‘I thought the upside of being ill was that you were close to it.’

‘Close to what?’

‘Your higher spiritual life.’

He lowered his voice to an intoxicated hush. ‘Jesus Christ, it really is you.’ He gave me a sideways glance that had something curious and greedy in it. ‘Tell me something: what’s it like?’

What’s it like? The physical ache, the loneliness, the high clouds, Vera’s face as she twisted in the hands of her captors, Jack letting the Fielding novel slip from his hands, Caiaphas, the anonymous misery of the DHU. To know all this, to be me and not me; to be reflected in the frightened eyes of my son and see a monster. ‘It’s a miracle,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re going to love it.’

I was staring towards the water, remembering a cold winter when I’d pulled out big panes of ice from the pond on Tooting Common and given them to Lucius and Sarah to jump on. The ice had left a weedy, riverine smell on my hands.

Hunter’s eyes glittered as he tried to suppress his excitement. I could see him struggling to keep his emotions in check: the thought of what I represented. The hope! And imagine the carcass they’d set aside for him!

He pointed towards the pond. ‘They have geese here in the summer,’ he said. ‘You know, when I was a kid, I had a pet goose called Snoopy. A dog killed it. My mother got me another one. Called that one Snoopy too.’

‘You didn’t miss the other one?’

Hunter shrugged. ‘A goose is a goose.’ He reached inside his overcoat for something that he couldn’t find. ‘Will you remind me of that when we get back? I haven’t got my notebook with me.’

He levered himself up onto his frame. ‘Come on. I’m getting cold.’

I followed him back across the silent garden.

He leaned against my arm as he negotiated the step up to the French windows.

After the cold, the warmth in his rooms seemed intense and soporific. At Hunter’s request, I fetched his notebook from the bedside table. It was in the first drawer: a fat leatherbound Smythson’s with onionskin pages.

While he was writing down his memory of the goose, I made a pot of redbush tea and set it down on the coffee table.

‘Do you know where I’ve been?’ I said.

He looked up from his writing and for the first time, I think I saw a trace of fear in his eyes.

‘If I said the name Dr Philip White, would that mean anything to you?’ I said.

‘Not unless he’s an oncologist.’

‘Dr White’s my psychiatrist.’

‘I know things haven’t been easy for you,’ he said.

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘You’ve got to understand, I relinquished any day-to-day responsibilities some time ago. I’ve been here, getting my head straight. There was a view that we simply couldn’t risk work of this importance being jeopardised.’

‘Hence Nicky’s murder?’

Hunter suddenly blazed with a flash of anger. ‘I’m ill but don’t take me for a dumb fuck. What are you, wired up like he was? We all understood the complexity of this work. Vera did. Okay, Sinan’s dad had a problem with it, but the rest of us were on board from the get-go. Ethically – I won’t kid you – it’s not simple. But the upside is, literally, infinite. We’re not choosing to be in the business of death. With insights this rich, with the backing we’ve got, we are on the brink of something incredible. I’m talking about the deepest wish, Nicholas. Time is the great blessing. We’re going to get more time. All of us.’

‘And Nicholas?’

‘Here you are, Nicholas! You’re right here.’ His anger had subsided and now he gave me a look of calm, transcendent love. I understood the joy I had given him. He was thinking of himself.

There were steps in the corridor. They seemed to be approaching the door, then they died away. Outside, the garden was suddenly bathed in light. A squirrel ventured right up to the French doors with brisk, staccato movements as though it were driven by clockwork. I thought of the wind-up ballerina on the South Bank, and the tragic lifelessness of her dancing. I saw Sarah barely hours old; her eyes milky and unaccustomed to the light; her arms and legs paddling the air. I remembered Lucius, as a child, leaning sleepily against the toilet as he peed in the middle of the night, and then collapsing into my arms. But not into these arms, into Nicky Slopen’s arms, not these counterfeits.

‘One day, we’ll look back at this time the way we look back at the era of surgery without anaesthesia, or before antibiotics. We’re going to make death optional.’

‘Not for Nicholas.’

‘And yet you’re here, aren’t you?’

‘I’m here because Vera felt things had got out of control,’ I said.

Hunter smiled. ‘Vera accepted what we needed to do. We were clear with each other at the outset. We can’t stop this thing because someone’s gotten squeamish. There’s too much at stake now. We’re at war, Nicholas …’ He was struggling to keep his eyes open. The walk in the cold had exhausted him. ‘We’re at war with death.’

The book slid to the floor. A moment later he was asleep.

I picked up his notebook and leafed through it. His handwriting was surprisingly characterful, very masculine, with a Greek e and a long flat tail on his ys and gs. He’d filled it with page after page of personal trivia.

So, for example: mom’s meat loaf. wrapped in greaseproof paper. grey slabs covered in ketchup.

Or: clap clinic 1967 – Deirdre, Phoebe, the Vassar girl?

I turned another page.

That afternoon at the Barbican. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tricia morose about my affair with C. I say we can have another kid if she really wants them, but what about the complications? Her age, etc.

It was just past one o’clock. I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be alone with him. I warmed my hands on the radiators to relax the muscles and take the chill off my fingers. I didn’t want the cold of them to wake him.

I had envisaged this moment so many times that the act was something of a let-down. In my fantasy it was always a haler Hunter, a more worthy adversary. And there was a particular shamefulness attached to killing such an attenuated version of the man. On what I’d based them, I don’t know, but I’d had such vividly different hopes for how things would turn out. Very briefly he opened his eyes, there was the slightest of struggles, and then his life left him, almost willingly, like a bird flying out of a thicket.

4

My wanderings since are not exactly pertinent to this testimony. But once you’ve acquired the habit of reminiscence, it gets harder and harder to decide what merits exclusion.

I hitchhiked from London to Swindon. Strange as it seems, in 2010 someone was willing to pick up a large, rather intimidating, heavily built man who was not only an escapee from a secure hospital with an outstanding section under the Mental Health Act, but a murderer.

The Good Samaritan’s name was Gordon Swanage. He was an ex-soldier from Newcastle. When I hungrily eyed the chicken salad sandwich in his glove box he pulled over and bought me gammon, egg and chips from a Little Chef on the M4. I told him I had been a teacher.

‘I went through hard times myself when I got back from Iraq,’ he said, as though he had heard nothing of what I had just said to him. The abrupt syllables of his Geordie accent made him sound, to my ear, like he was speaking Danish. ‘We’re still suing the Ministry of Defence. When I get the money I’m going to give all this up. Move to Spain. How about you? What’s your dream?’

‘Just living day to day,’ I said through a mouthful of food. ‘You know.’

‘I do indeed, my friend. I do.’

His kindness to me seemed almost without limit. I find it as mystifying – more, in fact – than the reasoned cruelties of Hunter and whoever or whatever stands behind him.