After an hour, Sparrow had still not reappeared, and I was not liking it one bit. I went to look for him, but the conjurer had been at work again. He’d gone. Two grown men had now vanished into thin air – and neither grown men nor anyone else vanish into thin air. An hour and a half ago, Sparrow had been sitting opposite me, picking his nose for all he was worth; now he wasn’t on this train, or if he was, he was damn well hidden.

If Sleder was picking off my team one by one, he was doing an efficient job; there was only me to go. However, short of barricading myself in the guard’s van for the rest of the journey, I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, and barricading myself away wouldn’t get me very far, except, perhaps, to keep me alive, which ought to have been enough, but I didn’t see it that way. I took the safety catch off my gun and returned to my seat.

The man opposite me continued to check his stubble and look out of the window. The reader on my right had somehow read one hundred and nine pages of Tai Pan in my absence, and the gorilla was busy moving solitaire pegs into new slots, and discarding taken ones into the plastic lid, with a rhythmic click, tap, click, tap, click, tap.

Suddenly I saw that the man who was reading Tai Pan wasn’t reading it any more: his eyes were looking at me. He lifted his copy of the novel to reveal that he was holding an object which looked to me, at first glance, remarkably like a .44 calibre Luger; it required only the most cursory of second glances with my trained eye to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that it was indeed a .44 calibre Luger, with a device attached over the barrel that bore more than a passing resemblance to a silencer. I didn’t require a third glance to see who the gun was pointed at. I looked over at the man with the stubble, and then at the gorilla; both of them had succeeded in producing Lugers out of thin air. Right now, I wished I could have done the same.

The gorilla stood up, followed by Stubble, and between them they blocked off the aisle in both directions. The intellectual indicated to me, with a remarkable economy of words, that I should stand up between the two. ‘Up,’ was all he said. It was enough. I stood up and stepped into the aisle. Then, sandwiched between the gorilla and Stubble, with a sharp object pushing into the small of my back, we shuffled in and out of step into the next coach, a first-class bedroom coach, and stopped outside a door with drawn curtains.