I suppressed a groan, and went back over, helping tip Wallace onto one side while Casey watched with an anxious expression whose meaning I couldn’t begin to fathom. I noticed that Wallace had taped large sheets of black paper over the windows, and remembered it was much the same downstairs.

‘What the hell is it with this place?’ I gasped, stepping back from Wallace once more. ‘How the hell can anyone live like this?’

‘Thanks for all your help,’ said Casey, with clear insincerity. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him now.’

‘What is your fucking problem, exactly?’ Rozalia snapped at him. From the look on her face, she’d clearly had enough.

Wallace stopped snoring. ‘Imphhrrrerr,’ he said.

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘If we’re lucky,’ said Rozalia, ‘that was a death rattle.’

Wallace’s hand beat at the surface of the bed. ‘Imphrurur,’ he said, with greater urgency.

‘He wants his inhaler,’ said Casey, somewhat testily.

‘Oh.’ Rozalia nodded in comprehension. ‘Of course.’

Living in a shithole like this, I thought, it was hardly surprising he had trouble breathing. I looked over at Casey. ‘Any idea where it is?’

He stared back at me in apparent outrage. ‘How the fuck would I know?’

I gave up on asking him anything more, and looked around until I saw a set of drawers by the side of the bed, half-buried beneath a mound of unwashed clothing. I opened them one by one until I found a shrink-wrapped inhaler. I reached in to get it, then noticed something gleaming dully at the back of the drawer. One half, I saw, of an I Ching coin.

I stared at it, frozen, one knee on the floor, my hand still on the drawer’s handle.

It wasn’t possible.

‘Jerry?’

I glanced back at Rozalia and Casey, and felt a terrible tremor run through my muscles.

I looked again. The coin was still there. I wasn’t imagining it.

I reached in and took hold of it. The scuffed and tarnished metal felt cool and hard against the palm of my hand. My head swam as I pushed the drawer shut. I had the inhaler in one hand, the coin in the other. I studied the latter in the sparse moonlight that somehow found its way past the sheets of card covering the windows.

It was identical in every respect to the half-coin I had worn around my neck for years in memory of my dead wife, and which I had lost in the river when Nadia died. How, then, could it possibly be here, in a drawer in Wallace Deans’ home?

Assuming, I realized, that it was mine, and not the other Jerry’s.

I pushed myself back upright, my legs feeling as if they were about to fold under me. I turned to look at Rozalia, and from her expression guessed my shock must be evident.

‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice full of worry.