'Everything's all right with you, isn't it, Roberto?' he asked, looking at me seriously.

I smiled. 'Sure, I'm good. It's quite a compliment to be told I'm wasting my youth when I'm thirty-four.'

'Yeah, but the man telling you that's forty-two.'

We both laughed, and I took another toke, beginning to get that lightheaded feeling.

'I want you to be happy, man, you know? You've had a few hard times, but you've got to remember that life's short, and it's there to be enjoyed. That's my philosophy and it's always worked.' He sat back in his seat, making himself comfortable, and fiddled with his bandanna (red tonight).

His philosophy had worked, too. Ramon might not have had a lot financially, but he was one of the happiest men I knew. He had his dope, his dancing, his conquests, and one way or another he always perked me up, however black my mood was.

I drained my beer and pointed to his. 'Another one?'

'Do bears defecate in forested terrain?'

'Apparently so,' I said, and got up, handing him the joint.

As I pulled two more Peronis from the fridge, I had a sudden rush of guilt. Here I was enjoying myself, drinking and smoking dope without a second thought for Jenny. I looked at my watch. It had just turned half eight. I knew I ought to phone Tina and chivvy her into action, but I told myself that I'd do it later. If I hassled her too much she'd end up ignoring my calls.

'You know what I could do with?' I said, coming back into the room with the beers. 'A holiday. I've just realized I haven't been anywhere apart from France since before Chloe was born, and that was over four years ago.' I put Ramon's bottle on the bedside table beside his chair, and collapsed back into the beanbags. 'I'm thinking somewhere like Costa Rica. Have you ever been there?' I remembered that he'd always claimed to have been a bit of a world traveller.

Ramon didn't answer.

He didn't even move.

I tensed, experiencing a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. 'Ramon?' My voice cracked as I spoke his name.

He was slumped forward a little in his seat, like he'd fallen asleep, and the joint was no longer in his hand.

I put down my drink and got to my feet, moving too fast and getting a headrush as I walked over to him. 'Ramon? You all right, mate?'

I crouched down. Still no movement. The hollow feeling was spreading to every part of me. I lifted his head, not wanting to do it but knowing that I had to.

'Oh Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ.'

There was a deep red hole where his left eye had been. It was pumping blood, a thick stripe of which ran slowly down his face and on to his neck, pooling in the fold there.

Straight away I knew he was dead. There was no question about it. His head hung heavy and useless in my hands, but it was still almost impossible to believe because I'd only been gone a few moments – thirty seconds at most – and when I'd left him he'd been laughing and talking and toking. Unable to quite comprehend what I was seeing, even though the blood was now running freely down his face, I felt desperately for a pulse that wasn't there.

A terrified panic ripped through me. 'Ramon! Ramon! Wake up! Stay with me!' I gave his face a gentle slap. 'Please,' I whispered. 'Stay with me. Don't go.'

And then I heard movement.

I froze.

'Who's Chloe?' said a voice behind me in a harsh Northern Irish accent.

Fourteen

My mouth went dry. My stomach tightened so much it was painful. More than anything else in the world, I didn't want to turn round.

But I couldn't keep staring at Ramon's blank, dead face either. Its utter lifelessness was tearing me apart.

Slowly, very slowly, I turned my head. Is this it? I kept asking myself. The end of my life? A lonely, bloody death in a cramped little flat miles away from the people I loved. I didn't want to die. God, I didn't want to die.

He stood between me and the bedroom door, blocking any possibility of escape – the grotesque-looking Irishman with the saucer eyes and the malignant smile permanently etched on the rack-tight skin of his face. He had one of his hands behind his back, while in the other he held the photo I kept by my bed of Yvonne, Chloe and me, taken in the garden a few weeks after we'd arrived in France, shortly before Chloe's second birthday, in the days when we were still full of optimism. Before everything went wrong.

It hadn't taken him long to find out where I lived, then.

'I asked you a question, Mr Fallon,' he said, his voice quiet and calm. 'Who's Chloe?'

He brought the hand round from behind his back, and I saw he was holding the stiletto he'd tried to cut my throat with the previous night, except this time it was stained with Ramon's blood. He tapped the tip of the blade against the photo. 'Is it her?' He turned the frame round so I could see it properly, rubbing the blade along the image of Chloe's innocent, smiling face.

'She's my daughter,' I said, my voice barely a croak.

'You don't want her to end up like your friend, do you?'

'No.'

'Good. Then you'll do exactly what I say.' He dropped the photo on to the carpet, and took a step towards me.

'You didn't have to kill him,' I whispered. 'He was nothing to do with this.'

'I know, but I enjoyed it.' He paused, taking pleasure in my fear, the pale saucer eyes lighting up with a childlike glee. 'Fear's a strange instinct, isn't it? It's supposedly there for self-preservation, yet right now it's preventing you from doing the one thing that will most obviously preserve your life – running.'

I didn't say anything. I didn't need to. He was right.

'Fear can make you weak and useless, but if you know how to control and channel it, it can be used to your advantage. I have that ability. I've always had it. But your problem right now is that you don't. Instead, your fear's going to make you do exactly as you're told.' He took another step forward so he was standing above me. I became aware of the scent of expensive aftershave. 'And what you're going to do now is drink this.' He produced a hipflask from the pocket of the raincoat he was wearing and threw it in my lap. 'Go on, drink.'

I picked it up but made no move to put it to my lips. Instead, I focused on the bloodstained blade only a few feet from my face. For the first time a real sense of anger began to overcome my fear. I couldn't believe this bastard had casually executed Ramon. And now he was threatening to do the same to my precious daughter, the one person in this world I would die to protect.

Some primal instinct kicked in. Remembering the way I'd caught him off guard the previous night, I leapt to my feet with a yell, blanking out the danger as I grabbed for his knife hand and lunged forward with the hipflask, using it as a makeshift club to slam into his face.

He moved aside easily and slapped the flask out of my hand, then drove a foot squarely into my groin.

I felt a searing pain travel up into my belly and the fight went out of me instantly. As I began to fall to my knees a gloved hand grabbed me by the throat and I was slammed back into the wall, stumbling over Ramon's corpse in the process. 'Don't fuck me about,' he hissed, and a split second later I felt the blade as he pushed it against my cheek.

For a second the room was silent, then he brought his face very close to mine. For the first time I noticed jagged patches of scar tissue round his chin that the plastic surgery had failed to get rid of entirely, and that he was wearing blusher to try to conceal them.

He ran the top of the blade along my cheek and into the pit just below my eye, pushing it against my eyeball. All the time his grip on my throat tightened, and I found it almost impossible to breathe.

'I once cut a man's face off with this knife,' he whispered gently, his breath warm on my skin. 'I started here.' He pushed the blade in harder and I began to moan, not daring to move a millimetre. 'And I sliced all the way down.' He slowly traced a line down my jawline to my chin. 'And when I'd finished, I had a fillet. Then I did the other side. His wife was watching at the time. I informed her that if she didn't tell me the whereabouts of her son – a man who owed a client of mine a very large sum of money – then I'd use a skillet to fry her husband's cheeks, and feed them to her. But she was strong-willed, as women so often are, so she ended up eating well that night. It was only when it was her turn to provide the meat that she relented and gave him up.' He let out a low chuckle, moving the blade down so that it was against my throat, revelling in my fear. 'I tell you this so you understand what I'm capable of if you lie to me.'