Almost immediately, Péter was hauling himself from the shattered passenger window. He saw László, shouted a warning, and pointed back up the drive, though there was no need. László had already seen the other car, a Russian military saloon pulling up twenty metres from the Skoda, three men inside (two in uniform, one in the back in plain clothes), who flung open their doors and began to shoot with pistols. Seeing it again, seeing the distances involved, it seemed extraordinary how even in the fading light they could have kept missing. Half in, half out of the car, Péter was a simple enough target, yet between them they must have fired a dozen times before they hit him. Then Péter had stopped struggling for a moment and became utterly still, as though the bullet were a thought, an idea, the most extraordinary he had ever had. The second caught him as he slithered down the blackened underside of the car. He cried out. A shocked, aggrieved sound. A sound of appalled protest at the realization of what was happening to him. The third dropped him on to his knees, though even then he didn’t stop, but kept crawling towards the shelter of the pillars.

All this László saw through the loop of the tommy-gun’s forward sights. He had raised the gun and pressed it to his shoulder, just as Feri had instructed him. He had drawn a line over Péter’s head to the plainclothes man, the most dangerous of the three, the one who fired with the greatest deliberation. And so intent were they on murdering Péter, such an appetite, they had not even noticed László, braced in the shadows, dark beside the dark of the stone. But as his finger touched the steel kiss-curl of the trigger, he knew that he would never pull it. Whatever it was a man needed in his nature to destroy another, he simply did not possess it. The act was beyond him. He could not kill. Could not. And this he learned about himself at the very moment when the human being he adored most fervently of all was gunned down by men who ought to die, but whom he could not bring himself to harm.