“You still don’t think it’s real,” he would say suddenly, in his soft, insinuating way: “Do you?”

Then: “Go on, Mick. Mickey. Michael. You can admit it to me.”

Valentine Sprake was already in his forties and still lived at home. His family ran a secondhand clothes shop in North London. There was an old woman with a vaguely middle-European accent, who spent her time staring up in a kind of exhausted trance at the curiously wrenched space of the religious art on the walls. Sprake’s brother, a boy of about fourteen, sat day in and day out behind the counter of the shop, chewing something which smelled of aniseed. Alice Sprake, the sister, with her heavy limbs, vacant heavy smile, her olive skin and faint moustache, regarded Kearney speculatively from large brown eyes. If they were ever left alone together, she sat next to him and put her damp hand softly on his cock. He became erect immediately, and she smiled at him in a possessive way, revealing that her teeth weren’t good. No one ever saw this, but whatever their other limitations that whole family had a withering emotional intelligence.

“You’d like to give her one, wouldn’t you?” said Sprake. “Give her a bit of a slippery hot one, Mikey old chap. Well I don’t care, mind—” here he gave a shout of laughter “—but the other two wouldn’t let you.”

It was Sprake who took them into Europe.

They killed Turkish prostitutes in Frankfurt, a Milanese dress-designer in Antwerp. Towards the end of what became a six-month spree, they found themselves in The Hague one evening, eating at a good-quality Italian restaurant opposite the Kurrhaus Hotel. The evening wind came up off the sea, blew sand into the square outside before it died away. The lamp swung above the table and the shadows of the wineglasses shifted uncomfortably on the tablecloth, like the complex umbrae and penumbrae of planets. Sprake’s hand moved between them, then lay flat as if exhausted.

“We’re like bears in a pit here,” he said.

“Do you wish we hadn’t come?”

“ ‘Crespelle and ricotta,’ ” said Sprake. He threw the menu onto the table. “What the fuck’s that about?”

After an hour or two, a boy sauntered past outside in the twilight. He was perhaps five feet ten inches tall and twenty-six years old. His hair had been dragged back and plaited tightly, and he was wearing yellow high-waisted shorts with their own yellow crossover braces. He carried a matching yellow soft toy. Though he was slightly built, his shoulders, hips and thighs had a rounded, fleshy look, and on his face was the self-satisfied and yet somehow wincing expression of someone acting out a fantasy in public.

Sprake grinned at Kearney.