I stared down at the river because this man was making my head swim. I mean, where do you begin?

‘So for the sake of those good democrats, a body here and a body there isn’t such a terrible thing. Is that your drift?’

‘Yip. And there isn’t one of those good democrats who’d say any different.’

‘I think Alexander Woolf would say different.’

‘Big deal.’

I kept looking at the river. It looked thick and warm.

‘I mean it, Lang. Big fucking deal. One man against many. He was out-voted. That’s democracy. Want to know something else?’ I turned to look at Barnes, and he was facing me now, his lined face caught in the flicker from the theatre sign. ‘There’s another two millionUS citizens I didn’t get around to mentioning there. Know what they’re going to do this year?’

He was walking towards me, slowly. Confidently. ‘Become lawyers?’

‘They’re going to die,’ he said. The idea didn’t seem to disturb him all that much. ‘Old age, auto accident, leukaemia, heart attack, fighting in bars, falling out of windows, who knows what fucking thing? Two million Americans are going to die this year. So tell me. You going to shed a tear for every one of them?’

‘No.’

‘Why the hell not? What’s the difference? Dead is dead, Lang.’

‘The difference is I didn’t have anything to do with their deaths,’ I said.

‘You were a soldier, for Chrissakes!’ We were face to face now, him shouting as loud as he could go without getting people out of bed. ‘You were trained to kill people for the good of your fellow countrymen. Isn’t that the truth?’ I started to answer, but he wouldn’t have it. ‘Is that, or is that not, the truth?’ His breath smelled oddly sweet.

‘This is very bad philosophy, Rusty. It really is. I mean read a book, for God’s sake.’

‘Democrats don’t read books, Lang. The people don’t read books. The people don’t care a piece of blue shit about philosophy. All the people care about, all they want from their government, is a wage that keeps getting higher and higher. Year in, year out, they want that wage going up. It ever stops, they get themselves a new government. That’s what the people want. It’s all they’ve ever wanted. That, my friend, is democracy.’

I took a deep breath. In fact I took several deep breaths, because what I now wanted to do to Russell Barnes might result in me not breathing again for quite a while.

He was still watching me, testing me for some reaction, some weakness. So I turned and walked away. The Carls moved up to meet me, coming at each side, but I kept going because I reckoned they weren’t going to do anything until they had the signal from Barnes. After a couple of paces, he must have given it.

The Carl on the left reached out and took hold of my arm, but I broke the grip easily, turning his wrist over and pushing down hard, so that he had to go with the movement. The other Carl got his arm round my neck for about a second, until I stamped hard on his instep and punched backwards at his groin. His hold broke, and then I was between the two of them as they circled me, and I wanted to hurt them so incredibly badly that they would never, ever forget me.

And then suddenly, as if nothing had happened, they were backing away, and straightening their coats, and I realised that Barnes must have said something I never heard. He walked up between the Carls, coming very close to me.

‘So, we get the idea, Lang,’ he said. ‘You’re really pissed with us. You don’t like me at all, and my heart is broken. But all that’s kind of beside the point.’

He shook out another cigarette for himself and didn’t offer me one.

‘If you want to make trouble for us, Lang,’ he said, gently exhaling smoke through his nose, ‘best thing is for you to know what it’s going to cost.’

He looked over at my shoulder and nodded at somebody. ‘Murder,’ he said.

Then he smiled at me.

Hello, I thought. This could be interesting.

We drove out on the M4 for about an hour, turning off, I would think, somewhere nearReading. I’d love to be able to tell you exactly which junction, and the numbers of the minor roads we took, but as I spent most of the journey on the floor of the Diplomat with my face being ground into the carpet, sensory data in-flow was a little restricted. The carpet was dark-blue and smelled of lemon, if that’s any help.

The car slowed for about the last fifteen minutes of the ride, but that could have been for traffic, or fog, or giraffes on the road for all I know.

And then we reached a gravel drive, and I thought to myself - not long now. You could scrape up the gravel from most driveways inEngland, and come away with about enough to fill a sponge-bag. Any second now, I thought, I’ll be outside, and within screaming distance of a public highway.

But this wasn’t an average drive.

This one went on and on. And then it went on and on. And then, when I thought we were turning a corner and pulling over to park, it went on and on.

Eventually, we stopped.

And then we started again, and went on and on.

I had begun to think that maybe it wasn’t a drive at all; it was simply that the Lincoln Diplomat had been designed, with fantastically precise manufacturing skill, to disintegrate into very small pieces as soon as it exceeded its warranty mileage; perhaps what I was listening to now, pinging and bouncing off the wheel arches, were bits of chassis.

And then, at last, we stopped. I knew we’d stopped for good this time, because the size twelve shoe that had been resting itself on the back of my neck was now sufficiently invigorated to slide off and get out of the car. I lifted my head and peered through the open door.

This was a grand house. A very grand house. Obviously, at the end of a drive like that, it was never going to be a two-up, two-down; but even so, this was grand. Late nineteenth century, I reckoned, but copying earlier ones, with a lot of Frenchness thrown in. Well, not thrown, of course, but lovingly bonded and pointed, beaded and mitred, bevelled and chamfered, very possibly by the same blokes who did the House of Commons railings.

My dentist leaves back numbers of CountryLife scattered around his waiting-room, so I had a rough idea of what a place like this must have cost. Forty bedrooms, within an hour ofLondon. A sum of money beyond imagining. Beyond beyond imagining, in fact.

I had begun idly to calculate the number of light bulbs you’d need to run a place like this, when a Carl took hold of my collar and plucked me out of the car, as easily as if I’d been a golf-bag, with not many clubs in it.