Or it might give the two men the freedom to stab me with a carbon-fibre blade and disappear into the crowd, leaving me gasping on the floor like a fish as I bleed out through a punctured liver. I meet the guard’s gaze and then look away.

The first automatic door opens for me, making a squeaking sound like on Star Trek, and I’m running through the airlock. Quieter in here. I can hear my breaths reverberating off the walls, the clopping heels of the woman ahead of me. She looks like a lawyer. Grey skirt, jacket over one arm, gold earrings. She senses me behind her and turns, alarmed. I overtake her and hurry through the second door.

Out through the foyer and onto the courthouse steps. I trot down them like a dancer, my legs a blur. Across the road is the diner where I ate with Thistle. There was a multistorey parking lot on the other side of it. If I—

Someone grabs my collar and I miss a step. My legs fly out from under me, but the hand keeps me from falling down the stairs. It’s like I’m being dangled over a cliff in the cold night air, although the next step is only six inches below me.

‘Phoenix, Cleveland,’ the tracksuit man says, in a voice with at least two generations of Texas in it. ‘Now answer your goddamn phone.’

•

‘When we met yesterday,’ Warner says, ‘I don’t remember you mentioning that you were working for the FBI again.’

She doesn’t sound pissed off. Instead, there’s an ominous flatness to her voice. It takes me back to Mrs Radfield at the group home. I’m not angry, Timothy, I’m just disappointed.

‘Where did you hear that?’ I ask, still pretending not to know about the tracking app.

‘Please,’ Warner says. ‘Are you going to pretend that you’re not with Special Agent Reese Thistle right now?’

Actually, Thistle is still inside. I’m with the tracksuit man on the courthouse steps, the streetlights stretching our shadows to a surreal length. But I take her point.

‘You never said you wanted me to work exclusively for you,’ I say. The plastic phone creaks in my hand as I squeeze it tighter and tighter.

‘I figured that was strongly implied,’ Warner says. ‘And given the nature of the work you do for me, I thought you’d be smart enough to stay a mile away from the feds.’

She’s not wrong. ‘I’m not investigating you,’ I say. ‘It’s an unconnected case. Unless you murdered someone named Kenneth Biggs?’

I said ‘murder’ deliberately. Maybe she’ll ask me how I know he’s dead. If she does, she’s involved.

But there’s just silence at the other end of the line. Impossible to read.