He came back briefly to Newmarket before leaving for home, calling in at the cottage and drinking a lunchtime scotch.

'Your year's nearly through,' he said.

'Yeah.'

'Have you enjoyed it?'

'Very much.'

'Want another?'

I lifted my head. He watched me through a whole minute of silence. He didn't say, and nor did I, that Warrington Marsh was never going to be strong enough again to do the job. That wasn't the point: the point was permanence… captivity.

'One year,' Luke said. 'It's not for ever.'

After another pause I said, 'One year, then. One more.'

He nodded and drank his drink, and it seemed to me that somewhere he was smiling. I had a presentiment of him coming over again the next year and offering the same thing. One year. One year's contract at a time, leaving the cage door open but keeping his bird imprisoned: and as long as I could go, I thought, I might stay.

Cassie, when she came home, was pleased. 'Mort told him he'd be mad to lose you.'

'Did he?'

'Mort likes you.'

'Donavan doesn't.'

'You can't have everything,' she said.

I had quite a lot, it was true; and then the police telephoned and asked me to see Angelo.

'No,' I said.

'That's a gut reaction,' a voice said calmly. 'But I'd like you to listen.'

He talked persuasively for a long time, cajoling again every time I protested, wearing down my opposition until in the end I reluctantly agreed to do what he wanted.

'Good,' he said finally. 'Wednesday afternoon.'

'That's only two days-'

'We'll send a car. We don't expect you to be driving yet.'

I didn't argue. I could drive short distances but I tended to get tired. In another month, they'd said, I'd be running.

'We're grateful,' the voice said.

'Yeah

I told Cassie and Bananas, in the evening.

'How awful,' Cassie said. 'It's too much.'

The three of us were having dinner alone in the dining-room as the restaurant didn't officially open these days on Mondays: the old cow had negotiated Mondays off. Bananas had done the cooking himself, inventing a souffle of white fish, herbs, orange and nuts to try out on Cassie and me: a concoction typically and indescribably different, an unknown language, a new horizon of taste.

'You could have said you wouldn't go,' Bananas said, heaping his plate to match ours.

'With what excuse?'

'Selfishness,' Cassie said. The best reason in the world for not doing things.'

'Never thought of it.'

Bananas said, 'I hope you insisted on a bullet-proof vest, a six-inch-thick plate glass screen and several rolls of barbed wire.'

'They did assure me,' I said mildly, 'that they wouldn't let him leap at my throat.'

'Too kind,' Cassie murmured.

We poured Bananas's exquisite sauce over his souflee and said that when we had to leave the cottage we would camp in his garden.

'And will you bet?' he asked.

'What do you mean?'

'On the system.'

I thought blankly that I'd forgotten all about that possibility: but we did have the tapes. We did have the choice.

'We don't have a computer,' I said.

'We could soon pay for one,' Cassie said.

We all looked at each other. We were happy enough with our own jobs; with what we had. Did one always, inevitably, stretch out for more?

Yes, one did.

'You work the computer,' Bananas said, 'and I'll do the betting. Now and then. When we're short.'

'As long as it doesn't choke us.'

'I don't want diamonds,' Cassie said judiciously, 'or furs, or a yacht… but how soon can we have a pool in our sitting-room?'

Whatever Luke said to my brother when he got home to California I never knew, but it resulted in Jonathan telephoning that night to say he would be arriving at Heathrow on Wednesday morning.

'What about your students?'

'Sod the students. I've got laryngitis.' His voice bounced the distance strong and healthy. 'I'll see you.'

He came in a hired car looking biscuit-coloured from the sun and anxious about what he would find, and although I was by then feeling well again it didn't seem to reassure him.

'I'm alive,' I pointed out. 'One thing at a time. Come back next month.'

'What exactly happened?'

'Angelo happened.'

'Why didn't you tell me?' he demanded.

'I'd have told you if I'd died. Or someone would.'

He sat in one of the rockers and looked at me broodingly.

'It was all my fault,' he said.

'Oh, sure.' I was ironic.

'And that's why you didn't tell me.'

I'd probably have told you one day.'

'Tell me now.'

I told him, however, where I was going that afternoon, and why, and he said in his calm positive way that he would come with me. I had thought he would: had been glad he was coming. I told him over the next few hours pretty well everything which had happened between Angelo and me, just as he had told me all those years ago in Cornwall.

'I'm sorry,'he said, at the end.

'Don't be.'

You'll use the system?'

I nodded. 'Pretty soon.'

'I think old Mrs O'Rorke would be glad. She was proud of Liam's worlc. She wouldn't want it wasted.' He reflected for a bit and then said, 'What make of pistol, do you know?'

'I believe… the police said… a Walther. 22?'

He smiled faintly. True to form. And just as well. If it had been a. 38 of something like that you'd have been in trouble.'

'Ah,' I said dryly. 'Just as well.'

The car came for us as threatened and took us to a large house in Buckinghamshire. I never did discover exactly what it was: a cross between a hospital and a civil service institution, all long wide corridors and closed doors and hush.

'Down there,' we were directed. 'Right along at the end. Last door on the right.'

We walked unhurriedly along the parquet flooring, our heels punctuating the silence. At the far end there was a tall window, floor to ceiling, casting not quite enough daylight; and silhouetted against the window were two figures, a man in a wheelchair with another man pushing him.

Those two and Jonathan and I in due course approached each other, and as we drew nearer I saw with unwelcome shock that the man in the wheelchair was Harry Gilbert. Old, grey, bowed, ill Harry Gilbert who still consciously repelled compassion.

Eddy, who was pushing, faltered to a halt, and Jonathan and I also stopped, we staring at Harry and Harry staring at us over a space of a few feet. He looked from me to Jonathan, glancing at him briefly at first and then looking longer, more carefully, seeing what he didn't believe.

He switched to me. 'You said he was dead,' he said.

I nodded slightly.

His voice was cold, dry, bitter, past passion, past hope, past strength to avenge. 'Both of you,' he said. 'You destroyed my son.'

Neither Jonathan nor I answered. I wondered about the genetics of evil, the chance that bred murder, the predisposition which lived already at birth. The biblical creation, I thought, was also the truth of evolution. Cain existed, and in every species there was survival of the ruthless.

It was only by luck that I had lived; by Bananas's speed and surgeons' dedication. Abel and centuries of other victims were dead: and in every generation, in many a race, the genes still threw up the killer. The Gilberts bred their Angelos for ever.

Harry Gilbert jerked his head back, aiming at Eddy, signalling that he wanted to go; and Eddy the look-alike, Eddy the easily led, Eddy the sheep from the same flock, wheeled his uncle quietly away.

'Arrogant old bastard,' Jonathan said under his breath, looking back at them.

'The breeding of racehorses,' I said, 'is interesting.'

Jonathan's gaze came round very slowly to my face. 'And do rogues,' he asked, 'beget rogues?'

'Quite often.'

He nodded and we went on walking along the corridor, up to the window, to the last door on the right.