Under there too was a small box of my old toys, including just the item I was hoping to find: a pair of police handcuffs, complete with keys, that Big Jacky had long ago unearthed at some charity shop or other. They had once been my most prized possession. I knew precisely how they worked, because at the age of nine I had played cops and robbers all around the house for weeks on end with an extraordinarily forbearing Big Jacky, and at least fifty per cent of the time I got to be the cop.

I carried on, encouraged now. Phyllis’s stuffed little packet of sleeping pills sat in the bathroom cabinet, exactly as I had pictured it. Best just to swipe one whole metallic sheet, I thought, and that way she would think it had fallen out somewhere. Anyway, I might need them all later. Down in the kitchen, I took a sharp knife and made a small, deep incision in the end of a cocktail sausage: I pushed a pill inside, and watched the puckered meat close back over it, like a tiny arsehole obediently receiving a suppository. Three pills into each sausage, three sausages in total, wrapped in foil and put in my pocket. Oh, and the keys for the cellar to Big Jacky’s shop. All done.

Then I started watching the clock.

Phyllis usually came back from bingo just before eleven, after a couple of drinks with Julie. It would be disastrous if she saw me. I would get entangled in the sticky web of her panic and never make it anywhere near McGee. I went through the house, setting it straight, carefully eradicating any clear taint of my presence, and stepped out into the cold night. There weren’t that many people about now, as the pubs hadn’t closed yet. The authorities had scaled down the British army patrols, with their jolting cargoes of jumpy young soldiers looking out warily from the back of Land Rovers, and the darkness meant that the disguise could pass with less scrutiny.

22

About half an hour after I threw the sausages into McGee’s yard, the dog stopped moving around. I could see it, if I jumped to look over the wall. It was lying down with its eyes closed but still breathing, giving little snorts, its side gently rising and falling.

I climbed over the wall, jumped into the yard and squatted near the kennel, just beneath the windowsill. It stank a bit there, of dog hair and rain and old scraps of forgotten food. I had time to think of what I was getting myself into, to acknowledge the anxiety slopping around my stomach. I now wished I had a real gun, but there was no going back. I had been crouching there about fifteen minutes, with small pains starting to quiver through my ankles and knees, when I heard voices coming closer as the lights went on in the living room.