I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Erskine. Any one of those troopers could have cut me down as I ran through the field towards the house. Instead they dropped where they’d been standing; double-tapped through the top lip or the rear of the skull – brain stem separated and heart immobile before they hit the ground. I didn’t take any of it in. Just ran, fighting the pain, gripped by the kind of madness that seizes you when somebody you love is in danger. I didn’t think about any of it. Hurled myself through the window because it was the quickest way in. It wasn’t until Walt was crunching through the cyanide tablet hidden in his back tooth that I actually allowed my brain to catch up with my actions. Then the shakes came and the tears and the shock and I swear if it wasn’t for Flick I’d probably have drifted off into a darkness that didn’t guarantee a return. Instead she kept me talking. Kept flicking away at my eyelids and squeezing the skin on my wrist and telling me over and over that I’d be OK and that she was going to read me the riot act once it was all over – that she’d been punched and kicked and John’s stitches had ripped and she was bloody furious with me for not telling her that John was on the payroll or that he wrote poetry and who the hell did I think I was getting another woman’s husband all in a lather with words and feelings that he wasn’t equipped to handle.

It went on for a while. I drifted in and out. There was a lot of shouting. Nobody seemed to know quite who was in charge. I remember people pulling and poking at me and Flick telling them that if they touched me again she’d bite their arms off. Then it was bright lights and high ceilings and the awful tugging feeling of the little forceps moving through the meat beneath my skin and the ‘plink’ of the bullet hitting the metal kidney bowl. Then there was sleep.

It was evening again before anybody official came to see me. I was in a private room in a military hospital and how I’d got there or where ‘there’ was didn’t really matter. I just know that the bed shifted for a moment and I woke up from wherever I’d been, and a man I knew to be Deputy Director of SIS was sitting there looking at me. He had a hat between his knees, silk-lined, and inside was a bag of pistachio nuts. He was shelling them as he watched me – taking the jackets off and then transferring the shelled nuts to a different section of the bag.