Swiftly he went through the other drawers and found only stationery and mail, a drawer filled with pipes and empty tobacco tins. Then he spotted the door behind the desk and tried the handle. It opened into a large walk-in cupboard. Empty wooden shelves ran along the far wall. A small, battered suitcase lay in the near corner. Three battleship-grey filing cabinets were pushed against the door wall. Also empty. Kale pulled the door shut behind him and felt darkness close around him. He shivered for the first time in the cold, and with his pencil torch picked his way round the filing cabinets and squatted in the corner, back pressed against the wall, thin legs pulled in close to his chest. He leaned his left arm on the battered suitcase, though strangely it never occurred to him to check inside. He should have.

He took out Gryffe’s gun and laid it on the floor beside him, then took out another from an inside pocket and fitted its silencer. He laid it on the floor beside the Colt and let his head rest back against the wall, eyes closing, blood pulsing softly at his temples.

This was the worst time now. The waiting. Twelve hours, perhaps more. But it was all so familiar. The loneliness, the dark room. It had been that way all his life. Even now he could hear his mother in the next room, half-drunk, laughing, entertaining another customer. They came night after night. Sometimes he would recognize a voice. Any one of them might have been his father, though later his more rational self doubted it. He had lain on the cot bed in the corner below faded grey curtains, watching the line of light under the door. He had been five, maybe six years old. He never saw the faces that came and went. But he heard them, grunting, cursing. And always his mother’s voice, the pretence of pleasure, the smell of the gin that fuelled her fake laughter. Then afterwards, she would come through, to stand over his bed, thinking him asleep, and bend to kiss his cheek with wet, loose lips, the smell of gin on her breath. How he loathed it. Her smell, her touch, the stink of men and sex. And how he despised her for her sobbing. Great long sobs of self-pity that he could hear through the wall when she had returned to her own room. What right had she to cry?