Slipping between the sheets, I checked my emails and scrolled through the news one last time, then turned out the light. In the darkness, I lay listening to the quiet street and distant sirens. In London, no matter where you live there are always sirens at night. I thought of the scenes the police were being called to, the people being raced to the hospital in the backs of ambulances. I thought of all the games no longer being played. Of all the games gone wrong.

All of which should have meant bad dreams, or at least unsettled ones, but in fact my dream was quite the opposite, although in a way that was worse, since waking from it was so painful. I don’t remember all of it, of course, was left only with a few images and a feeling: my bare feet ankle-deep in the wet emerald lawn, the sun falling just so on the manor, and to the left the lake where the wind stirred the reeds and the little white temple cast its dark shadow on the ripples. The whole afternoon lay ahead, spectral in its perfection. The sky would stay its clear, glassy blue, the shadows would creep feline over the grass, and then as the sun sank, the stone of the place would begin to exhale the heat of the whole long day. And in my dream, I knew exactly which day it was. I knew that today was the day of the apocalypse, today was June 20, 1996, the day the four of us first went to the manor, the day we met David. Just before we found out about the diamonds.

CHAPTER 2

APOCALYPSE I

It was May when my mother came home and, collapsed upon the hall carpet, her face all concertinaed on one side, announced the coming of the apocalypse. It was coming, it was coming soon, and none of us would survive it.

“June twentieth,” she said, “1996,” and then she passed out. I rolled her onto her side and pulled down her wrinkled skirt, breathing in vodka fumes and the smell of her unwashed hair. She opened her eyes, blinking sleepily like a kitten, and lashed out, her fist connecting with my jaw. I swore and backed off to a safe distance. Then I went to the kitchen, put a bag of frozen peas on it, and waited for the murder to seep out of my heart. It’d been a while since she had caught me.

“It’s coming! You’re going to die too!”

I went over and slammed the kitchen door, sealing her off. I hadn’t spoken to her properly in months. After a couple of minutes, I heard her shuffling into the living room where she slept these days, partly because she kept falling down the stairs, partly because it was as far away from me as she could get.