He left them where he had found them: planted side by side on the bench, Dunbar speaking softly, Southerland occasionally nodding. As he neared the park's edge Sykes appeared. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his sailor's coat. His restless eyes were fixed on something in the distance.

"All done?" His voice was vaguely unpleasant, thuggish.

"What do you want?"

Sykes grinned, his head cocked at an odd angle. "Just to take a look at your back."

"What?"

He pointed to the road ahead. "Watch your trail. Make sure the wolves haven't picked up your scent."

Gray turned, watching him. "Look, I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Sykes took a step closer, a finger pointing to his eye. "Just keep walking down the road, eh?"

Nor was the remainder of that night any less disturbing, with voices through thin walls, footsteps in corridors, and the screech of passing trams. Berlin.

Eventually Dunbar would record that Gray spent most of the second day preparing himself for Spangler. He exercised to calm his nerves, Dunbar would write. He rested with music on the gramophone. He ate fish and drank nothing but tea and mineral water. He rehearsed his approach in front of a mirror.

None of this was true: all Dunbar's flourishes to make himself interesting.

Gray would mostly remember the fog. It rose at dawn, spilling over banks of the canals, gently colliding with a windborne mist. By noon the heart of the city was also fogbound, with an ascendant chill from the alleys and drains. The fog seemed appropriate, and welcome, obscuring and softening what he had no desire to confront.

There were some eight hours on that second day to waste before the evening, and Gray used them like a tourist. He tried a gallery filled with derivative etchings. He wandered into a church. He visited a national monument and watched children tossing pebbles in a fountain until a policeman appeared. He sat on a park bench with a flask of whisky. There were also moments when he found himself unreasonably hungry, and understood that it was nervous fear. And there were moments when he could not stop shivering from the cold, and knew that it was Zelle. As dusk began to fall he also found himself, willy-nilly, thinking about Spangler.

He took a long time to dress that evening: laying out his clothing in a kind of trance, half dozing in a bath with another whisky at his elbow, smoking three or four cigarettes while waiting for a taxi. He was, he reminded himself, doing this for Zelle.