The coat muffled the sound of the shot, but it was still very loud, and twanged off the bricks, so that for a second Terry was deafened. Percy whirled about and stared at him with an expression of astonishment and outrage. It was as if, Terry thought, he had badly insulted the old boy, or made a joke in what Percy would say was ‘unforgivably bad taste, dear boy’. A ship somewhere nearby – it might have been the freighter Percy had just been on – sounded its horn, so loudly it made Terry jump and almost run for cover. Percy stayed upright for a second or two, swaying on tiptoe, doing a kind of pirouette. Then everything inside him seemed to crumple suddenly, and he collapsed on to the slimed cobbles, all the puff gone out of him for good.

He was dead – he had probably been dead when he hit the ground – and Terry didn’t bother checking for a pulse. The image of the front page of a newspaper popped into his mind, spinning in a circle like in the movies and then stopping, and the line jumping out: The victim died instantly. But did he? Terry knew there was no such thing as an instant death – hadn’t  Percy been alive for the time it took him to turn around and stare at Terry in shock and indignation, even with two bullets in his ticker? How long would it take? A second? More? If you were about to die, maybe a second could seem an eternity.

Strange, Terry thought, how a person could be there one minute, alive like everyone else, and nowhere the next. He wasn’t much given to that kind of morbid thinking, but just then, under that tunnel, in the darkness of the misty night, he felt a sense of awe before the mystery of the origin and the unavoidable end of all things. In dying, Percy had delivered to Terry his final life lesson.

It proved no joke, lugging the old man’s amazingly heavy corpse to the edge of the dock and delivering it to Thames water, water that looked, just then, as thick and shiny as creosote. Terry hunted around and found some loose bricks and stuffed them into the pockets of Percy’s Crombie overcoat to weigh him down. He didn’t really think it would work – a few bricks wouldn’t be enough, surely? – and old Percy would probably come bobbing up again in a matter of days. You can’t keep a fat man down, Terry thought, and laughed – Percy wasn’t the only one who had wit.

But if the body did come up, what would happen then?

Terry didn’t stay around long enough to find out. That night he went straight back to Fitzroy Square and packed up his things. He didn’t have much gear to take with him, for it had always been his rule to travel light.