Polly had been interested for a moment, but her interest was over.

“It isn’t, but if it was I wouldn’t care! Do you understand? I don’t care about it either way, all right? What happens to your army and who you choose for president is a matter of supreme indifference to me! Because tomorrow morning I have to go to work and wade back into a sea of people who have been abused, cheated, demeaned and destroyed all for reasons of race, sex, sexuality and poverty. They don’t have much hope, but if they have any I’m it, so please, Jack, leave, because I have to get some sleep.”

“OK, OK, I’m going.”

Jack got up and started to put away his bottles, and Polly sat back down on the bed feeling terribly, terribly sad.

The milkman had finished his breakfast and brushed his teeth. It was time to go to work. He wondered about going upstairs on his way out and speaking to the woman above. He decided against it. She still had someone with her; it would be embarrassing. He’d have a word that evening, just to let her know that two could play at the complaining game.

He turned off his radio, switched off the lights and let himself out into the hall.

At the bottom of the house, sitting in the hallway, Peter heard the door open and close and then the sound of a heavy footfall on the stair. This Peter knew was his best chance. The man above him, the man coming down the stairs, was the American. It was only minutes since Polly had ordered him to go, and now that was what he was doing. Besides which, who else would be walking out of the house at four thirty in the morning?

Silently Peter retreated into the shadow behind the stair. His enemy was on the floor above him now, the footsteps descending fast. The dark shape of a man appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Peter leapt out of the darkness and plunged his knife deep into the man’s back. He heard the man try to cry out, but there was only a muffled, gurgling sound.

The milkman sank to the floor without a word and lay there gulping his last blood-sodden, strangled breaths beside the bicycle. Looking down at him, Peter noticed that one of the tyres of the bicycle was flat. He also noticed that whoever he had killed it was not the American.

Jack and Polly had also heard the milkman leave. Jack was relieved; he had no wish to encounter the other residents of the building. He finished putting away his bottles, then collected Polly’s glass from the bedside table where she had left it and drained his own.

“I’m sorry about going on so much,” he said. “It’s just that I had to tell you all that stuff.”

“That’s OK,” Polly assured him. “Actually I’m glad. I’m glad you did.”

Jack did not ask her why, and Polly did not tell him. The truth was that the things Jack had talked about, the feelings he had displayed, had made Polly feel better about herself and, more important, better about not being, or wanting to be, any part of Jack’s life. It seemed to her that he had been right in a way about linking her with the ideological struggles he found so frustrating. The world had changed a little and for the better. Big tough guys like Jack couldn’t quite have it all their own way any more. Power was no longer an absolute defence against bad behaviour. Bigotry and abusive practices were not facts of nature; they could be challenged, they could be redressed. And perhaps, in her own small way, Polly had been a part of that change. She and a few million other people, but a part none the less.

Jack had stepped through into the kitchen area and was washing up the glasses.

“Jack, please, you don’t have to wash up,” Polly said.

“Yes, I do, Polly. I have to wash up,” Jack replied, drying the glasses thoroughly with a teatowel.

“My God, you’re a new man and you don’t know it,” Polly laughed.

Having cleared up the drinks Jack took a look around the room. He seemed to be checking that everything was in order.

“So General Ralston dropped his candidacy for the chair of the joint chiefs,” he said. “The Kelly Flinn scandal had put so much heat under the issue of sexual morality in the military that he had to withdraw rather than further provoke the liberal feminist lobby.”

Polly went and got Jack’s coat. “Goodbye, Jack.”

He put on the coat, still talking, still explaining. “Since then they had two other tries to find the right guy. An air force guy and a marine. Both superb officers, both unacceptable. I don’t know why. Probably stomped on a bug during basic training and offended the Buddhist lobby. We have a world so full of people ready to take offence it’s tough to find a fighting man, any man, who never offended anybody.”

Polly was trying not to listen, but she could not ignore the significance of what Jack was saying.

“I presume what you’re getting at is that they’re going to ask you to stand,” she said, impressed despite herself. “That you are going to be chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Is that what you came here to tell me? Am I supposed to congratulate you?”

Jack stood staring at Polly. He was gathering his thoughts. Then he stepped across the room to where Polly’s answerphone was still blinking out news of the various messages of the evening. Jack pressed the erase button. The machine clunked and whirred in response, wiping clean the tape upon which Jack had announced his rearrival in Polly’s life.

“What are you doing, Jack?” Polly felt a chill of fear shiver across her body, enveloping her like an icy cloak.

“Surely you know now why I’m here, Polly,” he said.

“No, Jack, I don’t,” Polly replied although suddenly she was not so sure.

“People die every day.”

Polly was cold to the bone now. “What do you mean?”

“What I say. People die every day. Famine, war, accident, design. Death is commonplace. A modern fiction has developed that life is precious, but we know it isn’t so. Governments sacrifice thousands of lives every day. At least in the old times they were honest about it. There was no hypocrisy. To be a king or a conqueror you had to kill; no one ever got to the top any other way. Sometimes you even had to kill the things you loved, wives, children… many kings and rulers did that. They still do.”

Polly could not credit the suspicions that were beginning to flood into her mind. Surely this would turn out to be just another monologue, going nowhere.

“Jack-”

“You were an anarchist, Polly,” Jack continued. “A sworn enemy of the state. When I met you your life was dedicated to the confusion of the military policies of your own country and also those of the United States. You were, to put it as I fear the press will put it, as my detractors in Congress and the Senate will put it, a foreign red. An enemy of the US.”

Jack could not be implying what it sounded like he was implying.

“I was seventeen, Jack! A teenager! It was so long ago.”

“Exactly. Seventeen, that’s four years underage in my home state. An anarchist and a child to boot! Twenty years ago people would have laughed and said I was a lucky guy. These days you get burned at the stake for that stuff. If our affair ever came to light it would finish me for good and ten times over. You know it would. A soldier on active duty consorts with juvenile pacifist anarchist? I wouldn’t last ten seconds in a Senate hearing.”

Polly struggled to come to terms with what Jack was saying.

“But only you and I know, Jack!”

Jack had taken his gun from his pocket and was attaching some kind of metal attachment to the end.

“That’s right, Polly. Nobody else knows about us and nobody knows I came here tonight. I’m a NATO general, in Britain for a few hours, asleep in his hotel room. There is a spook called Gottfried, the guy who traced you for me, but he got promoted to our station in Kabul. Nice job for him, convenient for me – the Taliban don’t tend to take the London Evening Standard.”