After a moment, they pull over, then the driver performs a U-turn and accelerates. "If you don't mind me asking, sir ..."

"Yes?" Panin looks up from the map book on his lap.

"Do you want me to call for backup?"

"When we know where we're going, Dmitry. Patience."

"Sir. Shouldn't you have told . . . ?"

"The wolf may not bite the hound, but that doesn't make them friends. I intend to get there first, Dmitry. Wherever 'there' is."

"Then I shall drive faster. Sir." The saloon accelerates, heading south.

"HELLO , BOB, " SAYS JONQUIL'S MUMMY, A SMILE CRINKLING the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes. "Oh dear, what did you do to your arm? Let me have a look at that." She tuts over the state of Julian's first-aid—very rough and ready, a wadded-up rugby sock held in place by tubigrip, now black with clotted blood. "You really ought to have taken the week off sick: overwork will be the death of you, you know."

"Fuck off!" Fury and pain give way to a mix of disgust and self-contempt. I should have seen this coming.

"Do feel free to let it all hang out," she tells me: "It's not as if you've got anything to lose, is it?"

Damn Iris. She knows me well enough to get under my skin.

"You've been studying me, haven't you?"

"Of course." She glances over her shoulder. "You. Fetch the first-aid kit at once." Back to me: "I'm sorry about . . . that."

"Does your idiot daughter always go around chopping up strangers when you're not around?"

"Yes," she says calmly. "It runs in the family. I don't think you have any grounds to complain, given what you did to poor Gareth. Would you like me to take those handcuffs off you? Don't get any silly ideas about escaping: the guards upstairs will shoot anyone they don't recognize."

"I didn't do anything to Gareth," I say as she pulls out a key and holds it up in front of me between two black-gloved fingers: "If he hadn't meddled—" I stop. There's no point arguing. "What do you want from me?"

"Your cooperation, for the time being. Nothing more, nothing less." There's a click, and my right wrist flops free. My arm flares for a moment, and I nearly black out. "That looks painful. Would you like something for it?" I don't remember nodding, but a subjective moment later I'm sitting up on the trolley and someone I can't see is leaning over me with a syringe. It stings, cold as it goes in—then my arm begins to fade, startlingly fast. "It's just morphine, Bob. Say if you need some more."

"Morph—" I'm nodding. "What do you want?"

"Come and sit with me," she says, beckoning. An unseen minion lifts me with an arm under my left shoulder and guides me towards one of two reclining leather armchairs in the middle of a dim pool of light on the flagstones—Flagstones? Where are we? "And I'll explain."