‘Expecting me then, were you?’ he said as Jessica came out of my bedroom.

‘Yes. You’re here on behalf of Augustus White?’ I asked.

‘Who the fuck’s Augustus White? No, mate, we’re here to take you to see Miss Lisa. Would you mind following me down to the van?’

We came down into the street, and I saw that there were two men in the front of the Transit. The side was covered in orange dirt, and someone had written a football slogan with their finger on the side panel. Neither Jessica nor I had taken our coats, and the cold bit in to me. The back of the van was twenty feet from my front door, and so I had perhaps fifteen seconds in which to decide whether to run, to make it clear in public that something was wrong. The children and the young men and women milling happily around the square appeared to me as distant from myself and Jessica as the living must appear to the dead. If I shouted, or ran, it would mean relinquishing the last fragment of social normality. I was surprised by how fiercely I clung to it. I realized that the man behind us, massive and casual as a hill, had managed to leave me with no clue as to what to expect from Lisa. She might be calling us to consult with her, or she might have sent her goons to take us out to a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of London, never to return. If there was one thing I had come to remember over the last twenty-four hours, it was the thinness of the membrane between fantasy and reality. I felt the opportunity to act slipping away even as I made my deliberations. By the time we reached the van, I found myself still marvelling at my own indecision. It was almost a relief when the man swung the heavy door behind us with a thick clunk, as it settled the question.

We climbed into the back of the van, which contained four seats facing each other across the floor. The men sitting in the front seats did not look around. Jessica sat behind the front passenger seat, settling into the rough brown cushion and fastening her seatbelt. There was no fear discernible in her face. I sat opposite her and she smiled at me. Her smile righted me, and helped me to think more clearly. Whatever was about to happen to me, she would be with me. When our escort followed, the load of his body rocked the suspension backwards. He swung the door closed behind us, and the man in front started the engine.

There were no windows in the back of the van, and to look out of the front I had to turn my head ninety degrees to crane past the bald head of the driver. Not knowing where I was going disturbed me, since I thought the direction would be the best guide to our ultimate fate. If I found us driving out of the city, or heading for less populous areas, it might be necessary to make some drastic plan. We headed north, passing out of London into the suburbs, but not into the countryside. In Totteridge, where the houses made the perceptible shift into mansions, we turned off the arterial roads into the long wide streets of private developments.