‘Don’t call me anything. Don’t call. Stay there and piss. Understand?’ _

‘I don’t want to piss.’

I could almost hear his brain grinding away. ‘What?’

‘I need to crap, Richie. Old British tradition. Now if you want to sit in the same room while I crap, that’s up to you. I just thought it would be fair to warn you.’

Richie thought about this for a while, and I was sure I could hear his nose wrinkling. The chair scraped, and the rubber shoes made their way towards me.

‘You don’t go to the toilet, and you don’t crap yourself.’ The face came into view, tight as ever. ‘Hear me? You stay where you are, you shut the fuck up…’

‘You haven’t got children, have you, Richie?’

He frowned, which looked like a gigantic effort on his face. Eyebrows, muscles, tendons, everything called into action for this single, faintly stupid, expression.

‘What?’

‘I don’t actually have any myself, to tell the truth, but I have god-children. And you can’t just tell them not to. It doesn’t work.’

The frown deepened.

‘The fuck are you talking about?’

‘I mean, I’ve tried it. You’ve got children in the car, and one of them wants to crap, and you tell them to hold on, put a cork in it, wait until we reach somewhere, but it doesn’t work. When the body has to crap, it has to crap.’

The frown eased slightly, which was nice, because I was starting to feel tired just looking at it. He bent down towards me, bringing his nose in line with mine.

‘Listen to me, you piece of shit…’

That was as far as he got, because on the word ‘shit’ I brought my right knee up as hard as I could and caught him on the cheek. He froze for a second, part surprise, part concussion, and I lifted my left leg and hooked it round the back of his neck. As I dragged him down on to the bed, he managed to get his left hand out in front of him to try and keep himself up. But he had no idea how strong legs are. Legs are very strong indeed.

Much stronger than throats.

He lasted pretty well, I have to admit. He tried the usual stuff, grabbing at my groin, thrashing his foot towards my face, but to do that kind of thing effectively you need air, and I just wasn’tinthe mood to let him have it in any useful quantities. His resistance curved upwards through angry, to wild, to terrified, peaked and then drifted all the way down to unconscious. I held him for a good five minutes after his last kick, because if I’d been him I would have tried playing dead as soon as I realised the game was up.

But Richie definitely wasn’t playing dead.

My hands had been tied with straps, which took a while. The only tools available weremyteeth, and by the time I’d finished I felt like I’d eaten a couple of Portakabins. I also got some solid confirmation of the injury to my chin, because the first time it brushed against a buckle, I thought I was going to go through the ceiling. Instead, I looked down and saw a mess of blood on the leather strap, some dark and old, some red and very new.

When it was over I fell back, panting with the effort, and tried rubbing some life back into my wrists. Then I sat up again and gently swung my feet over the edge of the bed and on to the floor.

It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement. I gripped the side of the bed and screwed my eyes shut until the roar had eased to a babble, then took another inventory. Whatever I’d hit first, I’d hit with my right side. The knee, thigh and hip were screaming at me, and their screams were all the keener for the recent contact with Richie’s head. My ribs felt as though they’d been taken out and put back in the wrong order, and my neck, though definitely not broken, was hardly movable. And then there were the testicles.

They’d changed. I simply couldn’t believe that they were the same testicles I’d carried around with me all my life, and yes, treated as my friends. They were bigger, much bigger, and completely the wrong shape.

There was only one thing for it.

There is a technique, known to practitioners of the martial arts, for relieving scrotal discomfort. It is often used in Japanesedojos, whenever your training-partner has got a little over-eager and actually landed one in the genital neighbourhood.

What you do is this: jump six inches in the air, and land on your heels with your legs as stiff as you can make them, to increase, just for an instant, the gravitational pull on the scrotum. I don’t know why it should work, but it does. Or rather it doesn’t. So I had to try it a few times, pogoing around the room as hard as my right leg would let me, until gradually, infinitesimally, the howling pain began to subside. Then I bent down to examine Richie’s body.

The label in his suit proclaimed the gifts of Falkus, The Fine Tailors, but nothing else; he had six pounds and twenty pence in his right trouser pocket, and a camouflage-patterned penknife in his left. His shirt was white nylon, and the shoes were four-hole Baxter half-brogues in oxblood leather. That was more or less it. There was nothing else to mark Richie out from the crowd and set the keen-eyed investigator’s pulse racing. No bus ticket. No library card. No page of personal ads from a local newspaper with one entry ringed in red felt-tip pen.

All I could find that was even remotely out of the ordinary was a Bianchi cross-draw holster, containing one brand new nine millimetre Glock 17 self-loading pistol.

You may have read, at one time or another, some of the nonsense that’s been written about the Glock. The fact that its body is made from a fancy polymer material got one or two journalists very excited a while back about the possibility that the gun might not register on airport X-ray machines - which happens to be so much hooey. The slide, barrel, and a fair portion of its innards are metal, and if that weren’t enough, seventeen rounds of Parabellum ammunition are pretty hard to pass off as lipstick refills. What it does have is a high magazine capacity for a low weight, great accuracy, and virtually unequalled reliability. All of which have made the Glock 17 the choice of housewives everywhere.

I worked the slide, pushing a round into the breech. There’s no safety catch on the Glock. You just point, shoot, and run like hell. My kind of gun.

I eased open the door to the corridor, and there was no space shuttle. It was a plain, white corridor, with seven other doors leading off it. All shut. At the end of the corridor was a window, looking out at a skyline that could have been any one of fifty cities. It was daylight.

Whatever the building was built for, it hadn’t been doing it for a long time. The corridor was dirty and lined with rubbish - cardboard boxes, mounds of paper, bin-liners, and half-way down, a mountain bike without wheels.