When I was nineteen, he’d told me I’d been selected because I’d fulfilled his search for ‘a legally sane psychopath’. But you reap what you sow. So now we met in public. Neither of us was likely to shoot the other in broad daylight.

His eyes flitted across the room and scanned the bar. He was unsettled. Anxious.

‘We don’t have much time,’ he pressed me. ‘Your check-in was incomprehensible and you look like shit.’ He smiled and took another swallow of stout. The Dublin in his accent thickened, taking the edge off his officer’s clip – the only clue he ever gave that his temper was about to blow. ‘So what the fuck happened?’

‘You never were one for small talk, I’ll give you that.’

Frank sized me up and went to speak again, but thought better of it. I’d stretched my left forearm across the table. A trickle of blood had run down it and smudged the back of my hand red where it rubbed against my jacket cuff. I licked my right thumb and worried away at the stain. Beneath my sweater unsealed wounds leaked into my shirt.

The first bullet to hit me – an armour-piercing 5.7 round – had grazed my left bicep. The shot that followed it had been slowed by the thick wooden chair I’d dived behind – burrowing into my left shoulder, and not through it. The lump of steel-tipped aluminium ground against my clavicle. Of the blood and mud that had fouled my face and clothes during the flight from the cottage, nothing remained. The hard, cold swim to the far shore had seen to that. I’d patched myself up as well as I could with the trauma kit in the Kia.

As far as ambushes went, it had been spectacular. If I hadn’t bent over to pluck the note from the corpse’s fingers I’d have been shot dead then and there. The first rounds zipped over my neck. I’d launched myself over the cadaver and come up firing behind his chair, shooting directly into the flares of burning gas erupting from the end of the enemy pistol. I sent three massive lead slugs into … nothing.

As I’d dived, my arm had been grazed. But it was as I came up again that I’d been hit in the shoulder – through the chair. I’d put my miss down to my wounds and kept firing. Shards of wood exploded from the frame and panels of the bedroom door. I’d fired again, high, low and wide, cutting a triangle of certain death in the darkness.