Then he leaned closer and whispered: ‘But if Gavin should come in here, I give you permission to hit him with any implement that should come to hand. You haven’t seen him before, after all, and from his demeanour you might assume that he is a violent intruder.’

He laughed, enigmatically. I wondered had all the whiskeys gone to his head, or maybe his nerves had just been scrambled by the evening.

I told him: ‘You seem like a good host, Murdie, and I’ve only been here ten minutes.’

He gave a regretful little smile. Hospitality was still a sensitive point, after the incident with the cousin. ‘Sleep tight,’ he said, and went up the stairs on leather-shod tiptoe so as not to wake Mrs Murdie with the groaning floorboards.

The yellow light of a street lamp came through the window, falling across my brown blankets. Out on the street a solitary drunk was stumbling home. I heard him singing a mournful song in a voice wet with alcohol and stirred with sadness. I could have lain awake all night, turning over the implications of what had just happened in the Whistle. But I didn’t. I just fell back on the clean pillows like a dead man, into the soft arms of a deep, black sleep.

9

I came round early and lay very still, trying not to wake my dread up. But it was already lying in me like stagnant water, and it began to stir when I heard the sound of Gavin clanking around in the kitchen.

There is a poem I have always liked, by W. H. Auden, that I first came across years ago in one of the books Big Jacky bought. It is about how perfectly the Old Masters understood suffering: how, in their paintings, when one person was enduring torments, everyone else was simply carrying on as usual, ‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’.

While Titch sat terrified in his airless bedroom, and I was thinking about being exiled from my own house, Mrs Murdie’s cousin Gavin had remounted the summit of his own good spirits and was digging noisily in the fridge for bacon and potato bread.

Gavin was a tall and robust fella in his early thirties: ruddy-cheeked, with a busy, loose-lipped mouth. There was an air of greedy carelessness to him, something almost unfinished, as there is with some hectic, sizeable people. The blueprint for Gavin had been sketched with a thick charcoal pencil and in great haste.