Or perhaps not. Maybe the old man just lay there day after day running baseball statistics through his mind; or wishing he’d slept with his neighbour’s wife when he had the chance.

As Mitch walked up the short hill, he cursed the fact that you could never get a decent parking spot in these residential streets. He’d had to park in the lot behind the drug store, the next street over, and the quickest way there was through a dirt alley just about wide enough for a garbage truck to pass through.

It happened as he cut through the alley. And it happened so fast that, afterwards, he couldn’t be quite sure whether he felt the sharp blow to the back of his head before his feet slipped out from under him, or after.

When Mitch opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the night sky. It looked like a black satin bed-sheet with some rich woman’s diamonds spilled all over it. There was no moon.

He felt frozen to the marrow. He didn’t know how long he had been lying there in the alley – long enough to die of exposure it felt like – but when he checked his watch, he saw he had only been out a little over five minutes. Not surprising no one had found him yet. Not here, on a night like this.

He lay on the frozen mud and took stock. Despite the cold, everything hurt – his elbow, which he had cracked trying to break his fall; his tailbone; his right shoulder; and, most of all, his head – and the pain was sharp and spiky, not at all numb like the rest of him. He reached around and touched the sore spot on the back of his head. His fingers came away sticky with blood.

He took a deep breath and tried to get to his feet, but he could only manage to slip and skitter around like a newborn deer, making himself even more dizzy. There was no purchase, nothing to grip. Snail-like, he slid himself along the ice towards the rickety fence. There, by reaching out and grabbing the wooden rails carefully, he was able to drag himself to his feet, picking up only a few splinters for his troubles.

At first, he wished he had stayed where he was. His head started to spin and he thought it was going to split open with pain. For a moment, he was sure he was going to fall again. He held on to the fence for dear life and vomited, the world swimming around his head. After that, he felt a little better. Maybe he wasn’t going to die.

The only light shone from a street lamp at the end of the alley, not really enough to search by, so Mitch used the plastic penlight attached to his key-ring to look for his briefcase. But it wasn’t there. Stepping carefully on the ribbed ice, still in pain and unsure of his balance, Mitch extended the area of his search in case the briefcase had skidded off somewhere on the ice when he fell. It was nowhere to be found.

Almost as an afterthought, as the horrible truth was beginning to dawn on him, he felt for his wallet. Gone. So he’d been mugged. The blow had come before the fall. And they’d taken his briefcase.

Then Mitch remembered the gun.

The next morning was a nightmare. Mitch had managed to get himself home from the alley without crashing the car, and after a long, hot bath, a tumbler of Scotch and four extra-strength Tylenol, he began to feel a little better. He seemed to remember his mother once saying you shouldn’t go to sleep after a bump on the head – he didn’t know why – but it didn’t stop him that night.

In the morning, he awoke aching all over.

When he had showered, taken more Tylenol and forced himself to eat some bran flakes, he poured a second cup of strong black coffee and sat down to think things out. None of his thoughts brought any comfort.

He hadn’t gone to the cops. How could he, given what he had been carrying? Whichever way you looked at it, he had been in possession of an illegal, unregistered firearm when he was mugged. Even if the cops had been lenient, there was the Law Society to reckon with, and like most lawyers, Mitch feared the Law Society far more than he feared the police.

Maybe he could have sort of skipped over the gun in his account of the mugging. After all, he was pretty sure that it couldn’t be traced either to him or to Garibaldi. But what if the cops found the briefcase and the gun was still inside it? How could he explain that?

Would that be worse than if the briefcase turned up and the gun was gone? If the muggers took it, the chances were someone might get shot with it. Either way, it was a bad scenario for Mitch, and it was all his fault. Well, maybe fault was too strong a word – he couldn’t help getting mugged – but he still felt somehow responsible.

All he could do was hope that whoever took the gun would get rid of it, throw it in the lake, before anyone came to any harm.

Some hope.

Later that morning, Mitch remembered Garibaldi’s will. That had gone, too, along with the briefcase and the gun. And it would have to be replaced.

There’s only one true will – copies have no legal standing – and if you lose it you could have a hell of a mess on your hands. Luckily, he had Garibaldi’s will on his computer. All he had to do was print it out again and hope to hell the old guy hadn’t died during the night.

He hadn’t. Puzzled, but accepting Mitch’s excuse of a minor error he’d come across when proof-reading the document, Garibaldi signed again with a shaking hand.

‘Is the gun safe?’ he asked afterwards. ‘You’ve got it locked away in your safe?’

‘Yes,’ Mitch lied. ‘Yes, don’t worry, the gun’s perfectly safe.’

Every day Mitch scanned the paper from cover to cover for news of a shooting or a gun found abandoned somewhere. He even took to buying the Sun – which he normally wouldn’t even use as toilet paper up at the cottage – because it covered more lurid local crime than the Globe or the Star. Anything to do with firearms was certain to make it into the Sun.

But it wasn’t until three weeks and three days after the mugging – and two weeks after Mr Garibaldi’s death ‘peacefully, at home’ – that the item appeared. And it was big enough news to make the Globe and Mail.

Mr Charles McVie was shot dead in his home last night during the course of an apparent burglary. A police spokesperson says Mr McVie was shot twice, once in the chest and once in the groin, while interrupting a burglar at his Beaches mansion shortly after midnight last night. He died of his wounds three hours later at East General Hospital. Detective Greg Hollins, who has been assigned the case, declined to comment on whether the police are following any significant leads at the moment, but he did inform our reporter that preliminary tests indicate the bullet was most likely fired from an old 9mm semi-automatic weapon, such as a Luger, unusual and fairly rare these days. As yet, police have not been able to locate the gun. Mr McVie, 62, made his fortune in the construction business. His wife, Laura, who was staying overnight with friends in Windsor when the shooting occurred, had no comment when she was reached early this morning.

The newspaper shook in Mitch’s hands. It had happened. Somebody had died because of him. But while he felt guilt, he also felt fear. Was there really no way the police could tie the gun to him or Mr Garibaldi? Thank God the old man was dead, or he might hear about the shooting and his conscience might oblige him to come forward. Luckily, his widow, Sophie, knew nothing.

With luck, the Luger was in the deepest part of the lake for sure by now. Whether anyone else had touched it or not, Mitch knew damn well that he had, and that his greasy fingerprints weren’t only all over the grip and the barrel, but on the wrapping paper, too. The muggers had probably been wearing gloves when they robbed him – it was a cold night – and maybe they’d had the sense to keep them on when they saw what was in the briefcase.