He fixes himself a vodka and Coke and sits down on the couch to your left. You think he's looking at you slightly strangely and you worry that perhaps your disguise isn't fooling him. You cough nervously.

"So, Mr Mellin," he says. "What is it you've got for me?"

"Well," you say, looking round. You watched the place all through the afternoon and you're fairly sure there's nobody else in here, but you're not absolutely certain. "As I said, um, in the shop, it's something a bit… a bit special. Something I understand there is a demand for."

"What sort of special we talking here?"

"W-w-w-well, well it's of a, shall we say, um, a violent nature. Quite a violent nature, in fact. And involves, ah… and involves, ah, ch-ch-ch-children. I was told that you… you can, you can… that you deal in that sort of, um, item."

Mr Oliver purses his lips. "Well, you'd have to be a bit of an idiot to just tell people that, wouldn't you? I mean, you wouldn't want to confess to something like that to a stranger, know what I mean?"

"Oh," you say, sounding crestfallen. "You mean you don't —»

"Na, I'm not saying nothing, am I? I'm just saying you got to be careful, know what I mean?"

"Ah," you say, nodding. "Yes. Yes, of course. Of course one does have to be… careful. I see. I see what you mean."

"Why don't you show me what you've brought, eh? We'll take a little look and then we'll see, eh?"

"Yes; yes, right. Of course. Ah, right; what I've brought, um, well, it's just part of it, to show you, but I think it amply demonstrates —»

"Video, yeah?"

"Yes, that's correct. On video." You unclip the catches on the briefcase, take out a plain VHS60 cassette and put the briefcase on the floor to one side as you stand up, handing the video to him.

"Ta." He takes it and goes to the video machine. You remain standing.

The cassette won't load properly; you can hear the VCR mechanism whining. Mr Oliver bends to look more closely at the machine. You come up behind him.

"Um, is there a problem?" you ask.

"Yeah; doesn't seem to be —»

The cassette will not load because you glued the hinged tape-cover down. Mr Oliver does not get to complete his sentence; you cosh him across the back of the head. However, he had started to move his head as you swung at him, and you only land a glancing blow.

He falls to one side, one hand trying to find purchase on the wall of hi-fi components, shifting the CD player and amp back on their shelves. "What —?" he says. You smack the cosh hard into his face, breaking his nose, then stamp on his crotch as he falls back. He doubles up on the floor, lying on his side, snorting and gasping.

You're staring wildly round the room waiting for some burly minder to come charging in swinging a baseball bat, your other hand in the pocket of your suit where the Browning is, but nobody appears. You lean forward and cosh Mr Oliver across the back of the head. He goes limp.

You handcuff his arms behind his back and go to the briefcase to get the things you will need.

Once you have everything ready and the camcorder is set up you have to wait for him to wake up. You go down to the street door and lock and chain it, then pad round the maisonette making quite sure there is nobody else in.

Mr Oliver's bedroom is all wood, brass, furs and red velvet. A glass cabinet houses a militaria collection, specialising in the Waffen SS. A bookcase holds numerous books about Nazi Germany and Hitler. Mr Oliver's private videos are stored in a repro teak-and-walnut wardrobe. There is a large combination floor-safe under the Persian carpet.

You bring what looks like a representative selection of the videos down to the lounge where Mr Oliver is sitting, still unconscious and sagging slightly, handcuffed and tied in a chrome-and-leather chair you brought down from the second bedroom. You have gagged him with a sock and a silk scarf you brought from his bedroom. His right arm is firmly tied to the leather-padded arm of the chair. You have removed his cardigan and rolled his shirt sleeve up.

While you wait for Mr Oliver to regain consciousness you look at the videos you brought down from the bedroom.

Some feature the gang-buggerings of children; mostly male and mostly Asian or South American. Others show women being mounted by donkeys and other animals, in what looks like a prison. The men watching all have moustaches and wear military dress. These look like second- or third-generation recordings and the definition is not quite precise enough for you to be sure, but you think those might be Iraqi army uniforms. There are a couple of videos which may come from the same source and show people — men, women, children — being tortured with irons, hair-driers, curling tongs and so on. There is no actual snuff material here, but you wonder what the floor-safe you discovered contains.

Mr Oliver starts to moan behind his gag and you put on your gorilla mask. You wait for his eyes to open then start the little Sony camcorder running. You take the gas cylinder from the briefcase, turn the valve on and suck.

"Mr Oliver," you say, in a high, absurdly babyish voice. "Welcome back."

He stares wide-eyed at you, then at the video camera, sitting on its miniature tripod on the coffee table.

You take another suck on the helium. "You're going to star in your own video, isn't that funny?"

He shakes in the seat, roaring behind the gag. You go to the briefcase and bring out a wide-mouthed medicine bottle. Cling-film over the top of it is secured with elastic bands. You shake the bottle, then lift the syringe from the briefcase.

Mr Oliver screams when he sees these.

You suck on the helium again, then hold the dumpy medicine bottle up and show him the thick-looking off-white liquid inside. "Can you guess what this is?" you ask him in the voice of a manic baby.

The syringe is a big mother; not like those dinky little disposable plastic things medics and junkies use. This device is made from stainless steel and glass; it has two hook-shaped finger-grips on either side of the barrel and it holds a fifth of a litre. You hold the medicine bottle sealed with cling-film upside down and slip the slanted tip of the big syringe needle into the clotted-cream-coloured liquid inside the bottle. Mr Oliver is still screaming behind the gag.

You suck on the gas again and tell him what you're going to do to him. His muffled screams rise in pitch until they sound like he's been breathing helium too.

The next day I scrounge a Lambert & Butler off Rose in the Foreign News section, smoke it at my desk and get a real hit off it, then feel disgusted with myself and vow that's the last one I'm going to smoke. I really mean it this time and decide to reward myself by using my increased credit-card limit to buy myself something. The car needs a service, I could use a new suit and the carpet in the flat is getting threadbare, but as candidates for expenditure none of those has very high self-reward status; minimal feel-good factors there. My mouth goes a little dry as I sit staring at the whisky story — which I'm reworking very slowly — and think of what I could buy with the extra dosh. Dosh/Tosh. Hmm.

I pull open a drawer and dig out a computer magazine. Five hundred glossy full-colour pages plus a free software disk for less than two quid. It's the November issue but the prices might be out of date by now; usually with computers they go down but this time they might have gone up because, now we're out of the ERM and the pound's sinking against the dollar, the price of components bought abroad is sure to increase.

I leaf through, looking at the lap-top adverts.

Shit, I can afford one of these; I can afford a colour one at last, one that'll play Despot. Especially as I can write it off against tax; I'll use it for work, after all. And even more especially as I'm giving up smoking; that's twenty quid a week at least I'll save, even if I don't stop doing speed. The price of 386 lap-tops has fallen quickly recently, and colour screens are no longer luxuries in the portable market. Yo!