It was late on a wet winter afternoon. The trains were reluctant, overheated, empty. Everything was slow, slow, slow. He caught a local, grinding its way out of London into Buckinghamshire. Every time he looked down at the dice in his hand, the world lurched and he had to look away. He sat there sweating until, two or three stops beyond Harrow-on-the-Hill, a tanned but tired-looking woman joined him in the carriage. She was dressed in a black business suit. In one hand she carried a briefcase, in the other a plastic Marks & Spencer carrier bag. She fussed with her mobile phone, leafed through a self-help book which seemed to be called Why Shouldn’t I Have the Things I Want? Two stations further north, the train slowed and stopped. She got to her feet and waited for the door to open, staring at the darkening platform, the lighted ticket office beyond. She tapped her foot. She looked at her watch. Her husband would be waiting in the car park with the Saab, and they would go straight on to the gym. Up and down the train, other doors opened and closed, people hurried away. She looked nervously right and left. She looked at Kearney. In the overheated emptiness, her journey pulled out like chewing gum, then snapped.

“Excuse me,” she said. “They don’t seem to be letting me out.”

She laughed.

Kearney laughed too.

“Let’s see what we can do,” he said.

Five or six thin gold chains, each bearing either her initial or her Christian name as a pendant, clung to the prominent tendons of her neck. “Let’s see what we can do, Sophie.” As he reached down to touch with his fingertip the makeup caked in the faint blonde down at the corner of her mouth, the train pulled slowly away. Her shopping had spilled when she fell. Something—he thought it was a shrink-wrapped lettuce—rolled out of the carrier bag and along the empty carriage. The platform slid backwards and was replaced by black night. The doors had never opened.

Kearney, expecting discovery at any moment, lived from newscast to newscast: but there was no mention of Meadows. The upper half of a body recovered from the Thames near Hungerford Bridge proved to be decomposed, and a woman’s. A second Nigerian boy was found dead in Peckham. Apart from these incidents, nothing. Kearney regarded the screen with growing disbelief. He couldn’t understand how he had got away with it. No one likes a venture capitalist, he found himself thinking one night, but this is ridiculous.

“And now,” said the anchorwoman brightly, “sport.”