Stefan looked at the Turk. He had raised his hands but Stefan could tell that he was more in control of his fear than the gunman was of his.

‘Then you would prove to me that I can’t let you leave. And I’d have to take you down.’

‘With what? You’re not armed.’

‘Trust me,’ Stefan kept his tone even. ‘You pull that trigger and it’s the last thing you do. I’m a specialist firearms officer. I know about guns. I know about the gun you’re holding. When and where it was made. I can tell from the way you’re holding it that you don’t know what you’re doing. And I know that you won’t get us both before I reach you and snap your neck. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Put the gun down. There’s a way out of this.’

‘Is there?’ The gunman smiled bitterly. ‘I suppose by restoring the monopoly on physical force?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Get out of my way!’ He brought the gun back to bear on Stefan. ‘Why do you have to do this? Why can’t you just walk away? Just this once.’

‘Because it’s what I do. Just give me the gun.’ Stefan took a step forward. ‘Let’s end this.’

‘Okay …’ The gunman’s expression seemed to empty.

Stefan gave a small laugh. He had been wrong. The gun was old. It hadn’t been maintained. But it didn’t jam. And the junkie had been either a better shot than Stefan had thought or had just been lucky. The sound of the shot still rang in the confinement of the store as Stefan looked down at his brand-new shirt. At the hole punched through it. At the bloom that spread as his blood soaked into the fabric. A central mass hit. Almost a perfect shot. Stefan’s legs gave way under him. He sank to his knees.

‘Why couldn’t you just have got out of my way?’ The junkie’s voice was filled with panic and hate in equal measure.

Stefan looked up at the junkie and opened his mouth to say something but found he hadn’t the breath to spare.

‘Why?’ the junkie repeated plaintively and fired again. Then again. And again.

7.

Once more Fabel dreamed of the dead.

Fabel had had the dreams throughout his career. He had learned to resign himself to the sudden waking, the thunder of his pulse in his ears, the cold sweats in the night as part of his mental processes. He accepted that the dreams were the natural byproduct of so many surplus thoughts and emotions circulating in his mind: those that he had learned to suppress as he dealt with the brutality of killers and, most of all, with the pain and misery of their victims. It was something he saw at every murder scene. The story. The history, usually written out in blood, of those last violent, sad moments. Someone had once said to him that we all die alone; that we can leave this world surrounded by people, but death was still the most solitary of acts. Fabel didn’t believe this. The one element of each murder scene that burrowed its way into his brain, malevolently lurking there until he dreamed, had always been the cruelty of a murder victim having to share their last, most intimate moment with their killer. He remembered how he had once come close to smashing his fist into the grinning face of a murder suspect when he had boasted of how his victim, as she had died from the stab wounds he had inflicted, had tried to hold his hand, seeking the only human comfort available to her. The bastard had actually laughed as he talked about it. And Fabel had dreamt of the victim the same night.