Gordon, who came upon the scene last, having dug himself out of the foliage and chased after Ron’s cart, mustered all his strength, all his stubbornness, all his power to deny time and character and reality, to shut out the idea that his father might have done this on purpose. With an effort of will that gave him an instant blinding headache, Gordon thought back to the clubhouse, Norma’s arms around Ron’s neck, laughing and blowing kisses and enjoying the kind of immoderate bliss he had rarely been allowed to see as a child.

And never when he was an only child.

Norma must, he concluded with hope in his heart, have tripped. Fallen without cause, but not without consequence. She hit her head against a rock wall and landed hard on her hip. She already had replacement hips on each side, and her left femur, sandwiched between concrete path and titanium prosthesis, made that terrible shattering noise. She was out cold. Gordon fell to his knees and cradled her head. A grey mouse swelled where her eyebrow had hit the wall.

The cart was upside down, having rolled into a drainage ditch beneath the tee box. Lou and Ben climbed in to fetch Ron, but he was able to crawl from the wreckage under his own steam. He pushed away their assistance and, dusting sprigs of native rosemary off his shirtfront, shuntered up to where Gordon was holding Norma.

‘Oh, what a bloody idiotic thing to do, what on earth was she thinking,’ Ron said. ‘Broken hip—for an old person that’s the beginning of the end.’

THIS PART

BIRD’S EYE

Bird’s eye

Five steps ahead? They flatter me.

It is a little-publicised burden of being an evil genius that we are never happy. Some of us dislike being called evil. I am the other: I object to being called a genius. Their thinking me evil represents a failure of their courage, which is no news. But I cannot stand them calling me a genius. I am blunter than I used to be, duller than I think I am, and less calculating than they take me for. For them to think that of me is a failure of compassion. It is lonely up here.

Ask me what is inside their heads, and all I can do is echo my legal adviser: I don’t fucking know. Bluebird is what it is, and these people are what they are. Up here in the sky, I can only take them as I find them: on the wrong side of history, worth one good look before they go. Ronald is out for the count, and here goes Norma, and oh boy, is he right about a woman’s hips being the beginning of the end.