The driver wasted no time in pushing into first gear. He turned the car out from the kerb to head down the hill and glanced in the rearview mirror. But already his passenger was only a shadow, barely visible among the trees. He let out a deep breath, one that he seemed to have been holding in his lungs all day, and allowed himself a smile of satisfaction as he fingered the wad of notes in his jacket pocket. All his fears and doubts of earlier melted as quickly as the snowflakes that landed on his windscreen. The thoughts he had entertained only a few hours before, of going to the police, seemed ridicu­lous now. Who cared why this sullen foreigner had wanted him to follow the blue Volkswagen? He pulled the flap over his pocket. Perhaps he could take a few days off.

Kale watched the red tail lights of the taxi vanish from view where the road turned down through the trees. He stood for some minutes. At first he felt nothing. Not even the cold. In a few hours it would all be over and then nothing would matter any more. Back the way they had come he could see the lights of the hospital through the branches of trees. He barely noticed the view of the city below him to his right.

He turned and walked back down the hill until he reached the first of the villas standing darkly behind its high stone walls. There a solitary streetlamp rose above its own pool of feeble yellow light, and he stopped to light a cigarette and turn up the collar of his coat. His every movement seemed remote to him, mechanical, as though he had stepped outside of his body and was simply an onlooker. He had surrendered himself completely to the job in hand.

He smoked only half of his cigarette before throwing it away and carried on down the road to the gates of the clinic. Already the tyre tracks of Bannerman’s car where it had turned into the hospital were covered by fresh snowfall, leaving only the merest of impressions. Kale hesitated for just a moment in the gateway, then moved silently from the drive into the trees. Here the snow lay in patches, the thick layer of dead leaves spongy under his feet. There was a smell of decay, damp and cold, among the evergreen foliage. He scrambled up the slope, his sleeves and trousers snagging on bushes, and then waited, breathless, at the top, crouched below the cover of the wall that bounded the terrace. A fine cold sweat beaded his forehead.