On the other side of the panels was another, much larger room. This one took up the rest of the railway arch, and ended in a wall made of bricks of different shapes, sizes, and colours held together by rough mortar. The space was filled with workbenches covered in strange machines and odd contraptions. And bent over one of them was a very old man. He was bald apart from a ring of short white hairs around the crown of his head. The dark, wrinkled skin of his face and hands was stained with grime, and the thick-lensed glasses he was wearing were smeared with grease. He looked like a geriatric animal in its cave, and Anna wondered when he’d last left his workshop.

‘Good morning,’ she said after watching him tinker away at the stack of pipes and gears in front of him for another full minute.

He didn’t seem to register Anna until he finished attaching a bronze tooth-edged disk onto the end of a short black stick. Then he turned towards the doorway and finally looked at her.

‘Hello, hello,’ he said, in an accent Anna placed somewhere in southern India. ‘How do you do?’

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to collect a package.’

The old man paused for a moment, then looked at a row of clocks lined up on a bench that all showed the same time—8:40.

‘The package, the package. Yes.’ He wiped his hands on an oily rag hanging from his belt. ‘I wasn’t expecting you so early.’

‘My apologies,’ Anna said, smiling. She hadn’t been given a time for her pickup, but she’d wanted to get it out of the way, and when it came to dealing with unknown third parties she preferred some element of surprise.

‘No matter, no matter,’ the man said as he scuttled over to a shelf that had been drilled into the arch and was piled high with more weird creations.

He pushed several aside, then delicately picked one up and carried it over to Anna. He offered it to her in his palms.

It was an elegant weapon. Two short and thin metal pipes seamlessly welded together and highly polished. Anna was surprised by how light it was as she picked it up out of his hands and held it up to her eyes. One of the tubes was a miniature rifle scope, with clear glass at one end and cross hairs at the other, and the second had a trigger cut into it so finely that Anna could barely feel it as she ran her fingers over its edges.

‘May I test it?’ she asked.

‘Of course, of course.’