He shrugs. “My apologies for so obviously inconveniencing you.” He sounds hurt. He stands up and runs a hand through his wiry brown hair. As he turns to look out into the body of the salon, a sandwich-board man races past, clacking. The resultant breeze makes Q’ands’s salwar kameez flutter. “… See if I can intercept my coffee…”

“Sit down!” she snaps.

He turns back. “But you said-”

“Sit!”

He sits, looking still more wounded.

“There are certain instructions specific to this matter which have not been written down,” she says. Q’ands looks appropriately surprised. She is already finding the way his expression seems to reflect his internal state so immediately and accurately extremely vexing. Worryingly unprofessional, too, if he’s like this with everybody. Has he finally gone off the rails? How vexing if her long campaign to destabilise the fellow has finally succeeded just when she needs him at his most implacably efficient.

“Indeed?” he says. He looks mystified. Madame d’Ortolan half expects a cartoon thought-bubble bearing a big question mark to appear above his head.

“Indeed,” she tells him. “The written orders mention some names and actions that you may find surprising. Nevertheless, these instructions have been subject to particularly careful scrutiny at the highest level, by not one or two but several sufficiently security-cleared individuals and you may be assured that there is no mistake. Regarding the final action you are instructed to pursue in each case, ignore that course of action as written in your orders. Each of the subjects concerned is not to be forcibly transitioned; they are all to be elided. Killed. Expeditiously. Do you understand?”

Q’ands’s eyes widen. “I am to ignore my written orders?”

“In that one detail, yes.”

“Detail?” The fellow looks aghast, though probably more at the choice of word than the terminal severity of the action proposed.

“In writing,” Madame d’Ortolan explains patiently, “you are instructed to find the individuals named, close with them and take them away. The spoken amendment I am giving you now is to do all the above, except you are to kill them rather than kidnap them.”

“So that’s an order?”

“Yes. That is an order.”

“But-”

“The written orders issue from my office,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him, her voice acidic. “This verbal order is also from me, has also been appropriately vetted and approved, and post-dates the written orders. What about this sequence of events is difficult for you to comprehend?”

There is a hurt silence while the waiter delivers their order. When he goes, Q’ands says, “Well, I take it the verbal orders will be confirmed by written-”

“Certainly not! Don’t be an idiot! There are reasons why this is being handled in this manner.” Madame d’Ortolan sits forward, lowers her voice and softens it a little. “The Council,” she tells him, head tipped towards him, drawing him in, “even the Concern itself, is under threat, don’t you see? This must be done. These actions must be carried out. They may seem extreme, but then so is the threat.”

He looks unconvinced.

She sits back. “Just obey your orders, Q’ands. All of them.” She watches as Christophe unseals her bottle of water, wipes her glass with a fresh handkerchief and pours. She drinks a little. Q’ands looks most unhappy, but drinks his espresso, finishing it with indecent haste in a couple of tossed-back gulps. She has a sudden unbidden, unwelcome and unpleasant vision of his lovemaking being similarly abrupt and curtailed now. Where once, of course, he had been quite pleasantly proficient. She pushes the memory away as something best forgotten and nods beyond the booth. “Now you may go.”

He rises, gives a cursory bow and turns away.

Madame d’Ortolan says, “A moment.”

He sighs as he looks back at her. “Yes?”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Q’ands, ma’am.”

“Well, Q’ands, do you understand?”

His jaw works as though he is trying to control himself. “Of course,” he says, voice clipped. “I understand.”

She favours him with an icy smile. “As you might guess, this is altogether of particular importance to us, Q’ands. It is what one might term a high-tariff matter. The highest. The rewards for success will be as lavish as the sanctions for failure will-”

“Oh, madame,” he says loudly, holding out one hand to her, his voice pitched somewhere between exasperation and what certainly sounds like genuine insult. “Spare me.” He turns and leaves with a shake of his head, disappearing into the tumult.

Madame d’Ortolan is quite shocked.

My father was a brute, my mother was a saint. Dad was a big, powerful man. He was what they used to call free with his fists. In school he was kept back a year and hence was always the biggest boy in his class. Big enough to intimidate the teachers sometimes. Eventually he was thrown out for breaking another pupil’s jaw. According to him, it was a boy, a bully, from a couple of years above him. It was twenty years later and he was dead before we found out it had actually been a girl in his own class.

He always wanted to be a policeman but he kept failing the entry exams. He worked in the prison service until he was thrown out for being too violent. Feel free to make your own jokes.

My mother had a very strict religious upbringing. Her parents were members of a small sect called The First Church of Christ The Redeemer Our Lord’s Chosen People. Once I suggested that they had more words in their title than they did members. It was the only time she hit me. She was proud that she didn’t sleep with my father until after they were married, on the day she turned eighteen. I think she just wanted to be free of her parents and all their restrictions and rules. They always had a lot of rules. Before they could be wed dad had to promise the elders of the church and our local minister that he would have all his children raised strictly in the ways of the Church, though he only did this so that he could wash his hands of his parental responsibilities. He had as little to do with me as he could while I was growing up. He’d usually be reading his paper, lips moving silently, or listening to music on his headphones, humming loudly and out of tune. If I tried to attract his attention he’d put his paper down, scowling, and tell me to talk to my mother, or just glare at me without turning his music down and stab a finger first at me and then at the door. He liked country and western music, the more sentimental the better.

He made no secret of the fact that he had no faith himself, except that “There must be something up there,” as he would say sometimes when he was very drunk. He said it quite a lot.

My mum must have seen something in him. Perhaps, as I said, she also thought that she was escaping from the petty rules and regulations and restrictions she’d had to accept living in her parents’ house, but of course dad had plenty of those of his own, as we both discovered. My usual way of discovering a new rule was being slapped around the ear, or, if I’d been really bad, dad taking his belt off, throwing me across his knee and leathering me. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that’s what it was for my mum. I started out in the fire.

Mum made me her treasured boy and gave me all the love that she wanted to give dad but which just bounced back off him. Don’t think that she turned me into a gay or anything. I’m not. I’m quite normal. I just had this unbalanced upbringing in this strange family where one parent worshipped me and thought I could do no wrong and the other one treated me like some pet that my mum had bought without asking him first. If I’d thought about it I’d have assumed my family was typical. It wasn’t something I did think about, though, and I’d never have thought of asking other children what their families were like. I didn’t mix much with other children at school. They seemed very noisy and dangerously boisterous and they thought I was quiet, apparently. Or cold. I was teased and picked on for being Christian.