I nodded.

‘I’m away now,’ I said, and offered him my hand to shake.

It was a mistake. He took his arthritic hands from his overalls and brushed his clenched right fist briefly against my open palm, and we both turned away with our own private shame.

He made no attempt to follow me this time.

Perhaps he figured that I wouldn’t be able to poke my nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Certainly everywhere seemed locked up, and despite the falling darkness few lights appeared in any of the ancient windows. I looked up at the room where Mallory and I had stared across the playing fields with Peregrine Waugh but I could see no sign of life even there.

But I saw Len Zukov again as I walked back to the car park. He was in front of his little stone cottage with another man and it took me a moment to recognise Sergeant Tom Monk, the burns on his face a smooth black mask from so far away.

As the old caretaker watched, a cigarette clutched in one balled-up fist, Monk raked a pile of newly mown grass, shovelled it into a wheelbarrow and carried the load round the side of the cottage to where the smoke from a small bonfire was rising. Easing the old man’s burden.

I raised my hand in farewell but they did not appear to see me.

Then there was another gunshot as I reached the car, much closer now, coming from somewhere just beyond the tree line. The stuttering shot tore through leaves and took its time to crack the sky. Len was wrong. Whatever they were killing, they were not using a .410 to do it. I know what a twelve-bore shotgun sounds like.

That’s big vermin someone’s hunting, I thought, happy to get back into the car.

There was something wrong with the silence.

It jolted me from my shallow sleep, and before I was even awake I was sitting by the side of the bed, staring straight into the eye of the madman who sat on my bedside table.

12:05, he told me. Five minutes after midnight?

Outside I could hear the hum and roar of the meat market as it began its night. The clamour of the trolleys, the shouts of the men, still laughing with the long hours of the night ahead of them.

What had woken me?

I pulled on my pants and a pair of lightweight knuckle-dusters that sat in the drawer by the bed. They weighed nothing but would crack open a skull like a boiled egg if you could get close enough. I stepped out of my bedroom, resisting the urge to call Scout’s name. Inside his cage, Stan stirred in his sleep.

Our front door was shut. Our windows were unbroken. There was no fresh air coming from somewhere it shouldn’t be.