Any answer would have felt awkward, so a moment of silence developed. For a few seconds, it was just the two of them, surrounded by darkness and silence, gazing into the water. Fry looked down at their hands, hers and Georgi’s. They were so close on the rail that they were almost touching. She felt as if she was an inch away from something unexpected, a contact she could so easily reach out for, and hold on to.

Then a young couple appeared on the opposite bank and began to walk slowly across the bridge. Kotsev moved back from the parapet when he heard the footsteps. He brushed against her as he turned, and Fry caught a whiff of his scent when he touched her. She inhaled instinctively, trying to read some elusive meaning in a smell.

‘Kalina Tet-a-tet,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s Russian.’

Fry met his gaze for a moment, wondering how he’d known what she was thinking.

 Cooper retrieved his beer and switched on the TV. But the film had already started, and it didn’t look quite so interesting after all. In fact, he thought he’d probably seen it before, and just forgotten the title. So he disentangled himself from the cat and picked up his phone again. He dialled a number from his phone book.

‘Hi, it’s me. What are you doing?’

And immediately it was as if he’d been sucked into some kind of time slip. Time went by without him being aware of it, because he was in a world when time didn’t really exist. When he next looked at his watch, the call seemed to have lasted for nearly an hour. He’d finished his beer, walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and come back with another bottle, all without breaking concentration. It was a miracle the way the mind could focus on the important things.

‘Better go. Are you on duty tomorrow …? I’ll see you, then.’

Finishing the call, he decided to go to bed early. But he lay awake for a while with the cat lying on his duvet, purring like a mobile generator. He always thought a feline in the bedroom was appropriate, in a way. A cat was the Celtic equivalent to the dog Cerberus – the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. Randy could watch over him as he slipped across the vulnerable threshold between waking and sleep.

Tonight, his brain was already wandering out of his control, following its own path. He was remembering random incidents from his past when reality might have been different from what he’d perceived. There had been moments, of course. There’d been times when he thought he saw things that didn’t exist, when he’d woken to a voice in the night and realized it was only a dream. There had been entire periods of his life when everything had been dark and twisted, and out of proportion. As a teenager, his whole world had seemed out of kilter. But you could only recognize that later, couldn’t you? Reality was a matter of perspective.

Finally, he drifted to sleep recalling how many times his mother had spoken to him when he knew she wasn’t there. He could hear her voice plainly, even now. It was a reality he couldn’t deny, a truth that defied logic. It was a sound snatched from the past, and trapped inside his head.

Four hours later, Cooper woke in a panic. He felt as though he couldn’t move. A great weight was pressing on his chest, pinning him to the bed. He knew he was in that indefinable place between sleeping and waking, and he wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t make his lungs work. Somewhere nearby a voice was speaking to him, but it was mumbling too indistinctly for him to hear the message.

And then suddenly he broke through a barrier, and shot upright in bed with a wordless shout. Randy flew off his chest, a resentful yowl filling the bedroom.

Cooper found he was sweating, and his heart was thumping. There was a burning pain in his arm, too. Was this what it was like when you had a heart attack? Should he phone for an ambulance, or wait and see what happened? He was only thirty, too young to die of heart failure.

It took him a few minutes to calm down. When he was breathing more slowly, he put on the light and checked his arm. He discovered it was covered with little claw marks, where the cat had been mauling him during the night. If the skin was broken, the scratches would get infected. A cat’s claws were never entirely clean.

The mumbling he’d heard might have been the cat, too. Or it might have been the rain he could hear hitting the roof of the conservatory. It must have started while he was asleep.

Half an hour later, the rain eased off, and finally stopped. By then, Cooper was sitting in his kitchen with a cup of coffee on the table, waiting for the light to seep through the windows.

It was barely dark when he got the call. ‘You know what you have to do, Johnny. It’s time.’

He didn’t need to ask any questions. He recognized the voice straightaway, and he knew the instruction was something he had to act on. And he had to do it now. ‘Yes, it’s time. It’s time.’

There had been a train of thought in his mind that he couldn’t quite grasp. Too many distractions and distortions, that was the trouble. At moments, he almost got a clear view of some mental will-o’-the-wisp that ought to be followed and interpreted. His thoughts were connected, but the connections were slippery, so they escaped his groping fingers. At other times, he knew the illusion of meaningfulness was just that – an illusion. It was like a blurred or shifting picture puzzle. The content seemed to change the more you tried to define it, or get it into focus.

Someone had explained it to him once. They said that incoherence resulted from a loosening of associations, a dysfunction at the neuro-cognitive level. He had no idea why he should remember that, when he couldn’t recall things that had happened the day before. Especially when he didn’t understand some of the words that were used.

Or perhaps that was the reason – he remembered because he didn’t understand. Yes, that could be it. There was no solid meaning in the words to escape him. No soft, slippery undertones, no blurry significance. Only letters and sounds, and nothing else. Like bare earth, with no life in it. No humanity or feeling behind the words to confuse him. No voices at all, only noise.

But it was a voice that had distracted him again. He had no idea what he’d been thinking about before it came. That was the way his thoughts were – always shifting. Forever flitting this way and that. The flight of ideas. He liked the sound of that phrase. The flight of ideas. It sounded exciting and creative. It made him sound like some kind of genius whose mind soared above everyone else’s, light and fragile, a crystal bird. Reflecting the light like a prism, riding the currents of the wind, dipping and soaring. Never following the same direction for more than five minutes at a time.

He waited as long as he could, resisting the urgent whisper until it became intolerable. Then he left the apartment at about two a. m., rolled his car quietly on to the street and started the engine. All the people in their houses were asleep by now, except for those sleeping alone, afraid what might be out there in the dark, the burglars and rapists, and the crazed axemen.

‘You know what you have to do, Johnny.’

26

Friday, 28 October

Fry was early for the briefing next morning. The room filled up around her, but she let the increasing level of noise wash over her. When Cooper arrived, he looked flustered and dishevelled, as if he’d only just got out of bed. But that was his normal style. His hair fell untidily across his forehead, there was a scuff mark on his jacket, and his tie needed straightening, as usual. Casual was OK, but on Cooper it made him look disorganized. She had an urge to tell him to tidy himself up before he met the public. Most of all, she couldn’t help reflecting on the contrast between Cooper and Georgi Kotsev.