Harry took a look at the toy landscape below and came away from the door. ‘I never feel quite safe in these things,’ he said. He felt the back of the door with his hand, as though he were afraid that it might fly open and launch him into that iron-ribbed space. ‘Victims?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,’ he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving – for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money – without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.’ He gave his boyish conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s the only way to save nowadays.’

‘Couldn’t you have stuck to tyres?’

‘Like Cooler? No, I’ve always been ambitious.’

‘You are finished now. The police know everything.’

‘But they can’t catch me, Rollo, you’ll see. I’ll pop up again. You can’t keep a good man down.’

The car swung to a standstill at the highest point of the curve and Harry turned his back and gazed out of the window. Martins thought: One good shove and I could break the glass, and he pictured the body falling, falling, through the iron struts, a piece of carrion dropping among the flies. He said, ‘You know the police are planning to dig up your body. What will they find?’

‘Harbin,’ Harry replied with simplicity. He turned away from the window and said, ‘Look at the sky.’

The car had reached the top of the Wheel and hung there motionless, while the stain of the sunset ran in streaks over the wrinkled papery sky beyond the black girders.

‘Why did the Russians try to take Anna Schmidt?’

‘She had false papers, old man.’

‘Who told them?’

‘The price of living in this zone, Rollo, is service. I have to give them a little information now and then.’

‘I thought perhaps you were just trying to get her here – because she was your girl? Because you wanted her?’

Harry smiled. ‘I haven’t all that influence.’

‘What would have happened to her?’

‘Nothing very serious. She’d have been sent back to Hungary. There’s nothing against her really. A year in a labour camp perhaps. She’d be infinitely better off in her own country than being pushed around by the British police.’

‘She hasn’t told them anything about you.’

‘She’s a good little thing,’ Harry repeated with satisfaction and pride.

‘She loves you.’

‘Well, I gave her a good time while it lasted.’

‘And I love her.’