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Chapters (45)
  1. The Man With No Face
  2. Also by
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. INTRODUCTION
  9. CHAPTER ONE
  10. CHAPTER TWO
  11. CHAPTER THREE
  12. CHAPTER FOUR
  13. CHAPTER FIVE
  14. CHAPTER SIX
  15. CHAPTER SEVEN
  16. CHAPTER EIGHT
  17. CHAPTER NINE
  18. CHAPTER TEN
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  25. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  26. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  27. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  37. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

He saw a face peering through a misted waiting-room window. A little girl was shouting, but there were no words. She ran towards him, arms outstretched, but she seemed to go through him and was gone. A hand wiped away the mist from the other side of the window and another face appeared. Bannerman tried to see it. There were features: eyes, a nose, a mouth. They were there, and yet he could not discern the face itself.

He awoke with a start and blinked in the darkness, momentarily confused and a little frightened, until he remembered where he was. He was cold. The room was like ice. Moonlight slanted through the window he had opened. He stood up and found his legs and arms stiff with the cold. He picked up his holdall and stumbled across the room in the darkness to find the door. He crossed the hall and returned to the bedroom he had first entered through the window. Here the moon rising in the south flooded the room with a light that reflected no colour and threw deep shadows across the floor. The sky was a chaos of stars, and frost was already glistening on the snow.

Bannerman threw his bag out of the window and then pulled himself up on to the sill. A small spot of red light fluttered momentarily on the wood of the architrave beside his head. As he saw it, the architrave split and threw jagged splinters into his face. The crack of a rifle shot echoed away into the night. An owl in a tree just outside the window screeched and flapped off into the dark. For just a moment Bannerman was confused. He drew his hand from his face and saw his fingers running with blood. He had no time to register that someone had just shot at him before he felt another bullet whistle past, no more than two inches from his left cheek, to smash into the plaster of the wall at the far side of the room. The gap between the two shots might only have been seconds, but it felt like hours. It was the full realization that came with the second shot that brought the fear. He recoiled instinctively and fell backwards from the sill.

He landed clumsily in the darkness and felt the broken glass from the window cut through his trousers and into his right knee. He rolled clear of it and lay on his back on the floor, listening to his breath coming hard and fast. And there, on the wall, was the same spot of red light, no bigger than a halfpenny. It moved slowly along the broken plaster then vanished. Some kind of infrared sighting device, reinforcing for Bannerman the intent of someone somewhere set on killing him.