I lunged forward, hitting her in the back. My pistol clattered onto the floor, out of reach, and Anna turned and lashed out at me, scratching at my face, but I managed to hook my arm around her right shoulder and brought her weight back and slipped the other arm around her neck and squeezed as hard as I could, trying to block out the pain, the sounds, everything. My hands were tingling and I looked down and saw that blood was flowing from the palms and I saw her face, her eyes fixed open, no drugs now, no clever injections, and I kept squeezing her even though I knew it was too late, because I could still hear the echo of the shot, and then I thought a flock of seagulls swept over the courtyard, but it wasn’t seagulls, of course, it was humans, screaming. What a strange sound, I thought.

I looked down. I could see everything perfectly - the black car surrounded by a swarm of people, their shadows making everything seem to lean to one side: the black man in the peaked cap kneeling beside the body of the white man in the summer suit whose head didn’t seem to be there any more. I let go of Anna, and she slumped to the floor. Releasing her seemed to do something to my breathing, because I started heaving uncontrollably.

There was a scraping noise and I looked up to see a small crowd of people tumbling into the room. I registered Smale first, then David the doctor behind him, and finally Manning, lobster-red in his tropical suit, his handkerchief the size of a windsail fluttering above the scene. Smale slapped me and screamed something I couldn’t understand, and when I didn’t answer he started shaking me. I wanted to tell him it was useless, he was wasting his time, I didn’t have long to go. ‘Murder!’ he was shouting, and I realized it was directed at me. ‘I am arresting you for murder!’ It seemed like the wrong thing to say and I started counting aloud, for some reason. There was a lot of movement, a lot of panic, but I was perfectly conscious of it all, right until the last moment, the last breath. I was watching it all, right up until I died.

XXV

XXV

Nobody tells you you’re dead - you have to figure it out yourself. It took me rather a long time. In fact, it was the presence of time that held me back. At the start, the idea didn’t even occur to me. I seemed to be surrounded by an endless grey landscape, but that didn’t mean death, surely: I was simply unconscious.