‘So,’ I said, ‘the servant got up on her and dug his spurs in the mare’s flanks and they lit off at a gallop, as fast as they could. The merchant watched them go and he was well pleased because he liked the servant and wanted him to be safe. But now he had no food in the house, so he went to the marketplace himself and sure enough he saw Death standing in the crowd. He went over to her, bold as you like, and said, “Why did you threaten my servant this morning?” But Death said to the merchant, “I didn’t threaten him. He startled me. You see, I was surprised to see him here in Moscow.” “And why is that?” asked the merchant. “Because,” Death replied, “I have an appointment with him tonight in Arkhangel.”’

1

Monday 8 January 2018

It was an easy kill.

He was trapped, hemmed in by the Atlantic and the wild country of Donegal. No road. No telephone. Nowhere to run.

On the seventh night I pulled the plug on the skiff tied up on the beach by his cottage. I settled into a gully a hundred and fifty metres from the front door and waited: a black shadow dripping rainwater in a muddy ditch. The moon was hidden by banks of cloud that rolled in across the ocean from Iceland. Thick, fast squalls cut visibility and drowned out everything except the waves ripping up the bay.

The tide had turned. Conditions were perfect.

He was alone. He went nowhere, did nothing, saw no one. He was scared. Or stupid. Or both. I didn’t know who he was, or what he’d done – but, at seventy-five, he’d either forgotten how to run, or didn’t think he had to any more. Maybe he just wasn’t thinking at all. Desperate men live only in the present. That much I did know. For ten months I’d anticipated nothing beyond sunset. Since I was sixteen I’d seen no further than the end of a barrel. The future was another country explored one day at a time. Interred in his thatched stone casket, he was waiting for someone or something. But whatever he was expecting, he wasn’t expecting me.

He’d already been inside for two days before I arrived. I watched the house for a week from a holiday park across the bay. Our lives ground down to the same rhythm.

Each morning he rose at seven thirty.