So I thanked her for her time, gave her a wide berth and went out in case she felt the moment was ripe for a demonstration. The door was slammed shut and the light in the whitewashed stairwell blinded me like a camera flash. I had got halfway down 265the stairs when my subconscious whispered something into my ear.

Hadn’t I heard a sound … a scraping noise, like a shoe? Was someone lying in wait?

I stopped and listened.

Silence … and a presence.

I leaned over the balustrade and looked upwards. A floor above, I could see five fingers on the banister.

‘Hello?’ I said.

No one answered, but the five fingers vanished as though I had burned them.

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I kept close to the wall and tried to look up. All I could hear was the sound of shoes moving over concrete.

I opened my mouth to shout again, but changed my mind. Instead, in two or three long strides, so as to surprise whoever was there, I took the rest of the steps up to the landing where the stairs curved.

As I rounded the bend I heard the click of a light switch. Darkness fell like a guillotine and I stumbled over the lowest step, hit my knees and calves on the step above and lunged in vain for the railing.

Then the person above came down towards me. I was on my way up when an off-target kick hit me between my heart and my armpit, paralysing my left shoulder and making me groan with pain. A slightly more accurate punch lit a shower of sparks in the darkness around me; it had struck my chin. Then the sparks died, darkness was total and I lay slumped on the floor, my head facing downwards against the concrete wall and one foot caught between the bars of the balustrade.

I hung there like a shipwrecked seaman caught in the ropes of a sinking ship. Blood pounded through my veins with the force of a monsoon and waves rose in my midriff, making me feel as old as the sea, weakened by the tides. I was at low ebb, on a beach where all the filth was revealed after the water had retreated. I was flotsam.

Then I slowly drifted up into the light, blinded by pain. I freed 267my foot from the railings, drew my knees beneath me, carefully bent my back and pulled my head out of the quicksand it was stuck in. I felt like an ostrich that had put its head in a Kenwood mixer. I found the wall and followed it down, the same way I had come up.

I couldn’t find the bell beside the door to Belinda Bruflåt’s flat. I banged hard on the door instead.

She fastened the security chain before opening the door a fraction and peering out at me. ‘What the…?’

I tried to move my left arm, but it just hung there. I tried to say something, but my chin was cemented into a position I didn’t have the strength to change. The only sensible solution was to faint.