The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:

“Ever feel like that, Kearney?”

Kearney considered.

“No.”

Valentine Sprake’s face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. “No?” he said. “Oh well.”

He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he had been crouching, an energetic-looking man perhaps fifty years old, with stooped shoulders, sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless eyes were wilful and absentminded at the same time. He had on a brown fleece jacket too long for him, tight old Levi’s which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrell trail boots. He smelled of rolling tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand—its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness—he held a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Kearney.

“Look at this.”

“I don’t want it.” Kearney backed away. “I don’t want it.”

“More fool you,” said Valentine Sprake. “I got it off the shelf there.” He tore out two or three pages of the volume—which, Kearney now saw, was Elizabeth’s beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics edition of Madame Bovary—and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. “I can’t be bothered with people who don’t know their own minds.”

“What do you want from me?”

Sprake shrugged. “You phoned me,” he said. “As I heard it.”

“No,” said Kearney. “I got some sort of answer service, but I didn’t leave a message.”

Sprake laughed.

“Oh yes you did. Alice remembered you. Alice quite fancies you.” He rubbed his hands busily. “How about a cup of tea?”

“I’m not even sure you’re here,” Kearney said, looking anxiously at the sofa. “Did you understand anything you were saying over there?” Then he said: “It’s caught up with me again. In the Midlands, two days ago. I thought you might know what to do.”

Sprake shrugged.

“You already know what to do,” he suggested.

“I’m sick of doing it, Valentine.”

“You’d better get out, then. I doubt you’ll finish with a whole skin whatever you do.”

“It doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know if it ever worked.”

Sprake gave him a small colourless smile. “Oh, it works,” he said. “You’re just a wanker.” He held up one hand in the pretence that Kearney might take offence. “Only joking. Only joking.” He kept smiling for a moment or two, then added: “Mind if I roll a cigarette?” On the inside of his left wrist he had a homemade tattoo, the word FUGA, in faded blue-black ink. Kearney shrugged and went into the galley. While Kearney made the tea Sprake strode about smoking nervously and picking pieces of tobacco off his bottom lip. He switched the lights off, and waited with a satisfied air for the apartment to fill with streetlight instead.

At one point he said, “The Gnostics were wrong, you know.” Then, when Kearney didn’t reply:

“There’s a mist coming up over the river.”