This is the car hired by the man who tried to kill me.

I opened the boot with the key from his

my

pocket, and looked inside.

Two black sports bags, one larger than the other.

The smaller contained a white shirt, a pair of black trousers, a plastic raincoat, a clean pair of underpants, two pairs of grey socks and a sponge bag. Beneath its removable plastic bottom were two thousand euros, one thousand Turkish lira, one thousand US dollars and four passports. The nationalities on the passports were German, British, Canadian and Turkish. The faces, alongside their endlessly changing names, were mine.

The second, far larger, bag contained a murder kit. A carefully packed box of little knives and vicious combat blades, rope, masking tape and stiff white cotton bandages, two pairs of handcuffs, a nine-millimetre Beretta plus three spare clips and green medical bag containing a range of chemicals from the toxic through to the sedative. What to make of the full-body Lycra suit, thick rubber gloves and hazmat helmet, I really didn’t know.

I nearly missed the fat Manila folder tucked into an inner pocket, save that a corner of it had caught in the zip and showed brown against the black interior. I opened the folder and almost immediately shut it again.

The contents would require more attention than I felt able to give for the moment.

I closed the boot, got into the car, felt the comfortable fit of the seat, checked the alignment of the mirrors, ran my hand around the glove compartment to find nothing more exciting than a road map of northern Turkey and started the engine.

I am, contrary to what may be expected of one as old as I, not in the least bit old-fashioned.

I inhabit bodies which are young, healthy, interesting, vibrant.

I play with their iWhatevers, dance with their friends, listen to their records, wear their clothes, eat from their fridges.

My life is their life, and if the fresh-faced girl I inhabit uses high-powered chemical cocktails to treat her acne, why then so do I, for she’s had longer to get used to my skin, and knows what to wear and what not, and so, in all things, I move with the times.

None of which prepares you for driving in Turkey.

The Turks aren’t bad drivers.

Indeed, an argument could be made for their being absolutely superb drivers as only split-second instinct, razor-sharp skills and relentless determination to be a winner could keep you both alive and moving on the Otoyol-3 to Edirne. It’s not that your fellow drivers are ignorant of the concept of lanes, merely that, as the city falls away behind and the low hills that hug the coast begin to push and shrug against you, the scent of open air seems to provoke some animal instinct, and the accelerator goes down, the window opens to let in the roar of passing wind and the mission becomes go, go, go!

I drive rather more sedately.

Not because I am old-fashioned.

Simply because, even at the loneliest of times on the darkest roads, I always have a passenger on board.

Chapter 7

The single most terrifying drive of my life.

It was 1958, she had introduced herself as Peacock, and when she whispered in my ear, “You want to go somewhere quiet?” I’d said sure. That’d be nice.

Five and a half minutes later she was sitting behind the wheel of a Lincoln Baby convertible, the roof down and the wind screaming, swooping through the hills of Sacramento like an eagle in a tornado, and as I clung to the dashboard and watched sheer drops twist away beneath our wheels she screamed, “I fucking love this town!”

Had I been experiencing any sentiment other than blind terror, I might have said something witty.

“I fucking love the fucking people!” she whooped as a Chevy, heading the other way, slammed on both its brakes and its horn as we barrelled towards the lights of a tunnel.

“They’re all so fucking sweet!” she howled, pins unravelling from her curled blonde hair. “They’re all so fucking, ‘Sweetie, you’re so sweet!’ and I’m all, ‘That’s so sweet of you’ and they’re all, ‘But we can’t give you the role because you’re so sweet, sweetie’ and I’m like, ‘FUCK YOU ALL!’ ”

She shrieked with delight at this conclusion and, as the yellow glow of the rock-carved tunnel enveloped us in its heat, pressed harder on the accelerator.

“Fuck you all!” she screamed, engine roaring like a baited bear. “Where’s your fucking bitter, where’s your fucking bile, where’s your fucking balls, you fuckers?!”

A pair of headlights ahead and it occurred to me that she was now driving on the wrong side of the road. “Fuck you!” she roared. “Fuck you!”

The lights swerved, and she swerved with them, lining up like a jousting knight, and the headlights swerved again, wheels screeching to get out of the way, but she just turned the wheel again, face forward, eyes down, no going back, and though I rather liked the body I was in at the time (male, twenty-two, great teeth), I had absolutely no intention of dying in it, so as we lined up for the kill, I reached over, grabbed her by the bare crook of her arm and switched.

The brakes gave off a primal scream of metal tearing metal, of tortured air and shattered springs. The car spun as the back wheels locked, until finally, as gentle and inevitable as the crash of the Titanic, the side of the car slammed into the wall of the tunnel and with a great belch of yellow-white sparks we scraped our way to a standstill.

The motion knocked me forward, my head bouncing down on to the hard steering wheel. Someone had tied little knots between all the neurons in my brain, making thick bundles of uncommunicative squelch where my thoughts should have been. I lifted my head and saw that I left blood on the wheel; I pressed a peacock-blue glove against my skull and tasted salt in my mouth. By my side the very pleasant young body I had been inhabiting stirred, opened his eyes, shook like a kitten and began to perceive for himself.

Confusion became anxiety, anxiety panic, and panic, having only a choice between rage or terror, went for the latter option as he screamed, “Oh God oh God oh God who are you who the fuck are you where am I where am I oh God oh God…”

Or words to that effect.

The other car, whose intended role had been the agent of our sticky demise, had pulled itself to a stop some twenty yards from us, and now the doors were open and a man was barrelling out, red-faced and cavern-skinned. As I blinked blood from my eyes I looked up to see that this gentleman, white-collared and black-trousered as he was, carried a small silver-barrelled revolver in one hand and a police badge in the other. He was also shouting, the great roaring words of a voice which has forgotten how to speak, words of my family, my car, police commissioner, going to burn, going to fucking burn…

When I had nothing to contribute on this subject, he waved the gun at me and roared at the boy to throw him my handbag. It too, like all things to do with me, was peacock-blue, adorned with green and black sequins, and glistened like the fresh skin of a shedding snake as it tumbled through the air. The man with the gun caught it awkwardly, opened it up, looked inside, and dropped it at once with an involuntary gasp.

Now no one was shouting, only the tick-tick-tick of the car engine filling the hot gloom of the tunnel. I leaned over to see what contents could possibly have induced this blissful respite from head-pounding noise.

My fallen handbag had spilt its contents in the road. A driver’s licence which informed me that my name was, in fact, Peacock, a curse clearly bestowed upon me by parents with a limited sense of ornithological aptitude. A tube of lipstick, a sanitary towel, a set of door keys, a wallet. A small plastic bag of unknown yellowish powder. A human finger, still warm and bloody, wrapped in a white cotton handkerchief, the edges ragged where it had been sawn away from the hand.