Jax had been surprised to learn how lethal he could be without a weapon. It took just seven pounds of force to crush a man’s windpipe. Ferris had warned him to be careful with that move. Deadly, he’d said. A well paced and placed slap to the ear could make a man lose his balance for hours. Ferris had warned him about that one too. Also deadly. Jax had also been surprised to learn a man’s foot was a good target: all those little bones. Ferris didn’t warn him about that one. Obviously not deadly.

Jax had liked Ferris. He was the only person, aside from Father Martin, he had felt comfortable around. Maybe it was because he had been a soldier too.

With the showers still blasting and steam filling the room, Jax’s reflection was slowly obscured by a fresh layer of condensation. When he could see nothing more than a foggy outline of himself, he picked up his towel and wiped again. Then he stepped back, half-expecting to see his former self. But again, it was the stranger.

Riley Jax was gone. Dead. He had become one of them.

Clarke had offered to get Jax off the hook for his crimes, promising he would never be charged, let alone trialled, for the murders of Billy Briggs, Daniel Marsh, Milo Grubetski, Charlie Moran, James Warren, Paul Fitzpatrick, and Dean Spanos, should he agree to assist. But Jax rejected that offer, didn’t try to avoid a probable life sentence.

‘Make me one promise,’ Jax had said. ‘Look after Nikki. Do that and I’ll do whatever you ask.’

When not in the gym, pressing and pulling, punching and pumping, Jax had sat in a legal visits room with Clarke, for at least three hours a day, taking lessons, planning and plotting, being briefed – a crash course, in other words, in becoming a spy.

Jax was surprised how much he already knew, partly from his university course – he realised it had been more on point than he’d given it credit for at the time. The rest he picked up pretty easily, inhaling the texts, files and cases he was given and easily committing them all to memory. Jax didn’t even try to hide his processing and recall abilities from Clarke – what was the point?

But then he suspected he already knew. That would explain why Jax had seen him twice before he turned up at Long Bay: once at his army base and then at his trial.

IN FACT, Project Mnemonist had begun when Jax was twelve.

‘What’s an eidetiker?’ Clarke had asked when he read the boy’s medical report.