I was sitting on the chair in the middle of O’Neal’s office. Solomon had gone to make some coffee for me and camomile tea for himself, and the world was slowing down slightly.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s perfectly obvious that for some reason I’m being set up.’

‘Explain to me please, Mr Lang,’ said O’Neal, ‘why that conclusion is obvious.’

He’d gone camp again. I took a deep breath.

‘Well, I’m telling you first of all that I don’t know anything about that money. Anyone could have done that, from any bank in the world. That’s easy.’

O’Neal made a big show of removing the top of his Parker Duofold and jotting something down on a pad of paper. ‘And then there’s the daughter,’ I said. ‘She saw the fight. She vouched for me to the police last night. Why haven’t you got her in here?’

The door opened and Solomon backed in, balancing three cups. He’d got rid of his brown raincoat somewhere, and was now sporting a zip-up cardigan of the same colour. O’Neal was obviously annoyed by it, and even I could see that it didn’t live up to the rest of the room.

‘We do, I assure you, intend to interview Miss Woolf at some convenient juncture,’ said O’Neal, as he sipped gingerly at his coffee. ‘However, the immediate concern of this department’s operation is you. You, Mr Lang, were asked to perform an assassination. With or without your consent, money was transferred to your bank account. You present yourself at the target’s house and very nearly kill his bodyguard. You then…’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Just wait one cotton-fucking minute here. What’s all this bodyguard stuff? Woolf wasn’t even there.’

O’Neal gazed back at me in a nastily unruffled way.

‘I mean how,’ I went on, ‘does a bodyguard guard a body who isn’t in the same building? By phone? This is digital bodyguarding, is it?’

‘You searched the house, did you, Lang?’ said O’Neal. ‘You went to the house, and searched it for Alexander Woolf?’ A smile played clumsily about his lips.

‘She told me he wasn’t there,’ I said, annoyed at his pleasure. ‘And anyway, fuck off.’

He flinched slightly.

‘Nevertheless,’ he said eventually, ‘under the circumstances, your presence in the house makes you worthy of our valuable time and effort.’

I still couldn’t work this out.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why you and not the police? What’s so special about Woolf?’ I looked from O’Neal to Solomon. ‘If it comes to that, what’s so special about me?’

The phone on O’Neal’s desk chirped, and he snatched it up with a practised flourish, flicking the wire behind his elbow as he brought the receiver to his ear. He looked at me as he talked.

‘Yes? Yes… Indeed. Thank you.’

The receiver was back in its cradle and fast asleep in an instant. Watching him handle it, I could tell that the telephone was O’Neal’s one great skill.

He scribbled something on his pad and beckoned Solomon over to the desk. Solomon peered at it, and then they both looked at me.

‘Do you own a firearm, Mr Lang?’

O’Neal asked this with a cheerful, efficient smile. Would

you prefer an aisle or a window seat? I started to feel sick.

‘No, I do not.’

‘Had access to firearms of any sort?’

‘Not since the army.’

‘I see,’ said O’Neal, nodding to himself. He left a long pause, checking the pad to see that he’d got the details absolutely right. ‘So the news that a nine millimetre Browning pistol, with fifteen rounds of ammunition, has been found in your flat would come as a surprise to you?’

I thought about this.

‘It’s more of a surprise that my flat is being searched.’

‘Never mind that.’

I sighed.

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not particularly surprised.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I’m starting to get the hang of how today is going.’ O’Neal and Solomon looked blank. ‘Oh do come on,’ I said. ‘Anyone who’s prepared to spend thirty thousand pounds to make me look like a hired gun presumably wouldn’t stop at another three hundred to make me look like a hired gun who has a gun he can hire.’

O’Neal played with his bottom lip for a moment, squeezing it on either side between thumb and forefinger.

‘I have a problem here, don’t I, Mr Lang?’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, I rather think I do,’ he said. He let go of the lip, and it hung there in a bulbous pout, as if it didn’t want to go back to its original shape. ‘Either you are an assassin, or someone is trying to make you look like one. The problem is that every piece of evidence I have applies equally well to both possibilities. It really is very difficult.’

I shrugged.

‘That must be why they gave you such a big desk,’ I said. Eventually they had to let me go. For whatever reason, they didn’t want to involve the police with an illegal firearm charge, and the Ministry of Defence is not, so far as I know, equipped with its own detention cells.

O’Neal asked me for my passport, and before I could spin a yarn about having lost it in the tumble-dryer, Solomon produced it from his hip-pocket. I was told to remain contactable, and to let them know if I received any further approaches from strange men. There wasn’t much I could do but agree.

As I left the building and strolled through St James’s Park in some rare April sunshine, I tried to work out whether I felt any different, knowing that Rayner had only been trying to do his job. I also wondered why I hadn’t known that he was Woolf’s bodyguard. Or even that he had one.

But much, much more to the point, why hadn’t Woolf’s daughter?

Three

God and the doctor we like adore

But only when in danger, not before;