Now, with Mrs Bondarchuk greeted and the building secured, the talk turned once more to the events of that evening as Louis poured two glasses of Meerlust Rubicon from South Africa, a suitably wintry red. Flurries of snow obscured the view through the windows, but they were halfhearted and ultimately inconsequential, like the parting shots of a defeated army. Angel watched as Louis shed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The shirt was immaculately white, and just as smooth as it had been before it was worn. It never failed to amaze Angel how his partner’s appearance could remain so pristine. If Angel even looked at a shirt it started to wrinkle. The only way he could have worn a white shirt for an evening and returned home without evidence of grievous wear would have been to add so much starch to it that it resembled the top half of a suit of armor.

‘Why did you give Ross those names?’ Angel asked. He spoke without even a hint of accusation or blame. He was simply curious to know.

‘Because I don’t like Cambion, and I’ll be happy when he’s dead.’ Louis swirled the wine in his glass. ‘Did you notice anything odd about Cambion’s little pied-à-terre?’

‘If I knew what that was, I might be able to answer. I’ll take a guess that you’re talking about the apothecary.’

‘You have a lot of room for self-improvement.’

‘Then you have something to look forward to. And in answer to your question, there was only odd when it came to Cambion’s little whatever-you-said.’

‘I counted three soup bowls, one of them plastic. I didn’t count but two people.’

‘One of the bowls could have been from earlier.’

‘Maybe.’

‘But you don’t think so.’

‘The place was old and weird, but it was tidy. Apart from those bowls.’

‘A plastic bowl,’ said Angel. ‘You think he has a child in there?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t think he and his boy Edmund are the only people holed up in that old store.’

‘You planning on going back there to clarify the situation?’

‘Not yet. We’re prioritizing.’

‘On that subject: you gave Ross that list, but what did we get in return?’

‘We know that the Believers had nothing to do with the hit.’

Angel wondered if the wine and the two earlier beers had somehow interacted disastrously, destroying some of his already threatened brain cells. Ross had shown them a picture. Had Ross been lying?

‘What about the photograph?’

‘The photograph is meaningless. It’s a false trail. These people, or whatever they are, they don’t sign their names. That’s for dime-store novels. You think I ever put a bullet in a man, then rolled up a business card and stuck it in the hole because it pays to advertise?’

Angel doubted it, but you never knew.

‘You think Ross figures it’s a false trail?’

‘Ross don’t care one way or the other. It’s one more nail in their coffin, and it don’t matter to him who hammered it in.’

‘“Doesn’t”.’ It doesn’t matter. You have inconsistent grammar, you know that?’

Louis’s public and private personae were different, but sometimes he forgot what role he was supposed to be playing.

‘Fuckin’ Ross was right about you, you know that?’ said Louis.

‘Ross can’t even get a parking ticket fixed. He said so himself. So we go back to Cambion and tell him what – that we sold out his future to the Feds, or do we just lie and make out like you’re still trying to burn the contract?’

‘Neither. I know people in the Carolinas. If there’s a team of husband-and-wife shooters operating out of there, someone’s got to have heard.’

‘Not if they’re selective. Not if they don’t work for money but out of some misguided sense of purpose.’

‘What, you mean like us?’

‘Exactly like us, except without the religion.’

‘Yeah, and look how hard we were to find. It wasn’t so long ago we had delivery men with explosives trying to blow our door off, and tonight Ross could have run our asses over if he felt like it. But we’ll nail them, however long it takes.’

‘And then?’

‘We make them talk.’

‘And after that?’

Louis tried the wine. It was good.

‘We kill them.’

Louis was correct in more than one of his assumptions. Even the most cautious of men can be found, if his pursuer has the commitment and the resources. The man who stood at the rain-soaked corner on the Upper West Side, where the poor were in sight of the rich and, more worryingly for those who feared imminent societal collapse, the rich were in sight of the poor, had spent a long time, and a not inconsiderable amount of money, trying to establish where Angel and Louis lived. In the end, it was the attack on the building – the ‘unpleasantness’ over which Angel and Mrs Bondarchuk had bonded – that brought them to his attention. Louis had made every effort to ensure that word of what happened did not leak to the police, but the man on the corner represented a different form of law and justice, and such matters were very difficult to keep from him and his father.

The Collector cupped his hands over the match and held it to the cigarette at his lips, then smoked it with the butt held between the thumb and index finger, the remaining fingers sheltering it from the rain. He had arrived just as Angel and Louis entered the building. He did not know where they had been, but he could guess: they would be tracking those responsible for the attack on the detective. The Collector admired their single-mindedness, their focus: no mercy dash north to be at the detective’s bedside, none of the fruitless beating at the darkness that comes from those who have grief without power and anger without an object. They would even have set aside their pursuit of the Collector himself in order to concentrate on the more immediate matter. The Collector knew that most of that impetus probably came from Louis, but his lover was not to be underestimated either. Emotionless killers rarely survived for long. The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check. The one called Angel enabled Louis to do this. Without him, Louis would have died long ago.

But Angel was dangerous too. Louis would calculate the odds and, if the situation were not to his liking, would back off and wait for a better opportunity to strike. The logician in him was always to the fore. Angel was different. Once he made the decision to move, he would keep coming at his target until one of them went down. He knew how to channel emotion as a weapon. That kind of force and determination was not to be underestimated. What most people failed to realize was that fights were decided in the opening seconds, not the closing ones, and there was something about facing an attacker of apparently relentless belligerence that could psychologically undo even a bigger, stronger opponent.

But what was strangest of all for the Collector, as he assessed these two men, was the realization that he had come to admire them. Even as they hunted him from nest to nest, and destroyed the hiding places that he had so carefully constructed for himself, he was in awe of their ferocity, their guile. Neither could he deny that he and these men, through their allegiance to Parker, were engaged in variations on the same work. True, the Collector had been forced to kill one of their number, but in that he had erred. He had let emotion get the better of him, and he accepted that he must pay a price for his lapse. The loss of his nests had been the price, but now he was tiring of the chase. He would give these two men what they wanted in order to secure a truce. If they did not agree, well, there was work to be done, and their pursuit of him was getting in the way of it. The distraction and threat that they posed, and the time and effort they were causing him to expend, enabled men and women of profound viciousness to continue to prey on those weaker than themselves. Judgments were waiting to be handed out. His collection needed to be replenished.