‘You’re not meant to be,’ he said, chastising me with the gentle, avuncular tones of a benign housemaster. ‘You were meant to deliver the information to six, then get off the train when I told you to. He was laying a trail, you see. He wanted you to be able to say you knew nothing of what was going to happen. He wanted you to have the credit not the shame.’

I ground my back teeth, tasting blood. ‘The credit for what? The men at the barn – the ones who left with him. They’re Kaibiles. You know what they do, what they are, what they stand for …?’ I stopped myself, another wave of confusion twisting me in knots. ‘If you’re on Walt’s side why did you just kill that man?’

He smiled at me again, a pleasant grin that suggested he was capable of looking quite handsome, albeit in a ruby player sort of a way. He seemed so different from the man on the train. What had Walt called him? How had he addressed him over the radio before he came for me?

‘I’m Erskine,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I answer to several names, just like you. But Erskine will do for now. Might I be permitted to call you Cordelia?’

I pulled a face that suggested he was mad. A moment ago I thought he was going to suffocate me to death and now he was worried about decorum. I recognized the type. He hadn’t been lying when he told me he was part of the Deck of Clubs. He was every inch the upper-class gentleman: military in his deportment and frightfully polite; mindful of social niceties even as we lay on the ground beside a cooling corpse.

‘Call me what you bloody like,’ I said, and there was more than a trace of my own heritage in the way I hissed it at him.

‘That’s the Cordelia that Walt described to me,’ he said, and moved a little further away from me, lifting the rifle and looking out through the scope. I didn’t speak. Just waited until he was done. When he gave me his attention again I sensed that he was in real pain. He was trying not to let it show but his jaw kept flexing and one eye was flickering open and shut as if he was trying to keep the agony chained up inside him.