He was less afraid of discovery, he found, than of the Shrander itself. Would Meadows be enough to keep it at bay? One minute he was confident; the next he had no hope. A noise in the street outside was enough to send his heart rate up. He ignored the phone, which was often ringing two or three times in a morning. Messages were backing up at his answer service, but he didn’t dare call in and get them. Instead, he cast the dice obsessively, watching them bounce across the floor away from him like bits of human bone. He couldn’t eat, and the slightest rise in temperature made him sweat. He couldn’t sleep, and when he did, dreamed it was himself he had killed. When he woke from this dream—filled with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief—it was to find Anna lying on top of him, weeping and whispering fiercely:

“It’s all right. Oh please. It’s all right.”

Awkward and unpractised, she had wrapped her arms and legs tightly round him, as if to stifle his cries. It was so unlike Anna to attempt to comfort someone else that Kearney pushed her off in a sort of terror and willingly fell back over the edge into the dream.

“I don’t understand you,” she complained the next morning. “You were so nice until a few days ago.”

Kearney peered cautiously at himself in the bathroom mirror, in case he saw some other thing. His face, he noted, looked pouchy and lined. Behind him through the steam he could see Anna lying in a bath which smelled of rose oil and honey, her colour heightened by heat, her expression made petulant by a genuine puzzlement. He put down his razor, bent over the bath, and kissed her on the mouth. He put his hand between her legs. Anna writhed about, trying to turn over and present herself, panting and slopping water over the side of the bath. Kearney’s cellphone rang.

“Ignore it,” Anna said. “Don’t answer it. Oh.”

Later, Kearney made himself listen to his messages.

Most of them were from Brian Tate. Tate had been calling two or three times a day, sometimes leaving only the number of the research suite, as if he thought Kearney might have forgotten it, sometimes talking until the answer service cut him off. To begin with his tone was hurt, patient, accusatory; soon it became more urgent. “Michael, for God’s sake,” he said: “Where have you been? I’m going mad here.” The call was timed at eight in the evening, and bursts of laughter in the background suggested he was phoning from a pub. He put the phone down suddenly, but the next message came in less than five minutes later, from a mobile:

“This is such a shitty signal,” it began, followed by something indistinguishable, then: “The data’s useless. And the cats—”