What he took to be a real doctor, wearing a white coat, was approaching. Terry passed him by without a glance, concentrating on the clipboard and frowning, as if he were reading test results and the news was all bad. He came to the door where the woman had gone in, pushed it open, and slipped inside.

It was a storeroom. There were shelves stacked from floor to ceiling, and on the shelves were boxes of pills and things, and bottles of stuff, and rolls of bandages and lint and sticking plaster.

The gun! For Christ’s sake – he hadn’t brought it!

She was half sitting on the edge of a metal table, turned away from him. He stood in silence with his back to the door. It seemed she hadn’t heard him coming in. What was she doing? A slip of folded tissue paper was open on the table. The left sleeve of her blouse was rolled up, and a rubber tube was wrapped tightly around her arm above the elbow. As he watched, she lifted a syringe to the light, tapped the barrel of it with a fingernail, then slid the needle at an angle into a bulging vein in the underside of her arm.

He felt let down. Why? What did it matter to him if she was a junkie? It didn’t matter, of course it didn’t. And yet he was disappointed in her. He was like a hunter who had tracked down the animal he had been stalking only to discover it was already wounded.

She eased out the needle and closed her eyes and let her head fall back slowly, exposing her smooth white neck. He heard her sigh. Then, even though he hadn’t moved or made a sound, she opened her eyes suddenly and turned her head and looked at him.

Why, oh why hadn’t he brought the gun? The thing would have been over and done with in a second, and she probably wouldn’t have felt a thing. Two to the chest and one to the head, bang-bang bang, that was the rule all professionals followed.

He was still holding the clipboard. It was made of some kind of stiff, thin metal, with sharp edges. He hefted it in his hand. It would do. He was good at improvising. He moved forward.

The woman said something in Spanish, and then, realising he hadn’t understood, she switched to English.

‘Who sent you?’

The dope was taking effect, and her voice was slurred, but he could see by her eyes that she was still alert enough. And she was angry. Those eyes glittered. The pupils were the size of pinheads.

He smiled.

‘It’s all right, April,’ he said softly. ‘I have something for you, from the folks in Dublin.’