I moved cautiously through to the bedroom. Birgitta was sprawled awkwardly on the bed, quite still. I checked her pulse and found she was merely in Torpor. Emotionally and intellectually brain dead she might be, but the stewardship part of her hypothalamus was functioning perfectly.

The hard part had been getting her unseen up the stairs, the most unpleasant task the removal of her thumb. I turned up the heating then sat on the bed and waited. About twenty minutes later her eyelids flickered open.

‘I love you, Charlie,’ she said.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, ‘but not this Charlie, your Charlie. I was beguiled by the hope that you meant me, but you didn’t. It was another Charlie. It was a  . . . nominative coincidence.’

I fed her the sandwich and the chocolate and then gave her a pint of water to drink. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to retire her that morning, so merely sidestepped the issue in order to keep all options open. Trouble is, my options hadn’t increased since this morning, they’d narrowed. I’d thought Birgitta and I had a connection, but we hadn’t. As Aurora had explained, I’d simply joggled her into my dream retrospectively. It was only a matter of time before she was discovered, and no amount of talking would get me off the hook. Harbouring was harbouring, no matter who did it, or the motivations. I would have to do now what I should have done that morning.

Jonesy was right: the first is always the hardest.

I held Birgitta’s head gently in one arm, set my Bambi to the test setting and pressed the weapon against the back of her head, just where the spine connects to the skull. I paused, then felt uncommanded tears well up in my eyes. It was fortunate they did; I moved to wipe them away and Birgitta shifted to reveal the corner of a sketchbook under the blankets on her bed. I gently released her and pulled back the covers. She had been drawing, and recently: that morning, after I brought her back to her room.

‘Kiki needs the cylinder,’ she said.

On the first page of the notebook was a sketch of the blue Buick as I’d seen it down in the basement, the oak tree near by, the pile of stones heaped around the trunk. There were the remains of a picnic near the car, and in the distance, a Morpheleum. There was a figure, too, sitting on the stones: Don Hector, looking dejected, while around the stones were hundreds of hands sticking out of the ground, waiting to get him.