“Is milk back on the ration books?” Reeve queried.

“What’s ration books?” Allan asked.

“Pray you never have to know.”

Allan wanted to watch TV, so the three of them sat on the long sofa, Reeve with his arm along the back, behind his wife’s neck but not touching her. She’d taken off her slippers and had tucked her feet up. Allan sat on the floor in front of her. Bakunin the cat was on Joan’s lap, glaring at Reeve like he was a complete stranger, which, considering he hadn’t fed her this past week, he was. Reeve thought of the real Bakunin, fighting on the Dresden barricades shoulder to shoulder with Nietzsche’s friend Wagner…

“A penny for them,” Joan asked.

“I was just thinking how nice it was to be back.”

Joan smiled thinly at the lie. She hadn’t asked much about the cremation, but she’d been interested to hear about the flat in London and the woman living there. Allan turned from the sitcom.

“So what’s it like in the USA, Dad?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Reeve had spent some time deciding on the story he’d tell Allan. He painted a picture of San Diego as a frontier town, exciting enough and strange enough to keep Allan listening.

“Did you see any shootings?” Allan asked.

“No, but I heard some police sirens.”

“Did you see a policeman?”

Reeve nodded.

“With a gun?”

Reeve nodded again.

Joan rubbed at her son’s hair, though she knew he hated it when she did that. “He’s growing up gun-crazy.”

“No, I’m not,” Allan stated.

“It’s all those computer games.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“What are you playing just now?”

“That game I told you about. Jackie copied it for me.”

“I hope it hasn’t got a virus.”

“I’ve got a new virus checker.”

“Good.” At that time, Allan knew only a little more about computing than Reeve and Joan put together, but he was steadily pulling away from them.

“The game’s called Militia, and what you do is-”

“No fried eyeballs,” Joan demanded.

“What happened to the game Uncle Jim sent you?” Reeve asked.

Allan looked embarrassed. “I was stuck on screen five…”

“You’ve given it away?”

Allan shook his head vigorously. “No, it’s upstairs.”

“But you don’t play it anymore?”

“No,” he said quietly. Then: “Mum said Uncle Jim died.”

Reeve nodded. Joan said she’d had a couple of talks with Allan already. “People grow old and tired, Allan, and then they die. They make room for other younger people to come along…” Reeve felt awkward as he spoke.

“But Uncle Jim wasn’t old.”

“No, well some people just-”

“He wasn’t much older than you.”

“I’m not going to die,” Reeve told his son.

“How do you know?”

“Sometimes people get feelings. I’ve got the feeling I’m going to live to be a hundred.”

“And Mum?” Allan asked.

Reeve looked at her. She was staring at him, interested in the answer. “Same feeling,” he said.

Allan went back to watching television. A little later, Joan murmured, “Thanks,” put her slippers back on, and went through to the kitchen, followed closely by Bakunin, scouting for pro-visions. Reeve wasn’t sure what to read into her final utterance.

The telephone rang while he was watching the news. Allan had retreated to his room, having given his parents over an hour and a half of his precious time. Reeve let Joan get the phone. She was still in the kitchen, making a batch of bread. Later, when he went through to make the last cup of coffee of the night, he asked who had called.

“They didn’t say,” she offered, too nonchalantly.

Reeve looked at her. “You’ve had more than one?”

She shrugged. “A couple.”

“How many?”

“I think this was the third.”

“In how long?”

She shrugged again. There was a smudge of flour on her nose, and some wisps in her hair, making her look older. “Five or six days. There’s no one on the other end, no noise at all. Maybe it’s British Telecom testing the line or something. That happens sometimes.”

“Yes, it does.”

But not more than once in a very blue moon, he thought.

They’d been in bed for a silent hour and were lying side by side staring at the ceiling when he asked, “What about those callers?”

“The phone calls?” She turned her head towards him.

“No, you said some customers had turned up.”

“Oh, yes, just asking about courses.”

“Two of them?”

“Yes, one one day, one the next. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. It’s just we don’t often get people turning up like that.”

“Well, I gave them the brochure and they went away quite happy.”

“Did they come in the house?”

She sat up. “Only as far as the hall. It’s all right, Gordon, I can look after myself.”

“What were they like? Describe them.”

“I’m not sure I can. I hardly paid them any attention.” She leaned over him, her hand on his chest. She was feeling his heart rate. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. But he swung his legs out of bed and started to get dressed. “I don’t feel tired; I’ll go down to the kitchen.” He stopped at the door. “Anybody else come while I was away?”

“No.”

“Think about it.”

She thought about it. “A man came to read the meter. And the freezer lorry turned up.”

“What freezer lorry?”

“Frozen foods.” She sounded irritated. If he kept pushing, the end result would be an argument. “I usually buy chips and ice cream from him.”

“Was it the regular driver?”

She slumped back on the bed. “No, he was new. Gordon, what the hell is this about?”

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

“What happened in the States?”

He came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think Jim was murdered.”

She sat up again. “What?”

“I think he was getting too deep into something, some story he was working on. Maybe they’d tried scaring him off and it hadn’t worked. I know Jim, he’s like me-try that tactic and he’d just be more curious than ever, and more stubborn. So then they had to kill him.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”

“And?”

“And, because I’ve been doing just what Jim was doing, maybe they’re targeting me. The thing is, I didn’t think they’d come here. Not so soon.”

“Two potential clients, a meter-reader, and a man with a van full of spuds and sprouts.”

“That’s four callers more than we usually get. Four callers while I was out of the country.” He got to his feet again.

“Is that it?” Joan asked. “Aren’t you going to tell me the rest?”

He started towards her, just able to make out her shape in the shadows of the curtained room-curtained despite the blackness outside and the isolation of the house. “I don’t want to make you a target.”

Then he padded downstairs as quietly as he could. He looked around, turning on lights, not touching anything, then stood in the living room thinking things over. He walked over to the TV and switched it on, using the remote to flick channels.

“Usual rubbish,” he said, yawning noisily for the benefit of anyone listening. He knew how sophisticated surveillance equipment had become. He’d heard of devices that could read computer screens from a distance of yards, without there being any physical connector linking them to the computer. He probably hadn’t heard half of it. The technology changed so quickly it was damn near impossible to keep up. He did his best, so he could pass what he knew on to his weekend soldiers. The trainee bodyguards in particular liked to know about that stuff.

He first checked that there were no watcher devices in the house. These were not so easy to hide: after all, if they were going to view a subject, they couldn’t be tucked away under a chair or a sofa. They also took a lot longer to fit. Someone would have had to access the house while Joan was out or asleep. He didn’t find anything. Next he put his jacket on and went outside, circling the house at a good radius. He spotted no one, certainly no vehicles. In the garage, he slid beneath both Land Rovers and found them clean-well, not clean, but lacking bugs. Before going back indoors he unscrewed the front panel from the burglar alarm. The screws were hard to shift, and showed no signs of recent tampering-no missing paint or fresh-looking scratches. The alarm itself was functioning.