And Bernard trailed along. His angelic face was tense, his eyes ached with staring at the red taillights before him. Despite the smooth movements of his hands upon the stick and the wheel, his body felt brittle, his muscles throbbed. Ahead, the Mercedes’ pace remained even, unhurried.

Was it possible, he wondered after a while, was it possible that he was being drawn in?

Oh, Harper, he thought. You old witch. He had seen her back in the square. With her hand outstretched, with her mouth open. She had been trying to stop him, hadn’t she? And he had ignored her. Because he was always tailing after her and she was always telling him what was what and she was always right about everything and, well, it rankled from time to time. So he had ignored her, and driven on as he thought best.

Was it possible, he wondered now, licking his dry lips, was it possible that she had been trying to save him from exactly this?

The Mercedes turned again, headed now along a curving street so narrow that the crumbling Tudor bays to the left and right seemed to hang directly over them. Then, all at once, with a harsh splash through a gutter puddle, the black car dashed out of sight, down an alley.

This was too much. In so tight a space, Bernard would be a fool to follow. He let the Morris glide past the corner. Glanced over as he went by, just in time to see the black car’s taillights wink out.

The Morris rolled on another short distance. Then Bernard pulled it to the curb beside an overflowing skip.

He switched off the engine. Flumped against the seat, his head falling back wearily. He shut his eyes.

He’d had a glimpse of the street in which the Mercedes had parked: a dead end, a walled close with barely a hand’s breadth of space on either side of the car. Trail the scarred man into that and he would come out with his head under his arm. And here he had been so looking forward to a ripe old age of moral degeneracy and exquisite perversion.

He cursed aloud, and then shouldered the Morris’s door open.

His long figure unfolded from the car. He was all in black. Only the shaven dome of his head shone under the single streetlight. He moved swiftly, with his willowy lope, back along the housefronts to the alley entrance. He pressed himself to the corner wall—feeling like a right idiot, feeling like a cinema spy—and peeked around the edge.