JAMES HOWELL

I swung theKawasaki along Victoria Embankment just for the hell of it. To clear its pipes and mine.

I hadn’t told the Woolfs about the phonecall to my flat and the nasty American voice at the other end. ‘Graduate studies’ could have meant anything - graduate studies, even - and the caller could have been anybody. When you’re dealing with conspiracy theorists - and kiss or no kiss, that’s definitely what I was dealing with - there’s no point in feeding them extra coincidences to get excited about.

We’d left the restaurant in an amiable state of truce. Out on the pavement, Woolf had squeezed my arm and told me to sleep on it, which gave me a nasty jolt because I’d been watching Sarah’s bottom as he spoke. But as soon as I realised what he meant I promised I would indeed, and out of politeness asked where I could get hold of him if I needed to. He’d winked and said he’d find me, which I didn’t much care for.

There was, of course, one extremely good reason for me to stay on the right side of Woolf. He may have been a flake and a crank, and his daughter may have been nothing more than a very attractive back-to-front jacket case, but I couldn’t deny that the two of them had a certain charm.

What I’m trying to say, is that they’d gone and put quite a large amount of that charm into my bank account.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t care greatly for money, as a rule. I mean, I’m not one of these people who works for free, or anything like that. I charge for my services, such as they are, and I get cross when I think I’m owed by somebody. But at the same time, I think I can honestly say that I’ve never really chased money. Never done anything that I didn’t enjoy, at least a little, just for the sake of having more of the stuff. Someone like Paulie, for example - and he’s told me this himself, many times - spends most of his waking hours either getting hold of money, or thinking about getting hold of it. Paulie could do unpleasant things - immoral things, even - and if there was a plumpness about the cheque at the end of it, he wouldn’t mind a bit. Bring it on, Paulie would say.

But me, I’m just not made that way. Different mould altogether. The only good thing I’ve ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.

And things, on the whole, I do quite like.

Woolf’s fifty thousand dollars was never going to be the key to everlasting happiness, I knew that. I couldn’t buy a villa inAntibes with it, or even rent one for more than about a day and a half. But it was handy, nonetheless. Comforting. It put cigarettes on my table.

And if, in order to keep hold of some of that comfort, I had to spend a couple more evenings in the chapters of a Robert Ludlum novel, getting periodically kissed by a beautiful woman, well, I could just about bear that.

It was aftermidnight and there wasn’t much traffic on the Embankment. The road was dry and the ZZR needed a gallop, so I eased open the throttle in third gear and replayedsome lines of Captain Kirk to Mr Chekhov in my head as the universe rearranged itself round my back wheel. I was probably brushing the cheek of a hundred and ten asWestminsterBridge came into view, and I dabbed the brakes and shifted my weight slightly, ready to crank the bike over for the right turn. The lights into Parliament Square were turning green and a dark-blue Ford was starting to move off, so I dumped another wedge of speed and prepared to ease round it on the outside of the bend. As I came level, my right knee getting down towards the tarmac, the Ford started drifting to the left, and I straightened up to take a wider line.

At that point, I thought he simply hadn’t seen me. I thought he was an average car driver.

Time is a funny thing.

I once met an RAF pilot who told me how he and his navigator had had to eject from their very expensive Tornado GR1, three hundred feet above the Yorkshire dales, because of what he called a ‘bird strike’. (This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird’s fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite.)

Anyway, the point of the story is that, after the accident, the pilot and navigator had sat in a de-briefing room and talked to investigators, uninterrupted, for an hour and fifteen minutes about what they’d seen, heard, felt and done, at the moment of contact.

An hour and fifteen minutes.

And yet the black box flight-recorder, when it was eventually pulled from the wreckage, showed that the time elapsed between the bird entering the engine intake and the crew ejecting, was a fraction under four seconds.

Four seconds. That’s bang, one, two, three, fresh air.

I didn’t really believe this story when I heard it. Apart from anything else, the pilot was a wiry little runt, with those creepily blue eyes that physically talented people often have.

And besides, I couldn’t stop myself from siding with the bird in the story.

But I do believe it now.

I believe it because the driver of the Ford never took the right turn. And I lived several lives, not all of them pleasant and fulfilling, while he ran me off the road and into the railings along the side of the House of Commons. When I braked, he braked. When I accelerated, he accelerated. When I leaned the bike over to take the turn, he kept on going, straight for the railings, nudging me in the shoulder with the glass of his passenger window.

Yes, I could definitely talk for an hour about those railings. And a good deal longer about the moment I realised that the driver of the Ford was not an average driver at all. He was actually very good indeed.

It wasn’t a Rover, which meant something. He must have had a radio set to get him into position, because nobody had passed me on the Embankment. The passenger was looking at me as I came alongside, and plainly not saying ‘mind that motorcyclist’ as the car drifted towards me. They had two rear-view mirrors, which has never been standard equipment on any Ford. And my testicles hurt. That’s what woke me up.

You’ve probably noticed on your travels that motorcyclists don’t wear seat-belts, which is both good and bad. Good because nobody wants to be tied to five hundred pounds of very hot metal when they’re sliding down the road. Bad because when the brakes are applied severely, the bike stops and the rider doesn’t. He carries on in a northerly direction until his genitals interface with the petrol tank and tears come to his eyes, preventing him from seeing the very thing he’s braking to try to avoid.

The railings.

Those sturdy, no-nonsense, finely turned railings. Railings worthy of the task of encircling the mother of parliaments. Railings that, in the spring of 1940, they’d have been tearing down to make Spitfires and Hurricanes andWellingtons and