Richie’s mind had been moving in the same direction. He said, “He’ll come. He’s already closer than he ever got last night; he’s dying to find out what’s the story. Once he sees Janine …”

I said, “That’s why we’ve got her moving stuff to the kitchen. I’m betting the first thing he’ll do is check out the front of the Spains’ house, from the building sites across the road. The idea is that he’ll spot her from there, he’ll want to know what she’s doing with all the stuff, but in order to find out, he’ll have to come back here. The houses are too close together for him to squeeze in between, so he can’t come over the wall and in by the back. He’ll have to come down Ocean View Walk.”

The top of the road was dark, shadowed by houses; the bottom stretch curved into moonlight. I said, “I’ll take the top of the road and the goggles. You take the bottom. Any movement, any at all, you let me know. If he does come up here, we’ll do our best to keep things quiet—it’d be nice not to alert the residents that something’s going on—but he may not give us the choice. The one thing we don’t forget for a second is that this guy is dangerous. Going on past form, there’s no reason to think he’s armed, but we’re going to act like he is. Armed or not, this is a rabid animal and we’re in his den. Remember exactly what he did down there, and take it for granted that, given the chance, he’d do the same to you and me.”

Richie nodded. He passed me the thermal-vision goggles and started tossing his things back into his holdall, fast and efficiently. I folded the map, stuffed Richie’s food wrappers into a plastic bag and tucked it away. A few seconds later the room was bare floorboards and breeze block again, like we had never been there. I slung our holdalls into a dark corner, out of the way.

Richie set himself up by the window-hole facing the bottom of the road, squatting in a slant of shadow by the sill, and pried a corner of plastic sheeting loose so he could see out. I checked the Spains’ house: our Fiona came into the kitchen carrying an armful of clothes, put them on the table and left again. Upstairs I could see, faint through Jack’s window, the glow of a light in Pat and Jenny’s bedroom. I pressed myself against the wall by the window overlooking the top of the road, and lifted the goggles.

They turned the sea invisible, a bottomless black. At the top of the street, the flat gray crisscross of scaffolding stretched away into the distance; an owl floated across the road, drifting on the air currents like a sheet of burning paper. The stillness went on and on.

I thought my eyelids were frozen wide open, but I must have blinked. There was no sound. One moment the top of the street was empty; the next he was standing there, blazing white and fierce as an angel between the shadowy ruins on either side. His face was almost too bright to look at. He stood still, listening, like a gladiator at the entrance to the ring: head up, arms held free from his sides, hands half closed, ready.