. Green uniform and a holstered revolver and polished hoots, peaked cap. He was directing the trucks.

Until he moved I couldn't bring my prisoner into the open. It was going to be bad enough with the other people around.

'Get in behind that one — come on!'

An engine gunning up.

I watched his boots. I watched them for ten minutes, fifteen, and listened to him shouting, telling them where to bring their vans and their pickups and flat-beds. Then a bit of trouble started in the next row, a scraping of metal, and a lot more shouting than usual. I think one of them had buckled another's wing and they were arguing the toss. The policeman went over there.

I got the man's wrists again and dragged him clear of the platform and began walking him to the gates with his arm round my shoulders and my own round his waist but his feet were dragging and it would have been easier to give him a fireman's lift but I couldn't do that because it would have looked very odd, something serious.

Headlights sweeping across the yard as the shopkeepers kept coming in. If they saw me they wouldn't do anything; this was a narrow time-gap for them — they had to get the produce through the checkers and into their shops and on display before they opened.

'What's the trouble, then?'

'He fell and banged his head.'

One of the truckers, sweating in the chill morning, his breath steaming as he stood fishing for his pack of cigarettes.

'Tell the cop, he'll get an ambulance.'

'He's not that bad,' dragging him faster, swinging him along. 'I’m getting him to the car — '

'You ought to tell the — '

'He's a friend of mine, had too much to drink — I don't want to get him in trouble.'

'That's different,' grunt of a laugh as he lit up and clicked his lighter shut, turning away.

Swinging him along, a dead weight, one of his feet getting in the way of my own, sweat on the back of my neck as I felt the cop's eyes on us — you there, what's the trouble? — don't let him turn, don't let him see us, swinging the bastard along, he would've shot me between the eyes if I hadn't been so fast, those were his instructions, his instructions from Horst Volper, come on you bastard lift your bloody feet up, come on.

'Had a skinful?'

'How did you guess?'

Face in a window of the van going by, laughing.

Crossing the street and I got the keys and let him slump against the BMW while I opened the passenger door and pushed him in, his eyes coming open but with no understanding in them. Coloured light flashing as a police patrol crawled past, pulling in to the kerb as the wrecking truck turned in from the next street, hauling the blackened shell of the Mercedes.

05:37 on the dashboard clock, the fuel gauge at half. I started up and waited until the wrecker had gone by and the police car swung in a U-turn and followed it and then I took the opposite direction, turning left at the intersection to keep clear of the police crew throwing sand on the road where the fire had been.

Heard his breath coming in a jerk as he recovered enough to realise the situation and instinctively tried to do something, lifting his foot and bringing it down as I used the edge of my hand on the knee-cap — I suppose he was trying to break the gear-lever or smash my ankle and hit the brake-pedal, something like that.

His breath was hissing now and he was holding his knee.

'Give me your name.'

Didn't answer.

Later would do, but the name is important, the key to the psyche. Our name is the most personal thing about us, a cypher for all that we are, our claim to identity. It is the first thing you do, when you begin the matter: you get their name, so that you can turn it as a weapon against them.

I drove circumspectly, slowing in good time for the lights when they changed to amber, keeping five kph below the speed limit, driving west and south and reaching the safe-house at 05:52.

Before we got out of the car I said: 'You are in my hands, as you realise, but you have a choice.'

I told him what it was.

Gunter Blum, looking down, his face white.

'Don't stand there,' I said. 'Don't just stand there like that.'

I wanted to be angry with him, for showing me what I had done, for holding up a mirror to me, to the picture of Dorian Gray. That was how it felt, how I thought of it.

'What happened?' he asked me.

I didn't answer. The light was still very bright: I'd taken the shade off and put some aluminium foil round it to intensify the glare. That too is important, another tool of this most hideous of all trades. There were smells in the room, too, none of them strong but none of them pleasant. There was no sound, except for his breathing. Dollinger's, Helmut Dollinger's breathing. It was all, one might say, that he had left: the ability to breathe.

Gunter was watching me now, his mouth open a little, his eyes naked and appalled under the fierce glare of the lamp.

I'd called him in here.

'I want you to take him somewhere and leave him, and phone for an ambulance, tell them where to find him.'

I was very tired. This business had drained me, and I hadn't expected it to be so bad. But if I had expected it, I would still have had to do it.

Against your principles.

Indeed yes, against my principles, against the tenets of human conduct that alone can keep some sort of brotherhood alive in this angry world. These I had transgressed, and this is not, my good friend — my friend, I am sure, no longer — this is not to purge myself in an outpouring of spurious confession. I shall remember the name of Dollinger. I shall remember it.

Gunter: 'Take him where?'

'What? Anywhere. In a doorway, where you won't be seen.' It occurred to me, either because I was finding it difficult to regain my focus on reality or because he looked so stunned, Gunter, so removed from ordinary understanding — it occurred to me that I should spell it out for him, for his own sake. 'That's the important thing, of course, that no one sees you. Then phone for an ambulance, without giving your name.'

I began taking off my gloves, the thin nylon driving-gloves they'd told Cone I preferred, when they'd briefed him as my director in the field. I'd put them on in a grotesque attempt to distance myself, my hands, from the other man's body while I worked on it, on its nervous system, its most sensitive sites of pain. They'd been meant to anaesthetise my hands, to separate them from what they were doing. Don't you think that's the most appalling part of it?

'Is he still alive?'

'Of course.' Said with anger, the first murmuring of self-rage, like distant thunder. 'But he needs hospitalising. For God's sake switch off the light.'

He seemed not to know where the switch was, though our apartments were identical. Then he found it and the glare was cut off, to leave the reflected glow of that bloody Wall in the room.

He came towards the man in the chair, tied to the chair with torn cloth, towelling, I forget what I'd used. 'What do I do if he dies, while I'm taking him there?'

'You'll leave him there just the same, you clod, and call an ambulance, for Christ's sake, now is that clear?'

He said it was, and got Dollinger across his shoulder and went out with him and I soaked a towel in the bathroom and held it against my face and stood there a long time with the nerve-light spangling the dark behind my lids and my heart's beat hammering. The worst of it, with things like this, as you know, is that you can't have your time over again, and not do whatever you've done, and I can't think of two other words in the whole of the language that carry the weight of such infinite despair as these: too late.