“We went to the pictures in Fulham, to see a Tarkovsky film, I think it was Mirror. But I went to the wrong cinema, and it was bitterly cold, and I was sitting on the steps outside waiting for you for an hour. When you got there, all you could look at was my Russian hat.”

“I remember that hat,” Kearney told her. “You said it made your face look fat.”

“Broad,” said Anna. “I said it made my face too broad. And you said, without a moment’s hesitation, ’It makes your face your face. That’s all, Anna: your face.’ Do you know what else you said?”

Kearney shook his head. All he really remembered was angrily searching the cinemas of Fulham for her.

“You said: ‘ Why spend any more of your life apologising?’ ”

She looked down at him, and after a pause said, “I can’t tell you how much I loved you for that.”

“I’m glad.”

“Michael?”

“What?”

“I want you to fuck me in my Russian hat.”

She brought her arm from behind her back and there it was in her hand, a silky grey fur thing the size of a cat. Kearney began to laugh. Anna laughed too. She put the hat on her head and instantly looked ten years younger. Her smile was wide and pretty, as vulnerable as her wrists. “I never could understand someone who wore a Russian hat to watch Tarkovsky,” he said. He gathered her nightgown up into the small of her back and reached down. She groaned. He was still able to think, as he often thought, Perhaps this will be enough, release me at last, push me through the wall between me and me.

He thought: Perhaps this will save her from me.

Later he made a phone call, and that afternoon, as a result, found Valentine Sprake wandering up and down the taxi rank at Victoria station with two or three blackened pigeons running in and out between his feet. They were all lame. Sprake looked irritated.

“Never phone me on that number again,” he said.

“Why?” asked Kearney.

“Because I fucking don’t want you to.”

He showed no signs of remembering what had happened when they last met. His engagement with the Shrander—his flight, if it could be described like that—was as private as Kearney’s, as private as madness: a dialogue so internalised it could only be inferred, partially and undependably, from the sum of his actions. Kearney got him in a cab and they went through the coagulated traffic of Central London then out to the Lea Valley, where the shopping parks and industrial estates were still embedded with a vestigial tissue of residential streets, neither clean nor dirty, new or old, inhabited by midday joggers and half-dead feral cats. Sprake stared sullenly out the windows at the alloy siding and empty buildings. He seemed to be whispering to himself.

“Have you seen this Kefahuchi thing?” Kearney asked him tentatively. “On the news?”