They must, while he was senseless, have dragged him away to the unlit side of the street. He had a short dream in which he was lying in the cot-bed on the Jenny, rising and falling with the movement of the sea, quite at ease. When he opened his eyes he was on his back with one of his legs in the air, a man tugging off his boot. He kicked out at the man and was immediately kicked himself, though the kicker’s aim was poor and rather than the toe of his foot connecting with Lacroix’s temple, the sole of the shoe rasped across the skin of his brow. Somehow—rage, fear—he got to his feet, rising up under a heavy rain of blows. He swung at the nearest shadow, connected with the man’s neck, saw him stagger backwards. Then the girl was there and he paused. Was she with them, or was she also under attack? He tried to speak to her but she ran at him and tripped him and the kicking began again, kicks from her too, lifting her petticoats to kick more freely, her feet as sharp as pins.

Then they fled, in one movement, like birds.

He stood again, set off in pursuit, running on stockinged feet until he came on them, all three, crouching behind railings. He knocked down the first man to rise and immediately straddled him. What he wanted above all was to hurt him; the whole night had narrowed itself to that, the desire to hurt, to repay the injustice of their actions by striking a face until it was pulp. The man writhed beneath him like a great fish but the others had not abandoned him and now the second man—it might even have been the woman—struck Lacroix with the fiddle case, crashed it into the back of his skull, and sent him reeling.

Hard to know how long he was out for this time. When he came back to himself he was spread-eagled on the cobbles as if they had tumbled him out of an upstairs window. He lay like that a while, not daring to move, then reached for the railings, pulled himself closer and propped his back against them. His mouth was full of blood. He gagged, turned his head and spat it out. Ahead of him, pale ghosts, were his own bootless feet. His money had been in his boots, most of it. Notes from the bank in Bath. Two fives, a ten.

He spat again. That last crack on the head with the fiddle was the one that really hurt. He touched the place gingerly, half afraid to put his fingers into the combs of his own brain. He tried to find it funny that he had survived the war but come to grief in Glasgow, cut down by an orange seller and her paramours. He tried.