They were sitting in a restaurant on the edge of Fulton Market. Six hours in the air had made her as difficult as a child. “You should always tell the truth,” she said, giving him one of the haggard, brilliant smiles which had captivated him so when they were both twenty. They had had to wait four hours for a flight. She had dozed for much of the journey, then woken tired and fractious. Kearney wondered what he would do with her in New York. He wondered why he had agreed to let her come.

“What were you really thinking?”

“I was wondering how to get rid of you,” Kearney said.

She laughed and touched his arm.

“That’s not enough of a joke, really, is it?”

“Of course it is,” Kearney said. “Look!”

A steam-pipe had broken in some ancient central heating system beneath the road. Smoke rose from the pavement on the corner of Fulton Street. The tarmac was melting. It was a common sight, but Anna, delighted, clutched Kearney’s arm. “We’re inside a Tom Waits song,” she exclaimed. The more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster. Kearney shook his head. After a moment, he took out the leather bag that contained the Shrander’s dice. He undid the drawstring and let the dice fall into his hand. Anna stopped smiling and gave him a bleak look. She straightened her long legs and leaned back away from him in her chair.

“If you throw those things here,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it. I’ll leave you on your own.”

This should have seemed less like a threat than it did.

Kearney considered her, then the steaming street. “I can’t feel it near me,” he admitted. “For once. Perhaps I won’t need them.” He put the dice slowly back in the bag. “In Grove Park,” he said, “in your flat, in the room where I kept my things, there were chalk marks on the wall above the green chest of drawers. Tell me why you washed them off.”

“How would I know?” she said indifferently. “Perhaps I was sick of looking at them. Perhaps I thought it was high time. Michael, what are we doing here?”

Kearney laughed. “I’ve got no idea,” he said.

He had run three thousand miles, and now the fear was abating he had no idea why he had come here rather than anywhere else.

Later the same afternoon they moved into the apartment of a friend of his in Morningside Heights. The first thing Kearney did there was telephone Brian Tate in London. When there was no answer from the research suite, he tried Tate’s house. It was the answer service there, too. Kearney put the phone down and rubbed his face nervously.