So much for Daddy. He must be rich beyond the dreams of Annandale – or at least of its farm labourers’ sons.

It seemed the time for irrelevancy.

‘Why don’t we get married?’ I asked her.

She widened those extraordinary eyes at me. For a panic-stricken moment, I thought she was going to accept.

‘I don’t think he’ll be able to stay there all night,’ she said. ‘He’s getting worse. He can’t be there when the men come in on Monday.’

She hadn’t even heard me, it seemed. A number of good things about being married to her came into my head.

‘Come back with me!’ she said. In her concern for emphasis, she leaned close. It reassured me to find that sex put danger out of your head in the real world. ‘He’ll listen to you.’

I had given up trying to explain that Kilpatrick was no friend of mine.

‘Why was he so sure you’d help him?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Why did you?’

She blushed. It was unmistakable. Not, despite the year, merely an allergic reaction or the reflection of a holocaust on the far side of the hill. It started out of sight, under the shirt in the soft dark, and spread up until it warmed her neck and the high bones of her cheeks.

‘You must be pretty close,’ I prompted.

‘We’re good friends.’

There was no answer to that.

‘Come on!’ I got to my feet and she looked up at me without stirring. ‘If we’re going, let’s get started.’

The flush ebbed from her skin and it was white under her mane of black hair.

‘You won’t come?’ she whispered.

It wasn’t what I meant, but her misunderstanding gave me one bonus chance, the last; to be sensible. It was a pity my idea of myself didn’t square with walking off and leaving her to her troubles. The girl being beautiful and frightened and helpless were poor reasons for putting my head on the block.

‘That’s not what I said. Apart from anything else, if we don’t move they’ll lock us in the park.’ I started to walk and she came into step with me. Close to me, even her sweat smelt of tears and honey. She moved with a loose graceful stride that almost matched mine. I wanted to stroke her hair and touch her. It didn’t make any sense, but I felt marvellous. The vast stone head of Thomas Carlyle peered at me across the twilight, and I wanted to yell at the old fraud, You’re dead, but I’m alive! I laughed out loud, and when she stared said to cover it, ‘We’ll have to spend the night in here.’

Innuendo would be my speciality; common sense could be someone else’s.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘We could climb the gate. I’m good at climbing.’

I wondered if she could be mentally retarded. Kilpatrick might have won her heart by poking nothing more sinister than Crunchie Bars into her.

I put an arm round her waist. She shied like a skittish horse, then relaxed against me, but when we came into the street she took my hand and lifted it away, not unpleasantly but as if it was the proper thing to do.

We walked until we came to a subway station for she had decided against bringing the car from her father’s yard. Going down the steps, I remembered trips on the subway as a child when we had visited the city.

‘It used to smell differently,’ I said. ‘It used to smell of ozone.’

She looked at me uncomprehendingly as we went down side by side.

‘Stuff that you get at the seaside,’ I explained. ‘You take deep breaths. Makes you feel better.’

Waiting on the platform, I began to laugh. It was as if I had been drinking and had taken too much. She looked at me as if I was mad and I remembered a silly story as an explanation.

‘My Uncle James lived in Largs when he was a boy. Do you know Largs?’

She nodded.

‘I’ve never been there. But he used to tell me how with the other boys he’d walk out to the Pencil – it’s a monument thing outside the town.’

‘It commemorates the Battle of Largs,’ she said seriously. ‘The Scots defeated the King of Norway.’

‘We were the people,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I laughed because I remembered him telling me how the tourists would stand on the sea wall out there and take deep breaths – aa-ah! aa-ah! And in those days the boys knew they were standing right above the pipes where the town’s sewage emptied. So much for ozone.’

The train poked its snout out of the tunnel. We travelled in silence. The walls of the tunnel slid past; then a station, two or three people, an Indian with a whistle who waved the train out again; more walls.

‘This is ours,’ Margaret said.

When we came out of the station, it was night. Between the pools of light from the streetlamps, it was dark. I wondered about putting my arm round her again, but before I could she said, ‘Please God, let him be all right.’

I thought she wanted to draw me into that feeling, but maybe she just wanted to share it. She must have known I would not turn back at this stage. We came into a main road with sulphur lamps set on long swan necks. In that street, her eyes turned some shade from outer space for which the name had yet to be invented. Out of it, we defiled into a wadi of darkened tenements. It was a place for ambushes. I felt endangered.

‘Margaret, he must have told you who hurt him and why?’

‘No.’ She turned her head away from me.

‘That’s hard to believe. Did you ask him?’

‘No.’

She stopped walking and we were outside a shop. I had been looking for a wall or a fence round what she called her father’s yard. There was a lane though at the side big enough for a lorry to go through. Her father’s name was over the door of the shop front.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Have you a key?’

Her breath hurried in little gasps.

‘I didn’t ask him,’ she said. ‘I don’t ask him any questions.’

‘Have you got a key? Give it me and I’ll go in first.’

She shook her head.

‘I don’t know what he’d do.’ Her voice was so quiet I could hardly hear it. ‘It’s better if he knows I’m here – so it’s all right.’

She had opened the door before I thought of the obvious. I caught her by the arm.

‘Has he another gun? One of his own, I mean.’

I felt her trembling.

‘I don’t know.’

But she pulled away from me and I followed her inside. There wasn’t enough light from the street to see anything. We stopped and she called, ‘Peter! Peter? It’s only me. Peter?’

In the silence I could hear the sighing beat of my blood, the sound of her breathing, a faint thrum of traffic from the main road we had left.

‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘He’s unconscious.’

When I tried to follow her, I blundered into the edge of a counter. It caught me on the left side under the ribs with the force of a punch. I couldn’t find another door. I had a touch of panic I’d felt as a child sleeping in a cupboard bed. I would waken and feel around in the dark until I was sure there was no opening but only walls on all four sides.

A light came on in the back shop.

‘He’s not here.’

Her voice was drained of life.

I pushed past her into the room: a desk, filing cabinet, a battered table supporting a typewriter and a pile of clip folders.

‘Shut the door of the shop,’ I told her. ‘Or we’ll have somebody wandering in off the street.’

She went through obediently. I heard the door bump shut and then her locking it. Beyond the back shop there was a smaller room with an electric cooker and sink. There was a bed against the wall. I lifted back the soiled grey blanket that covered it. On the sheet there were rusty smears like the marks on the cloth that had wrapped the gun.

I was sitting on the bed when she came back.

‘What will we do?’ she asked.

‘Are you sure he’s gone?’

‘I’d left him in the bed. He was too ill to move.’

I didn’t like the idea but I knew I would have to check the rest of the place. He might be lying somewhere too weak to move or call. Or crouching delirious, waiting for a head to appear round a corner so that he could blow it off.