'Oh, William,' Cassie said. 'Oh no.'

If I'd ever doubted she loved me, I had my answer. No one could have acted or feigned the extremity of despair in her voice and in her body.

'Don't… worry,' I said. I tried a smile. I don't suppose it came off. I coughed again, with worse results.

I was trying to breathe, I thought, through a lake. A lake progressively filling, fed by many springs. It was happening faster now. Much faster. Too fast. I wasn't ready. Who was ever ready?

I could hear Bananas saying something urgent but I didn't know-quite what. My wits started drifting. Existence was ceasing to be external. I'm dying, I thought, I really am. Dying too fast.

My eyes were shut and then open again. The daylight looked odd. Too bright. I could see Cassie's face wet with tears.

I tried to say, 'Don't cry,' but I couldn't get the breath. Breathing was becoming a sticky near-impossibility.

Bananas was still talking, distantly.

There was a feeling of everything turning to liquid, of my body dissolving, of a deep subterranean river overflowing its banks and carrying me away.

Dim final astringent thought… I'm drowning, God damn it, in my own blood.

Cassie's face was the next thing I saw, but not for more than a day, and it was no longer weeping but asleep and serene. She was sitting by a bed with me in it, surrounded by white things and glass and chromium and a lot of lights. Intensive care, and all that.

I woke by stages over several hours to the pain I hadn't felt from the shot, and to tubes carrying liquids into and away from my log of clay and to voices telling me over and over that I was lucky to be there; that I had died and was alive.

I thanked them all, and meant it.

Thanked Bananas, who had apparently picked me up and put me in my own car and driven me at about a hundred miles an hour to Cambridge because it was quicker than waiting for the ambulance.

Thanked two surgeons who it seemed had worked all day and then again half the night to staunch and tidy the wreckage of my right lung and stop blood dripping out of the drainage as fast as the transfusions flowed into my arm.

Thanked the nurses who clattered about with deft hands and noisy machinery, and in absentia thanked the donors of blood type 'O' who had refilled my veins.

Thanked Cassie for her love and for sitting beside me whenever they'd let her.

Thanked the fates that the destructive lump of metal had missed my heart. Thanked everyone I could for anything I could think of in gratitude for my life.

The long recurring dreams that had come during unconsciousness faded, receded, seemed no longer to be vivid fact. I no longer saw the Devil pacing beside me, quiet but implacable, the master waiting for my soul. I no longer saw him, the Fallen Angel, the Devil with Angelo's face, the yellow face with frosted hair and black empty holes where the eyes should have been. The Presence had gone. I was back to the daft real enjoyable world where tubes were what mattered, not concepts of evil.

I didn't say how close I had been to death because they were saying it for me, roughly every five minutes. I didn't say I had looked on the spaces of eternity and seen the everlasting Darkness and had known it had a meaning and a face. The visions of the dying and the snatched-from-death were suspect. Angelo was a living man, not the Devil, not an incarnation or a house or a dwelling place. It was delirium, the confusion of the brain's circuits, that had shown me the one as the other, the other as the One. I said nothing for fear of ridicule: and later nothing from feeling that I had in truth been mistaken and that the dreams were indeed… merely dreams.

'Where is Angelo?' I said.

'They said not to tire you.'

I looked at the evasion in Cassie's face. 'I'm lying down,' I pointed out. 'So give.'

She said reluctantly, 'Well… he's here.'

'Here? In this hospital?'

She nodded. 'In the room next door.'

I was bewildered. 'But why?'

'He crashed his car.' She looked at me anxiously for signs I supposed of relapse, but was seemingly reassured. 'He drove into a bus about six miles from here.'

'After he left the cottage?'

She nodded. 'They brought him here. They brought him into the emergency unit while Bananas and I were waiting there. We couldn't believe it.'

It wasn't over. I closed my eyes. It was never ever going to be over. Wherever I went, it seemed that Angelo would follow, even onto the slab.

'William?' Cassie said urgently.

'Mm?'

'Oh. I thought…'

'I'm all right.'

'He was nearly dead,' she said. 'Just like you. He's still in a coma.'

'What?'

'Head injuries,' she said.

I learned bit by bit over the next few days that the hospital people hadn't believed it when Bananas and Cassie told them it was Angelo who had shot me. They had fought as long and hard to save his life as mine, and apparently we had been placed side by side in the Intensive Care Unit until Cassie told them I'd have a heart attack if I woke and found him there.

The police had more moderately pointed out that if it was Angelo who woke first he might complete the job of murdering me: and Angelo was now in his unwaking sleep along the hallway, guarded by a constable night and day.

It was extraordinary to think of him being there, lying there so close. Unsettling in a fundamental way. I wouldn't have thought it would have affected me so badly, but my pulse started jumping every time anyone opened the door. Reason said he wouldn't come. The subconscious feared it.

Bodies heal amazingly quickly. I was free of tubes, moved to a side ward, on my feet, walking about within a week: creeping a bit, sure, and stiff and sore, but positively, conclusively alive. Angelo too, it seemed, was improving. On the way up from the depths. Opening unseeing eyes, showing responses.

I heard it from the nurses, from the cleaners, from the woman who pushed a trolley of comforts, and all of them watched me curiously to see how I would take it. The piquancy of the situation hit first the local paper and then the national dailies, and the constables guarding Angelo started drifting in to chat.

It was from one of them that I learned how Angelo had lost control of his car while going round a roundabout, how a whole queue of people at a bus stop had seen him veer towards the bus as if unable to turn the steering wheel, how he'd been going too fast in any case, and how he had seemed at first to be laughing.

Bananas, when he heard it, said trenchantly, 'He crashed because you broke his wrist.'

'Yes,' I said.

He sighed deeply. 'The police must know it.'

'I expect so.'

'Have they bothered you?'

I shook my head. 'I told them what happened. They wrote it down. No one has said much.'

They collected the pistol.' He smiled. They put it in a paper bag.'

I left the hospital after twelve days, walking slowly past Angelo's room but not going in. Revulsion was too strong even though I knew he was still lightly unconscious and wouldn't be aware I was there. The damage he had caused in my life and Cassie's might be over but my body carried his scars, livid still and still hurting, too immediate for detachment.

I dare say I hated him. Perhaps I feared him. I certainly didn't want to see him again, then or ever.

For the next three weeks I mooched around the cottage doing paperwork, getting fitter every day and persuading Bananas at first to drive me along to the Heath to watch the gallops. Cassie went to work, the plastered arm a memory. My blood had washed almost entirely off the sitting-room carpet and the baseball bat was in the cellar. Life returned more or less to normal.

Luke came over from California, inspected the yearlings, met Cassie, listened to Sim and Mort and the Berkshire trainers, visited Warrington Marsh, and went off to Ireland. It was he, not I, who bid for Oxidise at Ballsbridge and sent the colt to Donavan, and he who in some way smoothed the Irish trainer's feelings.