That run would surely end with the eradication of McGee, and then a new, cleaner life could start for me, a lucky life with love in it and maybe success too. If I let the chance to end things slither away from me now, the thought of my own weakness would chafe at me for ever.

The thing was, I needed to do what must be done quickly, before the anger that gave me the energy ebbed and I started to think too much. The Whartons knew that my mother had died years ago, so for them it was Titch that I reheated and hauled back to the border between life and death. I scribbled a note that read: ‘Good friend seriously ill, have had to go to Belfast. Back in a week or so.’ I left it on their kitchen table, anchored by a coffee mug. Then I packed some things in a bag – underwear, toothbrush, a suit, and the majority of my worn, filthy-soft little bundles of cash – and headed out into the street towards the coach for Scotland. One thought thudded round my head, almost too big to be absorbed into my bloodstream. Titch was dead.

20

Belfast

How do you shop for a murder you haven’t yet planned? I was sitting on the neatly made bed of a Belfast hotel room, a brightly lit people container shaped exactly like a box. The planners had fitted the maximum number of these small, profitable boxes into the enormous concrete box that constituted the building itself. In one hand I held a piece of lined paper and in the other a pencil. The only words written on the paper were: rubber gloves.

There were several cast-iron principles for carrying out a successful killing, I had decided. The first was obvious: that nothing I did should arouse any suspicion. Above all, I had to appear very normal, which was difficult because I was feeling so strange. I’d sort of lost perspective on what normal meant, but – seen dimly from a long way away – I thought perhaps it might manifest itself as a sort of cheerful blokeishness. If placed under any stress, I decided, I would try to exude a mild, friendly laddishness, the way a cuttlefish squirts out ink to blind its adversaries.

One of the chief obstacles to organising a murder is that you suddenly realise just how pointlessly nosey other people are about your most mundane business. Under ordinary circumstances their inquisitiveness would be tolerable, but when a dark intention is already planted in your brain every gasbag taxi driver or shop assistant is transformed into a potential police witness. You can picture them giving their statement to the investigating officer, swollen with self-importance at the drama of being asked, brow furrowed with the strain of remembering, until – from somewhere in the slop of their memory – they finally dredge up some nugget of detail to sink you for ever.