‘Like a disc?’

‘That kind of thing.’

I turned it over in my hand: my little key, my source, my secret clue. It glittered prettily where the light struck it, magnifying the weak October sun into deep yellow and blue flashes. It was the irreducible content of me, thirty-nine years of my life captured on a three-centimetre disc of quartz. ‘There’s not much to me,’ I said.

‘So it turns out.’

I put it in my pocket. ‘I was attacked in the hospital. The man had a tattoo like mine. Do you think he was a mankurt?’

He nodded.

‘But who was the original?’

Perhaps because he couldn’t shake himself free of the assumption that I was mentally defective, perhaps because Russian wasn’t my first language, he addressed me as though I was a child: slowly and with explanatory hand gestures.

‘No original. There are two variants. Zachot and pyaterka. You’re a pyaterka.’

‘And Jack?’

‘Also a pyaterka.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Soznaniye.’ He enunciated each of the four syllables as he tapped the side of his head. Consciousness. ‘Vera only works with pyaterki,’ he added with a note of pride in his voice.

‘Works?’ I picked him up on his use of the tense.

‘Of course. The others sew mailbags, Vera makes mankurts. No one else can do what she does. They’ll keep her there until she dies, or until I get her out.’

‘You might die trying.’

He smiled ruefully at me and the sun flashed on his gold bridgework. ‘I’ve done terrible things in this life, Nikolai. Terrible things.’ He turned away and narrowed his eyes at the horizon, as though contemplating his past enormities. ‘Yet somehow, I didn’t feel I was a bad person. Do you understand? When Vera told me what they were doing, I understood it was wrong and I understood that God was giving me a chance to make up for my old life. He asked and I obeyed. That’s how it was.’ Listening to him, I understood that both priests and criminals can be men of straightforward morality.

A sharp whistle ended the game. There was a smattering of applause from the handful of watching parents. The boys began filing off the pitch. They looked tiny and knock-kneed.

‘You’re not worried about betraying Sinan?’

He waved his hand in disdain. ‘No way, he’s a moron’ – the Russian word literally means ‘radish’. ‘Sinan’s not someone to worry about. There are some serious people in the upward chain of command, but not him.’

That phrase that sounds so un-Misha-like, upward chain of command, is the best I can do with the evocative noun he used: vertikal’.

‘Are there many?’

He finished his cigarette. ‘Enough to keep me busy,’ he said. He patted me on the shoulder and got up. ‘Time to go.’

‘One thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know where Hunter is?’

‘I can find out,’ he said. ‘But after that …’ He raised his forefinger to his lips. I understood. It would be our last communication.

‘What will you do?’ I asked.

He winked at me. ‘Men’she znaesh’, luchshe spish’.’

The less you know, the better you sleep.

He turned and walked away.

*

I knew I couldn’t trust myself to stay in London for more than a few days. It was too much temptation. I would come up with some excuse to go and see Lucius and Sarah and it would end up putting them at risk. I needed to put some distance between us, for their sake. There was no hope of connecting the broken thread of my life. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was one meaningful task remaining to me.

3

I spent my last days in London in a room above a pub in Streatham, vacillating between the necessity of leaving and my desire to settle scores with Hunter.

It felt safer to be in a neighbourhood I knew and where I had an instinctive sense of what was ordinary. But it had its own form of peril. One afternoon, I saw Tadeusz, Jack’s old landlord, unloading crates from a van parked outside the pet shop. Unthinkingly, I went up to greet him. His body tensed as he caught sight of me. He set down his crate. The coldness in his face reminded me who I was. I lowered my eyes and turned away from him.

I learned that night from Misha that Hunter was in a hospice near Richmond Park, a private one, with a Zen garden in its grounds.

I made a couple of speculative visits. Misha had told me that Hunter, a crank to the last, was having his meals delivered from outside, by a company called Raw Genius that specialised in raw food. Each morning before seven, a man on a moped dropped off an array of bizarre juices, buckwheat groats, weird fruits and spiralised and dehydrated vegetables.

One chilly November day I arrived around mid-morning, wearing a chef’s jacket and carrying a hemp bag of items from a health-food shop.

The place was more like an exclusive hotel than a hospital. The reception area was warm, and heady with the smell of aromatherapy candles and gourmet cooking. ‘Clair de Lune’ was playing quietly through discreet speakers behind the desk.

I couldn’t help comparing it all to the DHU. The basic economic injustice of the world struck me: that the rich don’t live the same lives as us, or die the same deaths. Some, like Hunter, don’t intend to die at all.

The receptionist spoke to me in a hushed voice that somehow made my deception easier.

I identified myself as a member of the Raw Genius team and told her that we’d delivered the wrong items. It was the only occasion in two lifetimes that I’ve had reason to be grateful to Caspar’s wife Hilary and her obsession with fad diets.

‘Entirely our fault,’ I said. ‘We’ve got four clients on two different restricted diets and we got mixed up. We delivered one here with a soy lecithin supplement. I don’t think he’s intolerant, but it’s better not to take the risk.’

Soy lecithin. I felt an abstract, almost parental pride in the smoothness of my articulation.

She told me where to find him.

*

Hunter had a suite of rooms with a verandah. He was shrunken, coughing, his hands frail and liver-spotted. He walked unsteadily, supporting his weight with a frame. His expensive clothes hung loosely.

‘Just put them down over there,’ he said with a vague gesture in the direction of the galley kitchen.

‘I need to remove the other items,’ I said.

‘They’re in the fridge.’

I opened the fridge door.

‘How are you enjoying the meals?’ I said.

‘Good enough. Are you waiting for a tip?’

‘I take it you don’t recognise me.’

He moved his frame towards me and peered into my face with no trace of fear. ‘Why? Should I know you?’

I told him who I was. He appraised me for a moment.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said.

*

I helped him into a big coat, fur hat and muffler. He manoeuvred his walking frame out onto the baize-green lawn, which was crisp with frost.

‘Nicholas said you could barely speak,’ he said.

‘It came back gradually.’

‘A miracle. Look at you.’ He was racked by one of his periodic fits of coughing. ‘But what’s wrong with your hands?’

‘They do this in the cold,’ I said, struggling to straighten my fingers.

I had to slow to a shuffle to keep pace with him. The rubber feet of his frame left scuff-marks in the gravel.

Ducks huddled round a water outflow in the middle of the frozen pond. Hunter dropped heavily onto a wooden bench by the side of the gravel path and gave a sigh.

For a few minutes we sat in silence, watching the ice creep imperceptibly across the water.

I was the first to speak. ‘I’m surprised you …’

‘What?’ he said. ‘Thought I’d be scared of you? There’s not much you can do to me now. I’m dying anyway. If I was a car, they’d scrap me. Cancer. Secondaries everywhere. I’m riddled with it. The upside is the drugs they’ve got me on. I’m higher than I’ve been for years.’