‘You’ll be right, Ms Balwyn,’ Shah’s man assured her. ‘I’ll make sure you get back safely. And we’ve got a couple of other blokes watching out for you. Put your head down, get some rack time. Nobody’s gonna be sneaking into your room tonight. Not unless they want to have a very nasty accident.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. Her eyes were watering, but that was from exhaustion.

She tried to take in as much of the city as she could while they drove south. If she was going to be here for a while, she would need to understand it. The Palms, the shake’n’bake, up-scale émigré ghetto where Shah had built his house, was easy enough to come to grips with. It was no different from any other expensive, gated community. She hadn’t been back to the UK in years, but she understood there were hundreds of them over there now, with plenty in Europe also. Almost as though the rich were returning to a feudal arrangement, whereby they walled themselves off from the dangerous masses and hired men like Granger to patrol the walls. Even Shah and Pappas were just glorified gatekeepers; captains of the gate, perhaps, but little more.

Julianne yawned. She had run away, hooked up with Pete and Fifi, to get out from behind the walls of expectation and inherited duty that had fallen to her, as the daughter of a landed family. Now it seemed as if the walls had expanded to enclose the whole world, and they were topped with razor wire, policed by the murderous hirelings of some low-rent bully – someone from the fucking building trade, of all things! A man with ideas above his station and more money and clout than was seemly, even in a world as mad as this one had become of late.

The driver took her along the highway, back in towards the city. A hot, pulsing dome of light marked the location of New Town, where neon lights and jumbotrons kept the darkness at bay. There was no missing it. Some Chinese tycoon had covered two whole city blocks with an immense and gaudy spectacle, in the form of a towering casino, constructed to mirror the look of the Athenian Parthenon. Laser packs and spotlights swept ceaselessly over the black marble façade – although Jules was certain that on closer inspection it would turn out not to be marble, but polished concrete painted to a high gloss noir. Great dark columns held aloft a massive portico, while volcanic geysers of fire snaked and roared up their length from gas vents built into the base of each plinth. The traffic stream thickened up and slowed considerably outside this awesome grotesquerie. Granger cursed under his breath as he muscled the car through the worst of the congestion.