When, ten minutes later, he dragged himself away and walked off towards the tube station, she simply followed.

He had met her in Cambridge, perhaps two years after he stole the dice. He was looking for someone to murder, but Anna took him to her room instead. There he sat on the bed while she opened a bottle of wine, showed him photographs of her most recent brush with anorexia, walked nervously about in a long cardigan and nothing else. She told him: “I like you but I don’t want to have sex. Is that all right?” It was all right with Kearney, who—constrained by the Gorselands fantasies and worn out by the evasions he normally had to practise on these occasions—often found himself saying much the same thing. Every time the cardigan fell open thereafter, he gave her a vague smile and looked politely away. This only seemed to make her more nervous. “Will you just sleep next to me?” she begged him when it was time to go. “I really like you but I’m not ready for sex.” Kearney spent an hour stretched out next to her, then, at perhaps three in the morning, left the bed and masturbated violently into the bathroom sink. “Are you all right?” she called in a muffled, sleepy voice.

“You’re so nice,” she said, when he came back. “Hug me.”

He stared at her in the dark. “Were you even asleep?” he said.

“Please.”

She rolled against him. As soon as he touched her, she groaned and pulled away, raising her behind in the air and burying her face in the pillow while he manipulated her with one hand and himself with the other. At first she tried to join in, but he wouldn’t let her touch him. He kept her at the edge of coming, breathing in great sobbing gasps, whimpering into the pillow between each breath. He watched her like this until watching her had made him so hard again his cock hurt. Finally he brought her off with two or three quick little circular rubs and let himself come onto the small of her back. Gorselands had never seemed so close. He had never felt so in control. Engineering that, he supposed, was her way of feeling in control. With her face still in the pillow she said:

“I really didn’t mean to do that right up until I did it.”

“Didn’t you?” said Kearney.

“You’ve made me very sticky.”

“Stay there, stay there,” he ordered her, “don’t move,” and fetched tissue to wipe her dry.