‘Next time use the little, sharp knife for the parsley, it will chop faster,’ said Francis, in a cold, businesslike voice. Then he went over to stir a cream capers sauce for his fillet of sea bass.

He hated the kind of food he had to cook at Delauncey’s, and often made a point of telling me so. Francis revered meat. When he ate out himself, he went to places where they served pieces of an animal’s interior that only surgeons and abattoir workers knew existed. He would have been happiest working in one of those New British restaurants, where they give claret-faced customers every known variety of offal, cooked in styles that are increasingly obscene to vegetarians. But Delauncey’s was regular work with decent money, and Harry Smiley had slyly hinted that Francis’s recreational habits were becoming expensive: ‘The trouble with Francis is, he spends far too much time with his old mate, Charlie.’

I had noticed the same syndrome in Francis myself, a certain subcutaneous twitchiness, although I had been slow to put a substance to it.

14

There was consternation at the Whartons’. Rollo had killed a grey squirrel and then dragged it into the house. It was lying on the hallway mat, with one dead bright eye staring up at the ceiling. Two front paws were raised in supplication, a plump little friar caught up in an unexpected massacre. Rollo lay dozing some distance away, a crust of squirrel blood drying in the seam of his jowl. It was the first time he had killed anything, and the Whartons looked at the sleeping dog with suspicion and respect, as though after all these years he had become a fresh mystery.

That night I lay in bed at the top of the house, in the dark, wondering how it was that Rollo had managed to kill the squirrel. They were so fast: I had seen them shinning up trees like circus performers.

I didn’t sleep well. The dream that kept troubling me came back, or a version of the dream. In it, I was looking out of the bedroom window in the Whartons’ house. Below me, standing in the falling rain on the wet street, was a man in a dark hood. He was calling out to me, ‘Jacky, Jacky, come down here, I have something for you,’ and holding up the curled body of a dead squirrel.

‘I’m not coming down,’ I called out to him from the window. ‘I can get the squirrel in the morning.’

‘Then I’m coming up,’ the man said. He began to climb up the drainpipe towards my window, slowly at first. I felt myself filling with fear, like a flooding ditch. I was rooted to the spot.