So much for this not being as bad as it might be, thought John.

“In summary, I really wouldn’t want to be your balls, John. Neither one of them. But on the upside, your way out of this mess is clear, yes? You simply do what you’re told.” He stood abruptly, and the chair toppled onto the carpet with a muffled thud. “Richard here will be in touch soonest. Check on your progress. We’ll give you a couple of days, John.” He cracked his knuckles. “A couple of days. Then I’ll start getting irritable. And you don’t want that.”

The list of things John didn’t want had grown exponentially this morning, but he could agree that Edward growing irritable was likely to be included. It didn’t seem worth corroborating this, though, so he didn’t waste his breath on a reply.

As they watched him weave up Marylebone High Street, looking not all that different from others starting to appear on the streets now—those who had places to go and things to do—Richard said to Edward: “I think we motivated him.”

“That was never going to be the problem. Someone as shit-scared as Bachelor’s easy to motivate. No, the major difficulty is the usual one when you’re using shoddy tools. Are they up to the job? Or will they fall apart in your hands?”

And as he was watched doing his weaving, John Bachelor thought: whatever’s going on here involves several layers of fuckery. He was a milkman, for god’s sake. If they wanted to put the frighteners on him, all they had to do was threaten to sack him. So there was something going on here, more than appeared on the surface. Not that that altered things much. Whichever way you looked at it, he was going to have to find Benny Manors.

Biggest puzzle of all, though, was: How come they couldn’t do this by themselves?

First thing first, he had a drink. Early doors by anyone’s reckoning, but sometimes you skip the niceties. Back in Solly’s flat, sitting by the window, he watched the morning get a grip on itself while he drank an inch of peach brandy, discovered at the back of Solly’s sideboard and saved for an emergency. The first gulp burned the way the first gulp does any time of day, though the peach flavour added a hint of breakfast. Good to maintain a schedule. And while he was doing that he ran through his mental records on Benny Manors, which took zero minutes. It wasn’t as if he knew the man’s haunts or habits; they’d had exactly one meeting, and that hadn’t gone well. And if Edward and Richard hadn’t managed to find him with the Park’s resources at their disposal: well. Why did they expect him to accomplish what they couldn’t?

In this whole sorry mess, he was holding only one card that he could see.

He knew who Richard was.