That was how things stayed for the next three years. I tried a hundred times to recreate the tune that had turned Rafi and Asmodeus into spiritual Siamese twins, but I never even got close. And without that starting point to work from, I didn’t have a bastard clue how to separate them out again. There’s no sieve in the world with a mesh fine enough for souls.

And now I’d run out of time. Asmodeus was walking the streets, leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. Something had to be done, and now that I’d sobered up long enough to string two thoughts together, I knew that it was me who had to do it. It was either that or stay smashed out of my skull for the rest of my life.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. It’s a bitch.

After finishing her second brandy, Pen tried to re-establish an air of normality by mucking out the rats’ cage. I left her to it and went back up to my room to make another pass at the mess: a parallel process really, except that my room smelled a lot worse than rat shit.

I worked with more of a will this time, and made some inroads into the chaos. Just having something to do was therapeutic, although I still felt fragile from the heroic abuses of the past few days and I had to take things slow.

Every so often random flashes of memory would play across my inner eye. I let them come and go again without trying to force them, intriguing though some of them were. As with birds, chasing after them would be the surest way to make them scatter.

I remembered sitting on cooling asphalt and trying to find a new note on my whistle, convinced that I was hearing the note in the air all around me. I could almost hear it again now, but it remained tantalisingly just out of reach, like a dream that’s already started to evaporate as you wake up piecemeal from a troubled sleep.

The withdrawal pangs hit me again, harder than ever, prickling my skin and covering me in an instant with cold sweat. I hardly even noticed. That note, that elusive ostinato, remained wedged in the doorway of my mind like an overlarge piece of furniture that couldn’t be pulled or pushed. It wouldn’t come into clear focus and it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I took out my whistle, put it to my mouth and blew a few random chords. A, C and then G took me by a sort of natural progression into ‘Henry Martin’, a wholesome little tune about murder, exploitation and the irreversible loss of innocence.

There were three brothers in merry Scotland,

In merry Scotland there were three,

And they did cast lots as to which one should go

To turn robber all on the salt sea.