As he drove, he remembered something and reached into his pocket, bringing out the note Harry had left for him, the one that had led him by the nose towards his intended death. He rolled down the window and threw it out. Was there anything else she had given him? No, nothing, not unless she had planted something on him without his knowledge. He would have to check his clothing.

Wait a minute, though … she had given him something else: a ten-pence piece to pay for the call she said she had made yesterday evening. He angled a hand into his trouser pocket and brought out all his loose change, scattering it on the passenger seat. Then he picked out the three ten-pence pieces that lay there and threw them out of the window too. He hoped someone would pick them up. If one of them contained a backup transmitter, Harry might have another long, hard and fruitless journey ahead of her.

Something else was niggling him. Several things really. For one, Fagin had ordered him to talk to Harry, to tell her everything he knew. So was Fagin in on it too? Or was he merely obeying orders? And who the hell was Villiers? What was it Harry had said? Something about ‘my employers, who are, ultimately, your employers’: but who – ultimately – was Hepton’s employer? The Home Secretary? The head of the MoD? Someone in London, he’d bet on that. But it might take a journalist’s nose to discover the final answer. A good journalist. Someone he could trust.

Supposing, that were, Jilly would even want to speak to him again.

15

In fact, the smooth-dressed, smooth-spoken Parfit did not return, and Dreyfuss, who had been keening like a young whelp, grew first agitated and then worried and then frustrated. Parfit had said he was coming back to take him away from Sacramento General, away from the vicious General Esterhazy and the cunning Frank Stewart, away from nurses who weren’t real nurses and drugs that did more than merely put a man to sleep. So where the hell was he? What was he doing?

The evening stretched into night, and the night saw Dreyfuss sleepless, pounding the floor of his room on aching feet. A night-duty nurse looked in on him, but he growled at her and she quickly fled. A male attendant, black, uncertain, asked him if he wanted anything.

‘Nothing,’ he snarled, and paced the cage again.

When breakfast arrived, he found himself waking on top of the bed, still wearing slippers and a dressing gown, his forehead damp with sweat.

‘Hot in here,’ said the nurse, a teenager who certainly looked more like a nurse than Carraway had.

‘Yes, it is,’ Dreyfuss answered, sitting up with his back against the mound of pillows. She placed the tray on a trolley and wheeled the trolley over until it was positioned in front of him.