Four

Wednesday, December 19

I

Hassan al-Rashid was sitting on the Dover to Calais ferry, where he was surprised to find himself almost the only passenger. He'd imagined throngs of thirsty kafirs going to stock up at discount alcohol warehouses in time for their 'religious' festival. As he came onboard down the covered companionway and stepped through the first available door, he found himself at once in an outsize alcohol-vending lounge; it was apparently called 'Le Pub'. He'd walked round both decks available to passengers, but there was no escape: every seat was in a licensed area. He placed himself as far as he could from the bar and stared through the window. The low, gunmetal sky met the high pewter sea at a smudged horizon; the world was wrapped in grey.

He'd risen with the alarm at six in Havering-atte-Bower to be in time to catch a train from Victoria. He found a seat in a quiet compartment and opened his book. At home he was reading the seminal Milestones by Sayyid Qutb for the third time, but didn't want to be seen with it, so had brought along one of the many new books that had recently been arriving in his father's study since the 'literary gentleman' had been visiting. It was a 'thriller' about horse racing, though not that thrilling. His concentration was disturbed by a raised voice. It was a youth who'd been evicted from first class by the ticket collector. The boy, though white, tried to sound black. He was accompanied by a man who actually was black: a tubby old-timer with a leather cap perched on top of greying dreadlocks. They settled next to Hassan, and the youth occasionally stood up and shouted. He swore in his too-loud, fake-black voice, still angry with the ticket man. Next, he tried to catch the eye of others in the carriage, but all were suddenly engrossed, even by giveaway newspapers. Hassan knew the type: attention-deficit and destined for a life in and out of prison; the old black man was presumably his probation officer or social worker.

At Faversham, the train divided and Hassan used the excuse to switch carriage with a dumbshow of having only just noticed that he was in the wrong section. At Dover station he waited for a bus to the port, but there was no bus. Then he saw a taxi and climbed in. They went past Dover College and down to the front with its dilapidated hotels; it was gone to seed in the mysterious way of all seaside towns. One hotel had an old red phone box in the forecourt, filled with flowering plants; the cliffs to their left looked less white than grey: grubby and tired in the winter light.

In the travel centre, Hassan could choose between two ferry lines and picked the one with the first sailing.

'Name?' said the clerk behind her computer. 'And first name?'

Why on earth did you have to give your name to buy a foot-passenger ticket? But Hassan was too surprised to lie. Worse was to come. A loudspeaker announcement directed him and his five fellow passengers to a coach. They drove smartly through the dock area, down white-edged lanes, and were nodded through by the man at the frontier post. As Hassan was starting to relax, the coach was suddenly waved into a shed. Everyone got out and had to put bags and coats through a scanner, then walk through a metal-detecting machine, exactly as at an airport. He hadn't foreseen this, and it was a setback, perhaps fatal, to his plan.

So as he sat encased in his grey world on the ferry, Hassan tried to work out how, assuming the scanning arrangements were the same in Calais, he might be able to get his cargo of hydrogen peroxide back through security without arousing suspicion. He hoped to buy the chemicals piecemeal in different pharmacies, to make himself less remembered, but had also found, after only twenty minutes on the Internet, the address of a hairdressers' supplier in the outskirts where he could buy it all at once.

He had used Shahla's knowledge of French to prepare himself. She was always pleased, if a little surprised, to hear from him and, when he told her that he needed help, she'd asked him to her flat in Clapham. She made Persian kebabs with rice and salad; she had bought orange juice for him.

'All right, Mister, what's it all about?'

He told her he was going on holiday to France in the summer and wanted to practise his conversation. Shahla clearly disbelieved him, but was too pleased to have his company to ask difficult questions. She'd visited friends of her father's in Lebanon and learned to speak French from a young age.

'I may have a slight Lebanese accent, Hass,' she said, throwing back her long black hair as she leaned over to struggle with the cork in the wine bottle. 'But they won't mind that in Provence.'

Hassan was able to turn the conversation to the general topic of how similar many words were in the two languages.

'Exactly,' said Shahla. 'It's easy to have conversations about science or philosophy because the words are all the same. What's hard is when they talk about ...' She glanced round the room. 'You know, concrete things - windowsill, fender, poker, mantel-piece, castor, latch.'

It was easy then for Hassan to have her confirm the pronunciation of oxygen, for instance, or hydrogen.

'Hydrogene. You'd say it "eed-row-gen". Try and gargle the "r" a bit.'

Later he slipped in peroxide.

"'Pay-rock-seed",' said Shahla. 'No, let me check. It may not have an acute.' It didn't. 'So it's "pe-rock-seed". Sorry about that.'

He watched her as she reached up to put the dictionary back on its shelf. Her grey skirt rode up to show for a moment the navy blue tights above the brown leather boots. How long were those legs from ankle to hip? he wondered. The funny thing was that Shahla wasn't coltish on them, but moved quickly and with such balance.

Then they did some general conversation about shopping and getting into a bus or taxi.

'You're brilliant, Hass. I thought you said you couldn't speak a word.'

'Aye, well we did study French at school. The Scottish system, you know. Hadn't quite packed up yet.'

'So you did a GCSE or something?'

'Yes, but you didn't have to speak it to pass.'

He didn't like to use Shahla in this way, but it was easy enough to explain it to himself. It was a question of priorities. The minor deception of a friend would be forgiven in the long perspective of establishing justice on earth and gaining paradise afterwards. God would look well on Shahla for having helped him; he might even overlook her irreligion.

Hassan's conviction that he was right was troubled only by an aching sense of how lucky he was to have a friend who questioned him so little, who seemed to like him just for what he was. If everyone could have taken this view of him, he wondered, would he be planning to go to Calais at all?

He couldn't tell anyone of what Husam Nar was planning, but if there was one person in whom he might have confided, it was Shahla. There had been moments over the past two years when he had been tempted to tell her what path he was travelling, but he had always pulled back.

It was not that Shahla would have been unsympathetic; on the contrary her brown eyes glowed with concern for him. No, the reason he couldn't tell her was that he felt she would laugh.

She wouldn't call Special Branch or MI5 or even the local plods; she wouldn't tell his parents or his tutors, but he could just imagine her holding her face in her hands and shaking with laughter while her long black hair tumbled down over her breasts. 'All this, Hass, for a disembodied voice in a desert?'

Every month he saw a magazine called The Toad on the news-stand and it seemed devoted only to showing how fake and dishonest the public world really was. On radio and television, he felt bombarded by cynicism about current affairs, about politics and, within certain limits of correctness, religion.

This low-minded national scepticism was part of what he wanted to leave behind in his devotion to what was pure and eternal. No kafir or Jew would ever understand just how spiritual and how demanding Islam really was; in the marrow of its being it meant that every breath and every thought you had was touched by the divine. Hassan's difficulty was that as a native Scotsman, resident there or in godless London all his life, he was saturated with British culture; his difficulty, if he could have been truthful to himself about it, was that he found The Toad quite funny.

Shahla was a Muslim and a friend; she shared the outlines of his identity; but she was also a danger because she had balanced things in such a different way. The more he was drawn to her, the more he had to keep away.

On the ferry, Hassan noticed that most of the conversations he overheard were about money - or rather, about price and value. The chips, the beer, the duty-free drink ... They were obsessed by it, and it made him long for cooler, more spiritual air. His father had often told him as a child that their religion had sprung up because the Prophet was shocked that the people of his tribe were so mercenary. The backbone of Islam, in Knocker's version, was the need for generosity, alms-giving - for sharing with the weaker members of the group.

Hassan remembered coming in his parents' car to France when he was eight or nine, when the ugly materialism of his fellow countrymen, and their drunkenness, had not particularly bothered him. Now everything he saw affirmed the Prophet's words. Every crude action and word of those around him made him more convinced that he alone on the gently heaving ferry had access to the truth. It was exhilarating - the way that everything, every detail, every observation, played into his heady conviction. It was almost, he imagined, like being in love.

At Calais docks, he boarded the shuttle bus, then saw a taxi draw up ahead and drop its passenger. He went to the front of the bus and asked the driver to release him. She opened the double doors with a pneumatic hiss and he was in time to catch the taxi and instruct him, 'Centre ville.' ('Not "sontruh vee". You sound the "l": "sontruh veal",' Shahla had stressed.)

Just outside the dock area were bars called Le Pub and Le Liverpool, where Hassan pictured busloads of vomiting English fans on their way back from a match.

The driver began talking to him conversationally, so Hassan said 'Pardon', pulled his phone from his pocket and feigned a call. He had wondered whether he should perhaps pretend to be deaf, to wear an obvious hearing aid, but then wondered how many deaf Pakis took a taxi into Calais. Be normal, always normal, Salim had said.

He was deposited near the huge town hall. The driver gave him a card with his number and told him, so far as Hassan could understand, to ask in a shop and anyone would call the cab for him. To gather his thoughts, Hassan went to look at the statue of The Burghers of Calais by Rodin. The dejected men in their robes and chains had outsize flat feet; some of them looked more like bronze apes than town councillors.

It was three o'clock and growing dark already. Hassan had forgotten to bring his gloves, and his hands were cold. They always were in winter; it was presumably a genetic weakness that harked back to his ancestors in the warm Mirpur Valley. Or was that an impermissible thought?

Hassan walked down the Boulevard Jacquard with its half-hearted Christmas lights. He looked into a pharmacy on the left, advertised by its large and flashing green cross. It was forbiddingly empty, with a serious bespectacled woman behind the counter. 'Edith Dumont. Pharmacien' it said on the glass door. He could imagine her saying, 'And why exactly do you require so much hair dye?'

He had the answer. 'Je suis coiffeur.' 'Zher swee quaff-urr.' He had got Shahla to spell it out for him in a conversational game of what might be said to him by people he met on holiday. He'd also taken a few business cards with the blessing of the local hairdresser in Havering.

The eye of Edith Dumont, however, was too forbidding. He tried the shop across the road, then the one in the Boulevard Gambetta, without ever feeling he could manage it. How odd it was they all sold so much homeopathic stuff and 'produits veterinaires' - dog food - as well as skin tonics advertised by naked women with golden skin. Finally, he tried the supermarket at the far end of the Centre Commercial, the indoor shopping centre. At least he wouldn't have to speak to anyone there, but could just load a trolley. His eyes scanned the ceiling for CCTV cameras; none were visible, but perhaps they were just better hidden than at home.

The 'Cheveux' section of the supermarket was huge, but the amount of hydrogen peroxide in a bottle of proprietary colouring was so small that he would need to buy up the whole place and all its reserve stock. The hardware section had variations of something called Javel in large enough bottles, but its active ingredient was chlorine; it was bleach, but of the wrong kind.

Hassan walked swiftly back down the overheated mall, with its tinny music and sweet smell, past a shop selling women's underclothes where a kafir poster girl in scarlet suspenders pushed her breasts against the glass, and out into the freezing air.

He found an alley where he was unobserved, then bent to say a brief prayer.

In a twenty-four-hour brasserie on the Boulevard La Fayette, he ordered something easy to translate - 'Une omelette' - and gave the waiter the taxi driver's card.

'Pouvez-vous--'

'Oui, oui.' It was clearly not the first time the waiter had been asked.

Ten minutes later he was in the back of a sickly scented people carrier on his way to the out-of-town hairdressing supplier whose address he'd printed off the Internet and now handed without speaking to the driver. The shop was a fifteen-minute drive away on the edge of an industrial zone, and had a counter in front with stockroom shelves behind, like a builders' merchant in London.

On the counter Hassan placed a piece of paper, on which he'd written his order, and one of the cards from his local hairdresser, in case he needed proof to qualify for the cash-and-carry discount.

The shopkeeper was a man of about sixty in denim overalls with greasy grey hair and thick glasses. He fetched a cardboard box, about the size of a case of wine, from the back of the stores and placed it on the counter with an effortful grunt. For the sake of realism, Hassan handed over a second piece of paper requesting twenty litres of conditioner. He paid in cash.

With the boxes in the back of the people carrier, Hassan said to the driver, 'OK, maintenant vin. Supermarche.'

It was dark by the time they reached the wine warehouse, which was on the edge of a different industrial zone, apparently on the other side of Calais.

The driver looked reluctant to wait a second time, but Hassan showed him the large roll of euros in his pocket and the man nodded.

On the concrete slab inside the warehouse were thousands of different wines and vintages displayed in open wooden boxes. Rhone, Roussillon, Alsace ... The places and the chateaux meant nothing to Hassan, who wanted one thing only: screw tops. Had the French ever heard of such things? he wondered, as he went from one primly corked burgundy to another. Eventually, among the roses of Bordeaux, his search was rewarded. He put a case in his trolley and took it to the checkout.

A young man passed a hand-held bleeper over it and the price rang up on the electronic till.

'Pouvez-vous, er ... ?' Hassan mimed lifting the case with one hand and the young man nodded. He tied some hairy string round the carton in such a way that it made a primitive handle.

'Merci,' said Hassan, parting with more euros from his roll. 'Toilettes?'

The man said something he didn't understand, but Hassan followed his gesture clearly enough. He carried the case in the direction indicated, through the door, and secreted it under the sink. He went quickly back to the taxi, held up three fingers to the driver, saying 'Trois minutes', and carried the carton of hydrogen peroxide back across the floor of the warehouse to the lavatory. He took both boxes into the cubicle and locked the door.

There was something profoundly satisfying about pouring away alcohol, then refilling the wine bottles with a purer liquid - something closer to the heart of the almighty God. Hassan gargled with some of the wine and spat it down the seatless lavatory; then he splashed some down the front of his clothes to make himself smell like a kafir on a Christmas outing. He resealed the wine carton carefully with the brown tape so that it appeared unopened.

The taxi took him back to the passenger terminal of the ferry, and he tipped the driver, though not so generously that it would stay in his mind. The next departure was not on the line he had come over with, but left in only half an hour; he bought a single ticket, disclosing his name again, then took the carton of hair conditioner to the Gents and dumped it in a cubicle.

He was ready to go. He said a brief prayer, opened the lavatory door and made for the security area to which he had been directed by the ticket clerk.

Two bored young men stood by the scanner and the metal detector. Hassan hoisted the wine box on to the conveyor belt and placed his jacket in a plastic tray behind it. In a moment of inspiration, he left his mobile phone in his trouser pocket, so that when he walked through the metal detector, it let out a screech. In the ensuing body search, the finding of the cellphone and the re-passing of the detector, nobody took any notice of the case of Bordeaux Rose as it chugged slowly on the runners down to the end of the ramp.

Hassan made male drinking noises, laughed and breathed fumes on the younger guard as he hoisted his 'wine' up and made his way over to the brightly lit waiting area. There were only three other foot passengers, and he expected a quiet crossing. He recited a few surah of the Koran silently to himself as he waited for the gates to the shuttle bus to open.

Hassan al-Rashid knew the Koran very well. Scriptures you take in as a child, his father told him, are with you always; they provide the landscape of your life. So when he went to his first meeting with Salim at the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque he quickly saw that he was among people who either hadn't read the book or who'd moved on from it. This surprised him. He'd expected the group to be scripturally-based.

The atmosphere, though not really religious, was collegiate and warm. Salim introduced him to the others - about twenty-five, all men - and they went to pray. Afterwards, they had fruit juice and cigarettes while they listened to a speaker in the meeting room. The speaker referred to a famous book by Ghulam Sarwar, and Hassan remembered it from comparative religion classes at school in Renfrew. It was a basic text read by British schoolchildren of all faiths; its central claim was that in true Islam there was no distinction between religious belief and political action. Islam contained everything that was necessary for men to run and build their own societies. The only problem was that there was not yet a truly Islamic state anywhere in the world: kings, generals, dictators or Westernised democracy got in the way. It followed that, since religion and politics were coterminous, the task of the believer was a practical one: to build the true state - the pure Islamic model that had been absent since the last caliph.

'That's my simple proposal for you today,' concluded the speaker, a softly spoken man of about thirty. 'And it's a more inviting life task than that available to the Christian or the Jew. They believe their political structures are separate from spiritual beliefs. They also believe they have already achieved civil perfection. Their idea of this is ... the United States of America.'

There was some low satirical laughter.

Hassan was not impressed by the speaker. When at the age of sixteen he'd first told his father about this idea of an Islamic state, Knocker had ridiculed it. 'It's not in the Koran,' he said, 'it's a pure invention. Who's filled your head with this nonsense?'

'A book they teach us all at school.'

Knocker was appalled. 'And who wrote this rubbish?'

'His name is Ghulam Sarwar.'

'That joker!' said Knocker. 'He's not an imam, he's a business management lecturer! How come they pass that stuff around?'

'I don't know, but that's what's given out. To all the children. Of all faiths.'

Shame-faced, Hassan had not mentioned the Islamic state again: he had readdressed himself to the central message of the Koran, which was to devote oneself to Allah or risk hellfire in all eternity. Of course, there was also practical advice: be kind to orphans, pay the alms levy, go to Mecca if you can, sleep only with the servant girls of your own house and not with other men's. But the overwhelming, overpowering, message of the book, which Hassan knew from back to front and of which he could recite large sections in Arabic, was that Allah was the true and only God; that, while Abraham, Noah and Jesus were decent men, the Jews and Christians were wrong in their beliefs; and that if you did not believe in Allah and Islam then you would be tortured for all time after death.

There was nothing in the Koran about the politics of building an Islamic state; the Prophet had not concerned himself with such things. So, as the discussion grew heated around him, Hassan found himself become detached from it. These young men reminded him of the members of the Left Student Group at college; there was a competition going on among them to see who could be more radical in his alignment. At college it had been a contest between the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party or the mysterious Red International. Here the name-drop of Muslim Youth International was finessed by World Islam League; Mid-East Forum was trumped by Jamaat-e-Islami. He also had misgivings about the way they referred to all non-Muslims as kafirs. It was all right for Jews to refer to non-Jews as 'Gentiles', but less so to call them 'goys'. To Hassan's ear, 'kafir' had a slur of assumed racial superiority about it.

He sighed. At least the Pudding Mill Lane Mosque had a prayer area for women. That seemed an advance on some of the places he'd visited, where row upon row of battered men's shoes were lined up outside with never a female slipper. After the political debate, matters moved into calmer waters as they read out news of football tournaments, youth camps and fund-raisers.

Afterwards, Salim put his arm round Hassan's shoulder as they walked towards the station.

'Did you enjoy it?' he said.

'Up to a point,' said Hassan. 'I don't agree with the political agenda. There's no basis for it in the Koran.'

'Religions move on,' said Salim. 'Even the word of God evolves through human interpretation. That's what theology is for. Other religions are the same. Christ had only male apostles. Now the Church of England even has female ministers.'

'I wouldn't take the Church of England as a model for anything,' said Hassan.

Salim laughed. 'Of course not. But you can look at it like this. True Muslims need to live in a society that respects their beliefs and gives them every chance of enjoying paradise when they die. Whether the Koran contains instruction to the last letter for making this new society is something the textual scholars can dispute. But meanwhile is it such a terrible aspiration to want to live in such a good place on earth or to want to help to build it?'

'If you put it like that, then--'

'I do put it like that,' said Salim. His deep voice was reasonable and reassuring; he seemed to have reserves of eloquence he'd kept hidden at their first meeting in the juice bar.

'Can I give you a lift? That's my old banger over there by the fence. Where do you live?'

'It's OK,' said Hassan. 'I'll take the train.'

'It's a DLR station. It's probably not open at this time of the evening. Come on. Hop in. It's no trouble.'

As the ferry was leaving for Dover, a strange thing happened: it began to fill up rapidly. Several coaches must have caught it just in time, Hassan thought, as he tried to find a seat away from the slopping of alcohol. He was pushed out of the way by a fat woman in her sixties making for the Food Court. 'Look at 'er go! Like a bloody greyhound!' her jovial companion shouted. Amongst the crowd of new passengers was a sense of hilarious relief at being homeward bound; a day on foreign soil had been enough. They carried pyramids of pale chips from the servery and ate them with their hands.

Next to the Food Court was a Club Lounge, though you had to pay to go in: PS15 to escape the rabble, read free copies of the tabloids and have 'complimentary' coffee. Hassan didn't want to stand out from the crowd; he found a seat among the beer-drinkers downstairs and noticed that the woman opposite was the one who had sat next to him on the shuttle bus to the ferry: young, Indian, quite well dressed, reading a middlebrow bestseller - typical, he thought, of the new MI5 recruits.

He looked down the deck to see if he could plausibly escape. There was a Cafe Bravo concession at the front of the ferry, but its queue had at least thirty people in it. At the other end of the deck was - of course - a giant bar. It was a nuisance to lug his heavy wine case down there, but he wanted to see if the suspicious woman followed.

'Any spirit. Double it for an extra PS1,' said a notice behind the bar, where Hassan positioned himself, with a good view of the whole room.

Some of the kafirs were so fat they could barely manage to get the trays full of lager and crisps back to their tables; many of them used sticks to help the knees that had given way beneath their weight. The younger ones sprawled on the red seats with their pierced bellies showing as they rolled down in lard layers over their low-cut jeans. Hassan noticed how many of the people in the bar were misshapen or deformed, though felt a slight unease at doing so, not sure at what point religious righteousness became a kind of racism. Above their heads came the fizzle and thump of a music video on a screen where a woman with dyed hair mimed fellatio on a microphone.

Hassan thought of the Prophet's life and of how in his religion God was immanent in all things, as he had been in the Sunna - the everyday actions of the Prophet; there was no disjunction between the sacred and divine because to a true believer all was holy, all was pure.

But suppose the afterlife was not as the Book described but a low-ceilinged, strip-lit hell like this? Not a garden of peace but a kafir ferry?

Hassan smiled as he placed his foot on top of his wine carton in a proprietary and confident way. He had no real concerns. His belief, at moments like this, was adamantine.

At Dover, he had to wait on the cold, deserted platform for an hour for a train to Charing Cross. There was a security announcement about unattended parcels.

With his own package tightly in his hand, Hassan walked up and down to keep warm. Through the glass door of the station manager's office he saw bored men waiting for their cold shift to be over. How few human beings lived life as if it mattered, he thought; to most of them it was just a case of passing time.

Eventually, the train came and he found an empty carriage. It was nearly nine o'clock and he had been on the go for fifteen hours. With his feet on the wine box, Hassan settled back against the headrest and fell asleep in the fug.

Above his head was a picture of a lone red suitcase with the words 'Increased threat to your security'.

II

Spike Borowski had arrived at the Worcester Park training ground at nine-fifteen that morning and parked his small German saloon. His customised large German saloon was on order from Bavaria and the dealer had lent him the embarrassing two-litre, two-door job in the meantime. In his kitbag he carried two pairs of boots, underwear, sweatshirts, gloves, a selection of crucifixes and two dictionaries. Max, the bootman, had told him on the phone there would be fluorescent bibs and a selection of team kit at the ground. Borowski looked up 'bib' in his Polish-English dictionary, where it offered 'sliniaczek'. His English-English dictionary defined bib as 'child's food guard'; though 'bib v' was also defined as'drink alcohol to excess'. He'd heard a lot about English footballers' habits, but he didn't think the manager would kick off a training session by drinking to excess. Afterwards, maybe.

At first, Spike thought his bossy German satnav had brought him to the wrong place. This was not what he understood by training ground, which had always been a hectare of rough grass with iron railings and a single-storey building with an outside urinal. This was something else entirely. For a start, there were seven football pitches, one with stands for spectators and one, AstroTurf, under cover of a giant tent. The building was painted white over three floors with a pillared portico; it reminded him of the country club in Connecticut he'd seen in an American comedy film. However, the security man on the gate seemed to recognise him and nodded him through with a smile.

Inside the main building, on the first floor, was a canteen, where some of the first-team squad were eating a late breakfast. Spike had met a couple of them at the ground when he posed on the pitch after signing his papers and they nodded in his direction. One was eating toast with some sort of chocolate spread smeared on it, the other was spooning in cereal.

Spike took a tray and pushed it along in front of the servery. He took a cup of tea. He had already eaten eggs and rye bread in the hotel in Chelsea where he was staying till they'd found him a flat, and they were lying heavy on his stomach.

'Fancy a smoothie, love?' said the woman behind the counter.

'What?'

She picked up a bottle and showed him.

He shook his head and moved off. "'Fancy a smoothie, love?"' What did it all mean? The way these people spoke was not in the books; he was already aware of that, and had taken steps to understand them. Using the computer in the 'office suite' at his hotel, Spike had found a website called interbabel.com that linked into numerous thesauruses and colloquial translation engines. Interbabel.com certainly had the dope. It had so many possibilities, in fact, that he was spoilt for choice, over-informed. This didn't stop him pursuing all the links and meanings, all the definitions and re-translations: he'd graduated in politics and economics before taking up football professionally; he owed his degree to his willingness to study thoroughly, and he carried the habit through to all parts of life. 'Stubborn' ('przymiotnik') or 'dogged' ('uparty') were words the press in his own country applied to him.

After breakfast, Spike went down the corridor, past numerous carpeted offices with shimmering flat-screen computers, including the private lair of the Turkish manager, Mehmet Kundak, to the team room. In sweatshirts and shorts, sipping glucose drinks, the first team lolled on rows of padded luxury-leather recliners. Kundak came in from a side door and told Archie Lawler, the coach, to start the video, which showed film of the last time they had played that evening's opponents. Occasionally, Lawler would pause it and point out the shape of the opposing midfield, the triangles they played.

After about five minutes, Spike began to panic. Although the score had apparently been 1-1, his team had never won the ball. Had he joined them on false pretences? Were they really that inept? Wave after wave of opposition attacks came crashing down on them, but as they watched it the players looked unembarrassed and Lawler much less alarmed than he needed to be.

'Why we never have the ball?' Spike asked an African sitting next to him.

'We know how we play,' he said. 'The film just shows their moves. It's cut.'

Spike laughed. 'Is big relief.'

The African ignored him. After some brutal exhortation from Lawler about the evening game, Spike followed the other players downstairs through a huge carpeted vestibule and into a corridor from which led numerous treatment and changing rooms. He got ready, took one of the club tracksuits, size XL, crossed himself and trotted out on to the pitches.

The first-team squad numbered thirty-eight, but without the nine on loan and the chronically injured there were twenty-five at the training ground. Seven reserves went off to train with the youth teams, leaving the eighteen-man squad, including Spike, for the evening league game. They gathered by the side of one of the pitches and bent themselves into postures like figures in a mediaeval depiction of hell. They locked hands round their ankles; they pulled one foot up into the buttocks until they could bear it no longer; they reached for the sky and laid their hands flat on the ground while standing. Spike joined in, though not wholeheartedly. After forty minutes, when every muscle fibre had been tweaked, expanded, rested and stretched again, they were thought ready for some action.

'We're going to be working on set pieces,' said Archie Lawler. 'Spike, get on the far post.'

For half an hour, Spike found himself doing things he hadn't done since the youth team in Gdansk. He was marked by the reserve centre back, Charles Watiyah, a giant Liberian, who was keen to force his way into the first team. Every time Spike went to head the ball, he found himself pushed in the small of the back; it was nothing violent, just enough to unbalance him. On the occasions he became airborne, he found the Liberian's head in his mouth. The crosses were provided by little Danny Bective, one of the few English players in the squad, a midfielder with what Archie Lawler had described to a television interviewer as an 'unbelievable engine'. He kicked the ball over a wall of life-size plastic players in bright red shirts that Lawler had wheeled up and left only eight yards in front of him. There was no point in moving it back the mandatory ten, because that never happened in a professional game.

'All right, Vladimir, you get on the far post now,' said Archie. 'Spike, you take a blow.'

Vladimir Stoev was a Bulgarian who had been at the club for two seasons and had scored eighteen goals the year before. He had once been banned for three months when a drug test found traces of something he claimed had come from an anti-asthma medicine; this, and his origins, had got him the nickname Vlad the Inhaler. Spike watched how Vlad dealt with Charles Watiyah, by jumping up and down like an excited child, moving around so he was not in one place long enough to be fouled, then making sure he jumped early, as soon as Bective had begun his three-pace run-up to deliver the cross. Sometimes Vlad was already on the way down by the time the ball arrived, but he could often maintain his height by leaning on Watiyah's shoulder. Finally, he elbowed him in the face and managed to head the ball past the stand-in goalkeeper.

'The beautiful game,' said Spike to the Egyptian left back, Ali al-Asraf.

'Fuck off,' said al-Asraf.

Spike wondered whether he'd said the right thing. 'Is what Pele say,' he explained. But had something been lost in the translation from Portuguese to Polish to English? 'The beautiful game. The ... lovely play?' He felt the links of interbabel.com clicking uselessly in his head.

Al-Asraf spat at his feet and trotted off to run through some cones with Danny Bective and Sean Mills.

The next part of training was 'One-Touch-He'. The players assembled in a circle with one, a small African Spike didn't know, standing in the middle. When they were ready, Archie Lawler threw a ball to one of them and he hit it first time to another, who side-footed it first time to a third, who chipped it to Spike, who nodded it on towards Vladimir. At that moment, Vlad turned and moved away, so the African in the middle was able to nip in and take the ball.

All the players began laughing, and the one next to Spike came up to him and flicked his ear, hard, with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Then every player in the circle came up and did the same thing. Seventeen stinging flicks were administered by seventeen laughing millionaires, before the game resumed, with Spike as 'he'. He was sweating and panting before a slightly underhit pass enabled him to dispossess Sean Mills with an ugly lunge. When Mills had stopped swearing, Spike enjoyed flicking his ear along with the others.

After showering, Spike explored the ground-floor warren further. There was a resident doctor in a small office of his own and, opposite, was a glass-panelled door with the words 'Nutrition Team' stencilled in black. In the treatment room afterwards, Spike was offered a rub-down by Kenny Hawtrey, the chief physio. He saw that two of the other players were already stretched out on the green and white couches having their calf muscles worked over and thought it would be the right thing to do. On the table next to him was Danny Bective.

Spike tried to remember what the assistant manager had said about him on television. Yes. 'Archie say you have incredible motor,' said Spike.

'Yeah, it's a Sherman Pathfinder.'

'Er ... And you do much running.'

'Yeah. They like that.'

'What happens now?' said Spike.

'Normally we have dinner upstairs and go home. But because there's an evening match we'll have a big meal at teatime in the hotel near the ground.'

When they had had their showers and were in the car park, nineteen men climbing alone into nineteen large cars, Danny said, 'By the way, mate. Word of warning. Don't let Kenny Hawtrey rub you down.'

'Why?'

'Shirt-lifter.'

'What?'

'Iron hoof.'

'Sorry?'

'Fuckin' bummer, innit?'

'Aah ...'

Something about Danny's pose made Spike understand. As he was about to climb into his car, one of the press liaison people took his elbow.

'Tadeusz, do you mind giving a quick autograph? Young lad over there, he's bunked off school to come and see you.'

'Sure, I meet him.'

Standing by the exit from the car park was a youth of about sixteen, slightly built, with curly brown hair and a few pink spots on his chin. He wore a tee shirt, jeans off his hip and a blue hooded top.

'Hello. I am Spike Borowksi.' He held out his hand to the young man.

'Finbar Veals,' he said softly, looking down at his new white trainers.

None of the three syllables sounded like a name to Spike. English people didn't seem to be called John Robinson any more; but linguistically it had been a bad day all round.

'You want I sign your book?'

'Yeah, thanks.' Finn held out a battered school notebook.

'How long you support the team?' said Spike. 'Since you a kid?'

'No, I ... er, I don't. I ... support a different team.'

'What?' Spike laughed. 'Maybe you support Chelsea!'

'No, I ... It doesn't matter. I wanted to meet you because I'm thinking of signing you in my Dream Team eleven. Do you know that website?'

'No. You tell me.'

Finn blushed. 'The Buyers' Guide said you're like Carlton King with a first touch, or Gary Fowler with an IQ.'

Spike laughed. 'Is very rude. Your newspapers too. They say something like I play like Orlando if he stop being a girl. Is not kind to Orlando. Just because he wear earrings.'

'No, I think it's because he dives. Do you think you are going to score a lot of goals? Are you feeling confident?' The meeting was important to Finn, and he found his natural shyness ebbing.

'If I get picked by the boss I will score. But we have four strikers, so is not easy.'

'But he won't play Vladimir Stoev now you're here, will he? He hasn't scored for months.'

'Is strong player.' Spike was thinking of the elbow to Charles Watiyah's face.

'They say he only scores if there's a full moon,' said Finn.

Spike laughed. 'OK ... Finbar? That your name?'

'Finn.'

'OK. Finn. You also go to training ground of team you support?'

'No.'

'But here you come.'

'It was important for me to see you in the flesh.'

'For a place in your team which is not in flesh.'

'Yes,' said Finn. 'I know it sounds weird, but all the guys in my year have teams in Dream Team and I don't want to be relegated.'

Spike looked at him oddly. 'I think you live in dreamland. Like Disneyland, yeah?'

'Well, no, I think it's the real thing.'

'And who else in your special team?'

Finn went through his current eleven. There were two England international centre halves, a Congolese enforcer in front of them, a Brazilian show pony on the wing and a giant Dane in goal. They were his big-money signings. The rest had been squeezed out of the budget that remained to him; they included a psychopathic Guinean with a dyed white goatee, a Welshman on a short fuse and a one-sided Colombian. He had sold a French striker and needed a steady supply of goals.

'I see,' said Spike. 'You make some good choice and some bad ones, I think. Now you meet me, what you say? Think I can score goals on the Internet?'

'You have to score them on the pitch, then they can be counted on the--'

'I know, I understand,' said Spike. 'But did you think I was good enough in training? You watch?'

'Yes, I saw.' Finn felt suddenly shy again. How was he to tell this man he needed to watch out for Sean Mills and Danny Bective, how they'd shafted the prospects of the last expensive striker?

'I must go now,' said Finn. His encounter with reality had left him drained.

'You want I take you somewhere in the car?'

'No, no, thanks. I'm fine. Thank you for the autograph.'

Finn turned and jogged off, out of the car park and down the pavement by the suburban street.

Spike watched him go and frowned. Why wasn't the kid at school?

Finn was already in the back of a black taxi. It was useful that the training ground was in the right direction for his second point of call on his day out: a pet cemetery in Esher.

He'd set his alarm for 8.32 that morning and called the direct line to the school office while his voice was still sounding fogged by sleep. Registration was at 8.40 and the form teachers were in the classroom by 8.30 so he had every chance of getting Peggy, the friendly school secretary. His luck - or timing - was in, and it was easy to convince Peggy that he felt 'terrible'. He did: he always felt awful when he first woke up. His father had long since left the house, while his mother, he guessed, would be drinking milky coffee in one of the larcenously priced delis on Holland Park Avenue. Finn went downstairs in his tee shirt and pyjama bottoms and made himself some hot chocolate and a toasted bagel with crunchy chocolate spread. He nodded to Marla, the Brazilian cleaner, as she passed the fizzing iron over one of his father's shirts in the laundry room. Marla spoke hardly any English and never got to the end of the few words she did know. 'Good mor' was as far as she went in greeting; she thought Finn's mother was called 'Vaness'.

It was a big day ahead. As well as checking out a striker for his virtual team, Finn was going to a place recommended by Ken, his best friend at school. Ken wasn't really called Ken, he was really called Leo, but when you typed Leo as predictive text on your mobile, it came out as Ken.

Ken told Finn he was mad to score his dope in Pizza Palace from a runner working for that king of rip-off artists, Liston Brown in Muswell Hill. He should go to the main supplier - to a farmer. So, at Esher station, he gave the taxi an address near West End Common. Paying for cabs was easy for Finn, as he always had cash, thanks to his Allied Royal debit card. His balance was kept permanently topped up by a trickle-down from one of his father's accounts; John Veals fiercely resented high-street bank charges and had set up the arrangement so that Finn could never overdraw.

The taxi pulled up outside a large low villa with a gravel forecourt and a waist-high brick wall. Next to the wrought iron gates was a signboard, like those announcing bed and breakfast or a two-star hotel in Bexhill. In blue letters on a red background, it said 'Snoozetime Pet's Rest'. Finn rang the bell by the locked gates, wondering vaguely what his English teacher had said about apostrophes.

The front door of the house opened, and a slightly hunched man came towards Finn over the gravel. He wore an anorak over tracksuit bottoms with brown leather shoes, had smudged spectacles on a long cord round his neck and grey hair sticking out under the sides of a purple baseball cap. There was something wrong about old people wearing baseball caps, Finn felt; and this man looked as though he'd slept in his clothes for a few days.

'I've come about a cat,' said Finn, as instructed by Ken.

'I see. And is Pussy still with us?'

'Er ... Yes, but it's kind of on its last legs. Can you show me some, like, you know, what you do if I bring it.'

The man unlocked the gate. He held out his hand to Finn.

'Simon Tindle,' he said. 'This way please.'

'Yeah, right, er ... Finn, yeah,' Finn mumbled.

'Now then,' said Tindle, 'I can begin by showing you the Garden of Remembrance. We have a special position here, backing on to the common. Would you like to tell me a little about the beloved? I hope you don't think I'm being rude.'

'Rude? No. Why?'

'I'd hate it if you thought I was being rude. People can take things the wrong way and I don't want to cause offence.'

They were walking beside the house down an alley, through a gate and out into a large grassed area of perhaps an acre, criss-crossed by gravel paths.

'Most of my friends,' said Tindle, 'prefer to take the departed home with them but one or two are buried here. You can see all our different stone memorials.'

'When you say "friends" ...'

'I call them friends because I don't like to think of them as clients. You'd be my friend if you decide to leave Pussy with us.'

'I see. So I, like, bring the ... like, the body ... and then what?'

'I give you a special heat-sealed thermabag now. You pop Pussy into it when she passes, then you bring her down here on the train. Or in the car. It doesn't matter, so long as it's within twenty-four hours. After that, it can get a little ... I hope you don't think I'm being--'

'No, no. Not at all. Bring him down here.'

'Oh. Pussy's a boy is he?'

'Well, whatever, bring her down and then?'

'We have a crematorium. You see over there? With the chimney.'

Finn followed the direction of Tindle's pointing finger to a large outhouse.

'Looks like Auschwitz,' Finn said, without thinking. They were always doing the Holocaust at school. That and climate change.

'Oh dear.'

'I'm sorry,' said Finn, 'I didn't mean to be--'

'No, not to worry, it's very upsetting when the dear one is ready to pass. I can show you inside the crematorium if you like. It's very humane.'

'No, that's all right. I believe you. Then what?'

'Then I give you the cremains.'

'The "cremains"?'

'Yes, the ashes if you prefer. I think that sounds rather coarse, though. Cremains is more dignified, don't you think?'

'OK.'

'And we choose a casket. I can show you a selection when we go indoors. We can do that now, if you like. And most of my friends like a cup of tea after the cremation. And then you take Pussy home.'

They were now standing outside the aluminium-framed French doors at the back of the house.

'What I really wanted,' said Finn, following the formula Ken had told him, 'was the full deluxe service with grass covering.'

Tindle stopped. 'Oh, I see. Aren't you rather ... I hope you don't think I'm being rude, but aren't you rather young?'

'Eighteen,' said Finn, pulling himself up to his full height.

'All right. Come on then. This way.'

Finn followed Tindle down some crazy paving, past a bronze bust of an evil-looking German Shepherd with the words 'Ever Faithful' on a plaque beneath it, round the back of the crematorium and into a dropped level of garden, where there was another low shed, this time without a chimney. Tindle took a bunch of keys from a purse in his anorak pocket and fumbled with the two heavy padlocks on the door. He held the door back for Finn.

It took Finn's eyes a moment to adjust to the overhead lights.

'Ah, methinks I see the metal halide blink!' said Tindle. 'The 1,000-watt bulb can put out your eyes if you're not careful. But they put out ever so much more light than your old fluorescent.'

'Heat, too,' said Finn.

'It would be a lot hotter without the fan up there. But it has to be pretty hot. And humid.'

Now that Finn was standing next to Tindle in the germinating atmosphere, he could tell his guess about the old man's clothes was right.

Marijuana plants filled the shed from wall to wall. They were potted on wooden trestles at about waist height, while the lights, in long galvanised metal shades, were suspended on chains from the ceiling, drenching each plant, forcing its growth, so that the room was filled with an odour that made Finn's mouth go dry and his stomach tense in reflex.

'This is a hydroponic system,' said Tindle. 'That means no soil. It's cleaner, quicker and you get more weed. Instead of getting the nutrients haphazardly from the soil, the plants get it in exactly the right amount through what we put in the water.'

Finn inspected the array of tubes and pipes that fed the flourishing plants in their plastic containers, sweating under the lights. They had woolly buds around the top, the promise of power, of great synapse-blocking and reality adjustment.

'This is Aurora Indica, very potent,' said Tindle. 'This little madam is my version of Super Skunk, which was an attempt to beef up the famous Skunk Number One. I've crossed it with a strain of Purple Haze for quick effect.'

'Sounds great.'

'Let me show you through here,' said Tindle, opening a locked door at the end of the room. 'In here we use the sea-of-green method.'

In the second area, the plants made a denser, lower canopy. The idea was to pack the space with smaller plants that matured earlier and force a continuous year-round harvest, Tindle explained. 'We're concentrating all the effort in the main cola, this bit here at the top of the plant,' he said. 'It gets so heavy that we have to support it with chicken wire. When they get nice and tall, we tie the top back down on the stem, like here, leave it for a week and then let it go - and hey presto, it's got twice as bushy. It's a year-round harvest festival.'

'Yeah, great,' said Finn. Something about the room made him uneasy. It was all so unnatural. When he'd first read about marijuana he'd pictured it as a mild weed that grew beside the road in sunshine and was smoked by laughing girls in California. This shed looked like a factory, where everything was forced, intensified.

'Well, anyway, that's enough horticulture,' said Tindle. 'Now let's do some business. Shall we go to my office?'

'All right.' Finn felt nervous. He knew how much he paid at Pizza Palace to Liston Brown's runner for half a sandwich bag of weed and he knew it ought to be cheaper if he was cutting out the middle man, but he wasn't sure he'd know the jargon. If he was confused, he'd be too embarrassed to reveal his ignorance.

Tindle locked the grow shed and led him over the crazy paving to the French doors at the back of his house. With his foot, he cleared away a tortoiseshell cat that was in the way.

'That your cat?' said Finn.

'No, it's next door's,' said Tindle, pulling back the doors. 'I haven't got pets. I don't like animals. I'm allergic.'

Indoors, he pulled the flap down on a walnut bureau, raised his greasy glasses on their string and opened a notebook. 'Now,' he said, 'what can I do you for?'

'I want something that'll give a great high. Big, powerful, but you know, no ill effects.'

'And what quantity are we talking about, young man?'

'I ... Er, what, you know, what do you, like, deal in?'

'Half a kilogram is the minimum I do. I could do you half a kilo of Super Skunk Two, cut with Aurora. That's a popular mixture. It's good value, too, because you don't need much of it.'

'What's it feel like?'

'I don't smoke myself because of my allergies. But I believe it's as good as anything you'll get in London.'

'How much is it?'

'Hang on. Let me have a look at my little book of rules. Right. Here we are. The street price would be about PS45 an ounce - if you could get it. But you can't get anything of this quality on the street. But let's just say for the sake of argument you could. One kilo is thirty-five ounces. Now let me see.' Tindle tapped a calculator. 'As a very special offer, I could let you have it for PS700.'

'Do you take debit cards?'

'Yes, of course. Here's my little johnson. You give me the card. Now you put in your number while I go and get the goods.'

Finn keyed in 1991, the year of his birth. PIN ACCEPTED.

Tindle returned with a giant zip-sealed polythene bag full of skunk and tore off the receipt from the PDQ machine. The slim curl of paper said 'Snoozetime Pet's Rest. 700.00 Received With Thanks.'

Some big coffin, thought Finn.

The first-team players were driven by coach to a modern hotel about a mile from the ground of the team they were playing. In a private dining room they helped themselves to food from the sideboard. There was pasta with tomatoes, pasta with spinach, pasta with peas and sweetcorn, pasta with more pasta and shreds of chicken, baked potatoes with pasta on the side, risotto and pilaff with pasta salad. Spike felt like a few pork sausages or a beef goulash with sour cream, but there was nothing like that on offer. He took a piled plate of pasta with bits of bacon and chicken and tried to pick the meat from the rigatoni. There was rice pudding to follow, with yoghurt and bananas. It was a bit like being in hospital, Spike thought.

What the players ate was carefully overseen by a young man called Gary Foskett, the senior club nutritionist. He had pale red hair, white flaky skin and a slight tremor in his hand.

Towards the end of lunch, the manager finally joined them. Mehmet Kundak had done well in his native Turkey and less well in Italy; his appointment had been a surprise, but he managed to carry with him an air of superior knowledge, intensified by the fact that he seldom spoke. Kundak left the set pieces, the cones and the stretching to Archie Lawler, while he chain-smoked over videos of the opposition. His substitutions were sudden and contrary, but often successful. It was known that he sometimes took against players for no reason. He had paid PS9 million for a Serie A striker the year before and picked him only once, in a Cup match away to a third-division side. His loyalty to players like Danny Bective and Sean Mills, cannon fodder of an English kind that hadn't changed since Agincourt, endeared him to traditional supporters who naturally distrusted the Australian private-equity company which owned the club.

Kundak greeted some of the senior players with a friendly hand on the shoulder. He had large rings round his heavily bagged eyes and their darkness was intensified by the sensitive transitional lenses of his glasses, which seemed to count even a 60-watt bulb as a cue for blackout.

'How you like it?' he said to Spike.

'Yes. OK,' said Spike.

'You like the food?'

'Yes. OK. It stuff you up.'

'It make you run. Run all day like Bective. Eh, Danny?'

'Yes, gaffer.'

'Tell the truth,' said Kundak, 'is shit English food. If you play well Saturday I take you to my best restaurant. OK?'

'Thank you,' said Spike. 'So I play for the team on Saturday?'

'Too right you play for the fucking team. No prima donnas here, mate,' said Sean Mills, and everyone laughed, except the small African and Ali al-Asraf.

After eating, Spike was sent to room 416 with Vladimir and told to relax. Vladimir stretched out his six feet four inches on the bed and scratched his heavy, week-old beard. He was a frightening prospect, even prone. From his bag, he took out a small double-screened games console and began to play something in which baby dragons collected gold coins to the accompaniment of bleeping sounds.

Spike hated lying down on a bed during the day. It reminded him of being a child, when his mother would make him go up and have a rest every afternoon in their flat overlooking the shipyards in Gdansk. Tadeusz, as he was called then, lay and watched the cobweb that joined the flex of the suspended light to a piece of cracked plaster in the ceiling. He looked out of the window, then closed his eyes and wondered at the way that he could still 'see' after-images of what he had glimpsed through the glass.

He went and turned the television on, but Vladimir protested. 'I try to concentrate, you fool,' he said. 'I have nineteen pieces. One more and I go up a level.'

Spike lay down on the bed and flicked through the Gideon Bible. He'd know better another time: get a different room-mate, bring a book. This Bulgarian was a jackass. Spike let his mind turn to his girlfriend, a Russian called Olya he'd met at a sponsored event when he'd first come to sign with his new club. Just thinking of her made Spike happy.

He dozed a bit, picturing Olya, naked in the hotel bathroom. She had that happy accident of a small ribcage and breasts that seemed disproportionately large: not in any freakish way, but just as though they belonged to her older sister. She was a little shy of them, he thought. She had dark, almost black hair, and naughty brown eyes; although her legs and hips were slim there was something not quite perfect about their proportions: they were touchingly, credibly flawed and when she took her clothes off he didn't feel that he was looking at a model but as though he'd surprised a fellow student in the changing rooms at university. Her English was as good as his, perhaps a little better, and she'd known who he was as soon as he went up and introduced himself at the club on Piccadilly. She worked in 'event management', though she was keen to move on, and Spike had agreed to make a few enquiries on her behalf at the club's headquarters. He wasn't sure what she'd done at home in the Ukraine, then in Moscow, before she came to London and she didn't seem to want to talk about it. Privately he thought it was a ridiculous idea to set such a girl loose among the old women who worked in merchandise and admin at the club; they'd just stare at her and wonder why she wasn't modelling. But maybe that was how you got started, he thought. Anyway, if it kept her happy, he'd ask around.

Spike dozed, and dreamed of Olya coming off the bench with ten minutes to go and scoring against Man U at Old Trafford. He didn't like it that all the other guys were staring at her, and she should have been in the club away kit, not topless.

He was awoken by Kenny Hawtrey knocking at the door.

'Wake up, sleeping beauties. Time to go to the ground.'

III

John Veals had also had a busy morning. He had a breakfast meeting with a man called Alan Wing, who worked for Vic Small at Greenview Alternative Investment Services. Veals's chosen meeting place was the Oasis Coffee Bar on the top section of Kennington Road, where it runs down from Lambeth North Tube station towards the Imperial War Museum. It was about as anonymous a stretch of road as you could find in central London: a straight strip of asphalt that joined nothing much to something else. The coffee wasn't even from an espresso machine but from a clouded glass jug, and tasted of acorns; Veals, who'd eaten at home, treated Wing to a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich from a sizzling waffle iron.

Wing handed over an A4 buff envelope that contained the fruit of two weeks' work. He had been following first the chief executive then, when the CEO had taken an unexpected flight to Madrid, the chairman of Allied Royal Bank. There were several photographs of the two men at work and in transit, accompanied by Wing's diary of events in which the chairman and chief executive were respectively Charlie and Eric. 'Charlie arrived for work at 7.42 by his usual car which was then parked in his reserved slot. He took the lift to the seventeenth floor. His PA was waiting. See attatched photo. Eric had breakfast meeting at Connaut Hotel with Unknown Lady (see pic). He ate kejeree, she ate bran flakes and orange juice.'

Alan Wing's photography was better than his spelling, and Veals could identify the Unknown Lady without too much trouble: she ran the bond department of one of the larger investment banks. The meeting could be for any number of reasons, but none of them suggested any particular cause for alarm to John Veals, even as he entered the most gut-wrenching hours of his trade.

What was worrying Veals was a strange, almost neurotic anxiety: suppose the rumour that he was about to start turned out to be true. He had weighed up the situation and decided that the way to boost the ARB share price was for people to believe that it was about to be taken over by First New York. If John Veals, in his bath at midnight, had concluded that such a marriage for ARB was highly credible, why would no one at either bank, people who were paid to think of little else, have concluded something similar? There would be something of Sod's Law, of almost unbelievable irony if this turned out to be the case; but in Veals's ever-turning calculations, the worst outcome was always the one on which to focus longest.

'All right. Keep at it,' he said. 'You have my mobile number. Call me if anything with the faintest whiff of the American comes up. Understand?'

Wing opened his mouth to let a piece of scalding tomato drop on to the plate. 'How do they get these things so hot?' he spluttered.

Veals flicked through the wad of yellow expenses sheets that accompanied the report. 'Don't like to go hungry, do you, Wing?'

'There was sometimes two of us. I couldn't be in two places at once.'

'I'll get the cash biked round later today. Here's something to keep you going.' He peeled six PS50 notes from a roll in his back pocket.

'Thanks, John.'

Veals stood up and looked down to where Wing was still scooping up the remains of the melted cheese. 'Well, get a fucking move on,' he said, and went out on to Kennington Road.

His next meeting was in a tennis club in Chelsea. Stewart Thackeray was a considerably more polished character than Alan Wing, though, in John Veals's view, stupider. He was a partner in an executive recruitment agency, whose offices were in Mayfair, but he was a keen tennis player and liked to mix sport with business among the potted palms of his club lounge overlooking the river.

A few pearls of sweat stood out on his forehead and receding hairline as he ordered fresh orange juice and sat back in the wickerwork chair.

'Sure you won't have anything, John? Not even a mineral water?'

'All right. Water.'

'Gosh. I think I'm getting too old for singles,' said Thackeray. 'Little bugger I just played, ten years younger, he ran down everything. I hit winner after winner and there'd be a scampering sound and the bloody ball came back again.'

'Did you win?'

'Just about. In the end.'

Veals, having done small talk, said, 'Right, Stewart. What did our friend have to say?'

Thackeray dabbed a towel against his forehead; although he'd showered and was in a suit ready to go to work, he couldn't turn off the sweat. 'Well, it was a fairly standard exit interview. He was mightily pissed off about being fired.'

'What did he do?'

'Shagged his secretary on the boardroom table.'

'Aren't you allowed to do that?'

'Not unless you're the Deputy Prime Minister.'

'I see.'

'No. I mean, Allied Royal is a proper, old-fashioned place. They have a rite of passage when you reach a certain level that you have to do this, you know, shag her on the table, but if you're caught in the act then that's it.'

'So he's pissed off with ARB.'

'Yup. It's not a great time to be looking for a job in that world. Not at his level. The situation may get better and--'

'It may get worse.'

'But in any event the climate's tense. All the big banks have toxic assets, and they haven't been quite candid about the extent of them.'

'You're teaching your fucking granny here, Stewart. But will he work for us as a consultant? Is he worth it?'

Thackeray drank some fresh orange juice and wiped the back of his hand over his lips. 'He knows a lot. He sat in on all the meetings when they took over the Spanish bank. You remember, the--'

'Yeah, yeah. So he knows all about that. What about ARB's underlying strengths and liabilities?'

'I believe so. You know, to some extent that's his pitch to future employers. He's had experience at a high level. He's selling himself as someone who's a calm head, a steady hand.'

'With a stack of inside dope.'

'Well obviously he can't work for a competitor for a hell of a long time. At least twelve months, I think.'

'But he could do some freelance.'

'You could ask him.'

'No I couldn't. I can't possibly be seen with him or anyone else from that bank.'

Thackeray raised an eyebrow.

'And you didn't hear that,' said Veals. 'Otherwise--'

'John, I never hear what you say. The acoustics in here are terrible.'

'You fucking bet. Otherwise--'

'Take it easy, John. It's been five years since we met. Five leak-proof, hermetically sealed years.'

Veals fiddled with his water glass. 'I just wish he'd shagged the secretary in the spring. I could have used him then. I think it's too late now.'

'I've never seen you like this before, John. You look really stressed.'

Veals took in a deep breath, then spoke through clenched teeth. 'I'm just covering all the options, Stewart. It's what I do. What I want you to do is this. Get this man back into your office this afternoon. Tell him you may have something. Get him interested. Then chat a bit more about ARB. Shoot the breeze. Now in this envelope I'm giving you there is one question I need to know the answer to. Make sure you ask him, then text me tonight on the number I gave you. Yes or no, that's all I need. It's belt and braces but I really want to have it. I'm shitting paving stones here.'

'Am I going to be able to work the question in?' said Thackeray.

'Of course you are. It's what you do. Old-boy chat. What did we pay you last time?'

'Twenty.'

'OK. Thirty.'

'I'll see what I can do.'

Outside, in a cold, deserted street near Chelsea Harbour, John Veals pulled out his blue cellphone, the one he used for intra-office calls, scrolled down to Martin Ryman's name and pressed the green icon.

'Martin? Meet me at the sushi conveyor belt in that Knightsbridge place at twelve noon. Don't expect to eat because you're going to Saggiorato's for lunch. Book for two. Take someone with you. Maybe Susanna Russell from HSBC. You like her, don't you? Pretty and clever: just your type. And ring Magnus Darke. Tell him you've got something for him. Arrange to meet tomorrow. Lunch. Anywhere. Throw money at it. One of those places with a psychotic chef who charges two hundred quid a head. Got it?'

Veals liked the sushi conveyor belt because it naturally threw strangers together. Although Ryman was on his 'office' phone list, he didn't actually come into Old Pye Street, and the fact that he was retained by John Veals as a consultant was known only to the pair of them; even Stephen Godley was unaware of the contract. In return for his large honorarium, and a small stake in the fund, Ryman had to drop everything when Veals called.

He was already sipping water at the chugging conveyor belt when Veals arrived at 11.55. Of the three people Veals had dealt with that morning, Ryman was immeasurably the classiest act: just as well, since he was being paid the most.

'Internet chat rooms,' said Veals. 'Know how to use them?'

'Yes, I think so. I'm going to take a bit of salmon here, John, just for appearance's sake.'

Veals knew this was a prompt for him to take some food too. One of the things he liked about Ryman was that he didn't waste words; another thing he liked was that Ryman wasn't frightened of him, not like Alan Wing or, beneath his tennis club bullshit, Stewart Thackeray.

'On your way to Saggiorato's,' Veals said, 'go to an Internet cafe. Get yourself half a dozen instant e-mail addresses. Get into a financial chat room. Pretend to be a nineteen-year-old waiter. Say, "I was waiting at a dinner party in Chelsea last night and I heard the head of First NY's London office talking about their decision to buy ARB. Their historical roots across much of the developing and former colonial world were the answer to First NY's aspirations as a truly 'global' bank ... blah blah."'

'First NY?' said Ryman, taking the purple-rimmed plastic cover off his sashimi.

'That's what I'm hearing, Martin. Then you go to a different Internet cafe this afternoon. Maybe you can do them all from the same one. You figure it out. Sign in as an amateur low-roller. You're an Australian physio who dabbles online between clients. Anything you like. You saw the waiter's posting. You make some comments. Seems a good fit. So now's a good time to buy ARB shares. Simple stuff. Tomorrow morning, see how it's going and if necessary do five or six more places. Then at lunchtime tomorrow, you drop it to Magnus Darke. Have you booked the table?'

'Yes. Darke bit my hand off. Said he's very short of material. You know, silly season, Christmas coming. We're going to a place run by that chub-faced TV chef. Darke's column is on Friday, so he can get in tomorrow fine. It's perfect timing for him.'

'Good. But today at lunch at Saggiorato's, have a word with Tony the barman. Give him this.' Veals passed two PS50 notes along the counter. 'You know Dougie Moon, the boring red-faced money broker, the guy who always sits in the window?'

'Yes, it's his canteen. I've never not seen him there.'

'Tell Tony to tell Moon in the strictest confidence that he saw our man at ARB having dinner in a private room with the chairman of First NY.'

Ryman licked his lips. He seemed less keen on this aspect of the plan; without the anonymity of the Internet, very little stood between him and the FSA - or the police. 'And then tomorrow. With Darke?'

'There was a tiny thing in the FT the other day about possible future bank mergers. Ask if he saw it. Talk about good fits. Remind him of Robert Fleming and the Chase Manhattan/J. P. Morgan sale: Old Empire and New America. Give him the reference of the chat room. Say there could be some corroboration there. Don't start a rumour, you can't do that, but point to what's already there. These journalists get most of their stuff off the Internet these days - they haven't got the time or the resources to do any research. Most of the paper's written by kids on work experience and they're just recycling one another's material via the Web. But tell Darke to be careful how he phrases it. He should just pass it off as a thought that occurred to him as he was looking back on a difficult year. "Doesn't it look a natural fit?" he might say. If the credit crisis gets worse there's going to be pressure on all the banks and it's natural that a lot of them will want to get extra security. Let him float it as a sort of positive, seasonal thing. Something good in your Christmas stocking. Got it?'

'Yes. I think he'll like it. It goes against the grain, against the doom and gloom. Good for the shareholders.'

'Good for the pensioners,' said John Veals.

'Sometimes,' said Martin Ryman, tasting a bit of wasabi off the end of his chopstick, 'I think people could mistake you for Father Christmas, John.'

'Well, at this time of year,' said Veals, not smiling at Ryman's sarcasm, 'all of us in our world try to put a bit back.'

Gabriel Northwood spent Wednesday morning with his feet up on the desk reading the Koran.

'What a bastard,' he muttered under his breath from time to time. 'What a bastard ...'

He had always thought of the Old Testament as giving the most implacable and unsympathetic portrayal of a divinity. Jahweh, or Jehovah, the god of the Jews and their Exodus and their dietary laws and bloody battles against the other Semitic tribes; Jahweh the god of exile, punishment, bloodshed, plagues and slaying of the firstborn ... He had surely set a standard of intransigence. Yet compared to the Koranic divinity, he was beginning to feel, old Jahweh was almost avuncular.

The god of the Koran brought with him neither the great stories of the Old Testament (though he referred back to them) nor the modern life-guide of the New. What he did offer was his own words, ipsissima verba, mouthed by the Angel Gabriel, remembered and transcribed verbatim by the Prophet. And over nearly 400 pages, the principal message seemed a simple one: believe in me or burn for all eternity. Page after page.

Woeful punishment awaits the unbelievers. Shameful punishment awaits the unbelievers. For the unbelievers we have prepared chains and fetters, and a blazing Fire. Would that you knew what this is like. It is a scorching Fire. Woe betide every back-biting slanderer who amasses riches and sedulously hoards them, thinking his wealth will render him immortal! By no means! He shall be flung to the Destroying Flame. But if he is an erring disbeliever, his welcome will be scalding water, and he will burn in Hell. We shall sternly punish the unbelievers. The Fire shall for ever be their home.

You could open the book at random. It was the same message on any page. 'Consider the fate of the evildoers.' The phrase tolled like a stuck muezzin.

For the believers, on the other hand, there awaited 'dark-eyed virgins in their tents whom neither man nor jinnee will have touched before ... Virgins as fair as corals and rubies ... They shall recline on couches ranged in rows. To dark-eyed houris we shall wed them.'

The life choice laid down by the Prophet was what Delilah in the clerks' room called, to Eustace Hutton's irritation, a 'nobrainer'. Anyone, Gabriel thought, would take the virgin option over hellfire - any man, at least; it wasn't clear what was on offer to women. What the book lacked was any reasoning or evidence to support its depiction of this radically divided afterlife.

Jehovah had parted the Red Sea. He had destroyed the cities of the plain. He had spoken in the ears of the prophets. He had visited plagues on the enemies of the Israelites. Jesus had performed miracles to demonstrate his own divinity; he had invented a revolutionary manner of behaving - kindly. He had walked on water. He had risen from the dead. Allah, on the other hand, had not condescended to intervene on earth or to argue his case. He didn't bother to persuade; in his single apparition he had offered only warning. Believe in me or die.

After 200 pages, Gabriel found a great weariness come over him. And there was also something in the self-grounded and unargued certainty of the Koran that reminded him of something else, of someone he knew. A voice. He couldn't at that moment put a name to it.

He had read somewhere that the Arabs had felt excluded from monotheism because, several hundred years into it, they had still had no directly instructed prophet of their own; it appeared that their Jewish and Christian trading partners even taunted them for this lack. When the Prophet finally arrived, it was 600 years after second-placed Jesus Christ had been and gone: a lapse of time as great as 1400 to the present day. That was an awfully long time in the short history of monotheism, Gabriel thought, to be viewed by your neighbours as backward. And sometimes the fierce iterations of the book seemed to show the effect of those pent-up centuries of hope and silence. Here is the god at last. And after all this time, he'd better be emphatic.

But perhaps, Gabriel thought, his view of the book was too legalistic or pedantic. After all, there was a lot of rubbish in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: 'A man who has had his testicles cut off cannot be admitted to the presence of Jahweh ...' But the Jews had moved on. They and the Christians accepted that their holy books had been written by humans, albeit inspired by God, and the great majority were happy to see the words in the context of their time and had little trouble in squaring them with modern knowledge, provided they could just be left with a comforting sense of a higher power who took an interest in their affairs before and after death.

But as far as Gabriel understood it, Islam had never yielded that ground. Once an early theological debate had decided for all time that the Koran was literally and in every syllable the unmediated word of God, then all Muslims became by definition 'fundamentalist'. It was by its nature unlike Judaism or Christianity; it was intrinsically, and quite unapologetically, a fundamentalist religion. There was, of course, a world of difference between 'fundamental' and 'militant' - let alone 'aggressive'; but the intractable truth remained: that by being so pure, so high-minded and so uncompromising, Islam had limited the kind of believer it could claim.

After lunch, Gabriel went to meet Jenni Fortune for a ride on the Circle Line.

He'd been once before, when he was preparing the case for the first trial, but felt it would be helpful for him to do it again, so he had a true feeling for her work. The supervisor was waiting for him at the barrier and took him down to the platform to wait for Jenni's train.

When she pressed the button to open the door for him, Jenni's face came as close as Gabriel had seen it to a smile.

'Hop in,' she said. Because they'd done this once before, he thought, perhaps she felt more confident; there was nothing new for her to fear.

Gabriel folded out the dicky and sat down. The interior of the cab was painted sky blue, and in front of Gabriel on the dashboard was an instructor's emergency brake. Jenni checked her rear-view mirror, pressed the two buttons to close the passenger doors, depressed the driver's handle in front of her and turned it slowly anticlockwise. The train moved off.

'How have you been, Jenni?'

'Not bad, thanks. You?'

'Fine, thanks.' Was that mascara on her lashes? It was hard to tell in the darkness.

'What do you want me to tell you?' she asked.

'Oh ... Well, let's just have a chat, shall we?'

'OK.'

'Do you feel cut off from things down here?'

'Yeah, I s'pose so. But I like it.'

'It's your own world.'

'Yeah.'

'What do you do in the evenings?'

'Go home. Look after Tony. He's my half-brother. Watch telly. Play Parallax.'

'Is that the alternative-reality game?'

'Yeah, it's brilliant. My maquette's called Amanda. She's a beautician.' She pronounced the word 'mack-wet' and it took Gabriel a moment to understand what she meant.

Jenni moved the lever back to six o'clock, then round to about four to bring the brakes on hard, then back to five to let the train decelerate more gently as it ran into the station. When it had stopped, she let the lever rise up on its spring.

'And what about reading?' said Gabriel, as they moved off again. 'You like reading, don't you?'

'Yeah, I do.'

'Why?'

'Dunno. I s'pose it's an escape from the real world.'

'But surely it's just the opposite,' said Gabriel. 'Books explain the real world. They bring you close to it in a way you could never manage in the course of the day.'

'How do you mean?'

'People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.'

'Even if the people in the book are invented?'

'Sure. Because they're based on what's real, but with the boring bits stripped out. In good books anyway. Of my total understanding of human beings, which is perhaps not very great ... I'd say half of it is from just guessing that other people must feel much the same as I would in their place. But of the other half, ninety per cent of it has come from reading books. Less than ten per cent from reality - from watching and talking and listening - from living.'

'You're funny.'

'Thank you, Jenni. Why are you waving?'

'Driver coming the other way waved at me. They always do. Unless they're District. They just turn the cab light off.'

'What? Is there a rivalry between Circle and District?'

'You bet. The five-a-side footie's a bloodbath.'

'All right. We'd better talk about your work. Tell me about the stations. Are they all the same to you, or do they have different characters?'

He watched Jenni while she answered. She had quite delicate hands, not really right for a manual job, he thought, even though working the lever and the door buttons was not demanding. The palm was paler than the back of the hand, and the fingers were long, with neatly trimmed nails; that much at least must be necessary for the job, he thought.

'... and Baker Street's a nice station. Always busy with Madame Tussaud's and that. And the brickwork's just like when it was built all those years ago. Embankment's always busy with the theatres and the Strand. Temple's quiet, usually.'

'I know.'

Gabriel noticed the care with which Jenni checked the mirrors at the station even as she was talking to him. She was wearing her black hair tied back with a ribbon; the lamp on the platform threw a shaft of light across her face, over the pale brown skin, across her mouth where the pigment changed in her lip from blackish-brown to pink. She seemed to sense him staring at her and turned her head suddenly to look at him.

He looked back into her deep, dark eyes. She held his gaze and said nothing. He felt he mustn't look away, that while their eyes were locked he could transmit belief to her. She didn't blink or move her head, but the light of fear and challenge slowly dimmed in her eyes. She pressed the door-close buttons, her eyes still on his, leant on the lever and pushed it away to the left. It was not until the clattering train had reached twenty miles per hour that she finally looked ahead of her, through the windscreen, and Gabriel thought he could see in her face the beginnings, or possibly the remnants, of a smile.

'And Aldgate, since you ask,' Jenni said. 'There's the ghost of a woman there. But it's a friendly one. One of the P. Way guys, he touched the live rail and--'

'P. Way?'

'Permanent Way. The people who maintain the track. He touched the live rail by mistake but the other guys saw this woman put her hand on his shoulder and move him away. He was completely unhurt. He should have fried.'

The train hurtled on through the darkness, slowing and speeding at Jenni's simple left-hand command. She was standing up, as she did every other circuit, she explained, to ease her back from the brutally uncomfortable seat. Gabriel was silent. There was something he found harshly poignant about this gruff girl at her work; you didn't need to have read very many books or to be much of an observer to see that she was someone who'd been rebuffed or bruised and now relied on her job as a measure of her own value. He was torn by a desire to lead her into a more ambitious way of looking at her life, and a simple admiration for the pride she took in doing something useful. In any case, what could he offer, broke and alone as he was? What did he know from his precious books that he could teach this busy, thoughtful woman? And what if she was hiding from something underground? Wasn't he, really, doing the same with his crossword puzzle and his French novels?

'We're coming to the end of the circle,' said Jenni.

'That was quick. How long's it been?'

Jenni looked at her watch. 'Fifty-six minutes.'

'Right. I suppose I'd better--'

'I'm going round again, though.'

'So I could stay and ...'

'Yes, you can come round again. If you like. I mean--'

'Yes, I'd like to. I think there are more things I should know. We talked too much about books and stuff that time round.'

Jenni was smiling. 'Go on then. Sit down. Fire away.'

In the darkest section of the Circle, just before Victoria, Gabriel suddenly said, 'Maybe I could come and play Parallax one evening at your house.'

'Would that be right? If we was like, you know, clients?'

'We could talk about work. I could take you out to dinner maybe. Somewhere local you like. Then I'd go home. We couldn't talk about anything else until after the case comes on in January.'

'So just work.'

'Exactly.' Gabriel was wondering how he was going to pay for dinner.

'Well, that'd be fine then. Maybe tomorrow. I'm off by six.'

'Tomorrow would be ... Perfect. OK.' Where the hell was he going to get the money? 'Tell me, Jenni. That woman's voice. The recording that says, "We are now approaching King's Cross. Change here for the Piccadilly Line" or whatever. Is that one of your colleagues? Or an actress, or what?'

'I dunno,' said Jenni. 'We call her Sonia.'

'Why?'

'Because she get s-on-yer nerves.'

'And how does she know when to come in? What cues the recording?'

'The number of wheel revolutions. It's different between each station. It works fine unless there's been a lot of rain. Then you get wheelspin. Then she thinks you're in Blackfriars when you're only just pulling out of Mansion House.'

'What do you do then?'

'Turn the bugger off.'

At 5.30, Knocker al-Rashid was waiting for his penultimate visit from R. Tranter. He had squeezed in one for Wednesday in addition to their regular Thursday morning slot, which would be the last one before his visit to the palace on Friday. They had agreed to put that aside for 'revision', so today's was almost the last time they would cover new ground. Knocker looked at his watch. He had become impatient with his teacher lately. How different it had been at the start.

Before Tranter's first visit in the spring, Knocker had felt unpleasantly nervous.

'Nasim,' he said. 'A distinguished literary man is going to arrive any minute. We'll go to my office to discuss books and reading. Could you bear to arrange for some fruit and tea to be served to us in about twenty minutes?'

'Of course, love,' said Nasim. She smiled at her husband's way of speaking; the larger the successive houses they had lived in, the less Knocker had come to sound like a Bradford Paki, as she'd once heard him called, and the more like David Niven.

In the course of her long and happy marriage to Farooq, Nasim herself had lost her Yorkshire accent and now spoke in a way she fancied was pretty close to the BBC - the old BBC, since nowadays so many people on the radio seemed to have come from Bradford.

'What sort of man do you think he'll be?' she asked Knocker.

'An old-style English gentleman, I think.'

'A bit of a Prince Charles?'

'I expect so. He was at Oxford University. Do you think my suit is smart enough?'

'Don't be silly, Knocker. Don't be shy of him. He's just a tradesman who's got something you need. Like the lime farmer in Mexico.'

'Rodrigues! You promised never to mention him again.'

The bell rang, and Knocker crossed the enormous tiled hall to open it, braced to see an intimidating guardsman in a Savile Row suit.

'Hello? Mr al-Rashid, I presume.'

The door had revealed a slight, gingery man in a blue anorak with a green tie, brown shoes and forty-eight hours of stubble on his chin. His eyes were a little pink.

He held out his hand. 'Ralph Tranter. Most people call me RT, though.'

Knocker had not travelled to every continent of the world (bar Australasia) without concluding that the outer wrapping of a man was insignificant. Even so ...

He rose to the occasion. 'I'm very pleased to meet you. Please come this way, Mr Tranter.'

They crossed the hall, then went through the giant drawing room with its views over open countryside, out through the double doors, down a panelled passageway and into Knocker al-Rashid's study, whose long shelves were lined not with books but with Japanese ivory figures, porcelain boxes, framed photographs of Nasim and Hassan and a handful of work mementoes - a gold-plated lime, for instance, presented by his workforce and a drive wheel from his first production line mounted on oak with an inscribed plaque. There was a new thirty-six-inch-screen computer on the desk; it was of a make not available in the usual retail outlets.

'Very nice,' said Tranter.

There was a faintly sneering edge to his voice that Knocker chose to ignore; some people just had an unfortunate manner. He settled Tranter in an armchair and went to sit behind his desk.

He smiled broadly. 'Let's get down to business, Mr Tranter, if we may. I've got a simple proposition to put to you. I need what you might call a crash course. I shall shortly be meeting Her Majesty the Queen and I feel that I'm not well prepared conversationally.'

'Really?' There was a sceptical note to everything Tranter said, though Knocker found it hard to tell whether Tranter thought he had made up the bit about the Queen or was being modest about his readiness.

'I come from a simple family, you see. My family were farmers and didn't read books. My education was in a state school that prepared the pupils to be electricians or plumbers. I think I may also have suffered from dyslexia, though it wasn't a complaint we knew anything about in those days. What I'd like is for you to make me familiar with the great works of English literature of the past and bring me up to date on the writers of today, so that if Her Majesty steers the conversation towards books, I can have something interesting to say.'

Tranter's mouth opened and closed a couple of times. 'Yes, I can do that,' he said eventually. 'But do you think it's likely that she'll talk books? She's not famous for reading, is she?'

Knocker frowned. This had not occurred to him.

'But of course,' Tranter went on quickly, glancing round the opulent room, 'you'd better be prepared. And it'll still be knowledge that'll stand you in good stead. At other times.'

'Yes, indeed. That's a good way of looking at it. Now I've done some homework on the most respected writers of today, and I sent my assistant Mrs Hine out to the bookshop. Come and tell me what you think of this little collection. Tell me which one to begin with.'

Knocker pointed to two piles of books, about fifteen in all, that were ready on his desk. Tranter came and stood beside him.

'This author's very famous, I believe,' said Knocker, holding up a moody-looking hardback with a belly-band that said it had been listed for the Cafe Bravo award.

'Famous,' said Tranter, 'but hopelessly overrated. It's what we call OT.'

'What's that?'

'Oirish Twaddle.'

'I don't understand.'

'It doesn't matter. Forget him.'

'What about this one?' said Knocker. 'It says she's twice won the Allied Royal prize.'

'No, no. Awful "creative writing" sort of stuff. Terribly illusionist and overwrought. Poor man's Somerset Maugham, with embarrassing improbabilities at key moments.'

Knocker looked taken aback. 'I see. I think perhaps I was misinformed. I took some guidance from the Internet.'

Tranter gave a short laugh. 'God, that goons' rodeo. Nutter central. I mean, if only they could get a green-ink detection device and use it as a filter the Web'd lose ninety per cent of its traffic.'

Knocker looked at the sharp, foxy face next to his. He couldn't understand much of what the man said. It struck him as odd that Tranter, who was supposed to be a man of words, wouldn't alter the way he spoke so that Knocker could follow what he meant.

'This one?' he said, holding up another novel heavy with praise.

'Oh God,' said Tranter. 'The man who put the "anal" into "banality". Costive little stories that beg to be called significant. His tragedy is that he was not born "European". Should have worked in advertising.'

And so they went down through the pile. 'Overblown and sentimental ... You just wish he'd come out of the closet and stop pretending that his little queens are women for heaven's sake ...'

By this time, there were only three of the books that Mrs Hine had bought remaining on the desk, and Knocker was beginning to lose patience.

He held up a book by an author whose name was familiar even to himself.

Tranter took it from him, shook his head and tossed it back on the desk. 'Barely animated TV scripts,' he said.

The last two he didn't even bother to pick up. 'Barbara Pym and water ... Writing by numbers ...'

'Well, Mr Tranter,' said Knocker, 'I seem to have made a pretty bad start to my project.'

'It's not your fault,' said Tranter. 'These are just the usual suspects favoured by the literary establishment.'

'Yes,' said Knocker, 'but are there any living British authors that you do recommend?'

Tranter scratched his chin, and his fingernails made a slight noise in the stubble. 'No, not living,' he said. 'But quite recent. Modern in their way.'

Nasim came in with a tray. Normally, she would have asked Lucy, the Brazilian girl, to do it, but she was curious to meet the literary man.

'My dear, this is Mr Tranter. This is my wife, Nasim.'

Tranter and Nasim had a moment of being uncertain whether to shake hands, though it passed when Knocker put his arm round his wife and escorted her to the desk.

'Mr Tranter says I'm wasting my time with all of these writers,' he said. 'He says none of them are any good.'

'But what if Her Majesty likes them?' said Nasim. 'You should still have read them so you can talk to her about her favourites.'

Knocker smiled. 'A very clever woman, my wife, isn't she? These writers may all be as bad as you say, Mr Tranter, but I need to have some knowledge of them. Even if they are all a big con trick.'

'Well, I can give you that all right,' said Tranter. 'A sort of bluffer's guide if you like.'

'We also need to find out who her favourite authors are,' said Nasim.

Knocker looked at Tranter. He scratched his chin again. 'I seem to remember she likes Dick Francis.'

'Who is he?'

'He writes racing thrillers. You know, horse racing.'

'I shall ask Mrs Hine to buy some tomorrow. Has he written many?'

'Thousands.'

'Good. But I should also like to read some great literature. I want to learn for my own sake, not just for Her Majesty. I want to start the habit of a lifetime.'

'Then I suppose we should look at the Victorians,' said Tranter. 'Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope. George Eliot.'

'You won't tell me they're a "busted flush" or "writing by numbers"?'

'No, no. Not Thackeray anyway.'

'I've heard of all those people,' said Nasim.

'My wife is very well read,' Knocker explained. 'Tell him who you've read.'

'For our exam,' said Nasim, 'we could choose between a book by Iris Murdoch--'

'Oh yes,' said Tranter, 'an excellent example of the higher bogus.'

'Or Howards End ...'

'Mmm ...' said Tranter. 'Which Howard? I think we know which end.'

'Or Virginia Woolf.'

'God. Chick-lit meets psychosis. Which one did you end up doing?'

'We did Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'

Tranter laughed. 'Noting like a bit of Irishry if in doubt,' he said. 'A bit of OT always goes down well.'

Nasim looked crestfallen. There was a slight flush under her skin.

'There's another Victorian novelist I rate very highly,' said Tranter quickly, as though sensing that he might have gone too far. 'In fact, I've written a biography of him.'

'How exciting,' said Nasim, recovering her poise. 'And is it published?'

'That's the general idea,' said Tranter. 'In fact it's a finalist for the Pizza Palace Book of the Year at Christmas.'

'Congratulations. And who is this author?'

'Alfred Huntley Edgerton,' said Tranter.

'I've never heard of him,' said Nasim.

'He's not as well known as the others. But he's very good.'

'I think I should like to try him,' said Knocker.

'Then you'd be one up on the Queen,' said Nasim. 'I mean, thanks to Mr Tranter you'd have a special knowledge of ... What was his name?'

'Edgerton.'

By the time Tranter left half an hour later, Knocker al-Rashid had his first homework reading list: Shropshire Towers by Alfred Huntley Edgerton and Whip Hand by Dick Francis. The over-praised 'moderns', it was agreed, would have to wait for another day, when Tranter would begin the bluffer's guide.

In Pfaffikon, Kieran Duffy was moving cautiously forwards. It was none of his business how John Veals intended to introduce some life into the market for ARB shares, but while he was waiting for it to happen, he turned his attention to the foreign-exchange leg of the trade.

On the grounds that a British bank crisis, even if confined to one bank, would adversely affect the pound when the government had to borrow abroad, Duffy intended to sell forward PS10 billion against a mixture of euros, Swiss francs and US dollars. Even twenty years before, such a large trade would have been the talk of every bar in London, New York and Paris, which was still then a financial centre. Now Duffy could complete it in privacy in ten minutes on the FX screen installed on his desk by High Level's prime broker. It was the one part of the trade that he himself manually instigated.

Foreign-exchange trades required that the trader put up two per cent collateral, but High Level could automatically borrow the first PS400 million of any margin requirement; this was one of a number of facilities offered by the prime broker when they were pitching for High Level's business. What it meant in practice was that Duffy could place a trade of PS20 billion without putting his hand in his pocket, though he preferred to go in at only half that level for the time being.

He keyed in the last of his strokes, less elegantly than Victoria would have done, with a defiant stab. The desktop system he was using rationalised every bid and offer from every trading system in the world, working all day, six days a week. As he sat back in his chair, he knew that risk and settlement systems around the globe were almost instantaneously digesting his trade.

It was no fun any more. The typical foreign-exchange trader in London had once learned his business in a fish or meat market where he'd been able to do rapid calculations while withstanding a barrage of shouted information. Duffy was old enough to have seen them in action once, these Leadenhall and Smithfield men, on a visit from New York. He'd been taken out to lunch at a place called the Paris Grill, where the steak and chips was served by waitresses in black negligees. He'd been amazed at how much the Brits could drink at lunch before returning to work, where, in the absence of sufficient foreign-exchange activity, they placed huge bets on how long the Pope or Emperor Hirohito was going to stay alive.

When it was confirmed that his currency trade had gone through, Duffy turned his attention back to Allied Royal. The share price had begun to rise - not dramatically, and with one or two blips, but with what looked like a steady underlying confidence. By late afternoon there was enough activity for him to be able to start making some more calls to obtain prices for puts and calls in the stock. He didn't know what part Veals might have played in the rally, and he would never ask, but when the day's trading was finished he was able to send a message to Veals's black mobile number: 'Rheumatism definitely easing. Expect full movement tmw.'

IV

Sophie Topping's taxi drew into Dover Street at seven o'clock. She'd arranged to meet Lance at 6.30 and some women from her book club at 6.45, so her timing, she felt, was just right.

She had never been to the auctioneers' headquarters before, though she'd seen it on the television news when a suave man in a double-breasted suit extracted PS10 million from an absent buyer for a smudged pot of Impressionist flowers.

Tonight, however, was a special gala and Sophie found herself giddy with pleasurable excitement. Here were no Van Goghs or Monets, no Old Masters or Cubists or Moderns; tonight, as the catalogue had it, was 'A unique artistic event'. The forty-two-year-old Liam Hogg had taken over the entire first floor of the auction house. Hogg, with the blessing of the Blank Slate Gallery in Stoke Newington, to whom he had remained brashly faithful through the boom years, had decided to 'turn art-world convention on its head'.

Sophie walked through the long downstairs lobby, past the coats, and turned to climb the marble stairs. She spotted Lance halfway up, talking to Vanessa Veals and Amanda Malpasse.

'Glad you could make it, Soph,' said Lance, looking at his watch.

Sophie wasn't listening; she was taking in what clothes the others were wearing. Both had gone to considerable efforts. Vanessa must have spent thousands on her outfit - not that money was of any consequence to the Vealses; but Sophie recognised the couture dress from a page in a fashion magazine and the shoes from a designer whose work she considered too delicate for her own sturdy ankles. The brassy handbag was another three or four thousand pounds' worth that would appear on Vanessa's arm perhaps twice in its life.

A waiter was offering cocktails of a violent blue, and Sophie opted for the safety of champagne. Amanda also had a new dress from the top end of a Knightsbridge rail and her hair had the slightly dry look of the salon about it. Both declined the morsels of food - raw shark, carpaccio of suckling pig or something equally scary-sounding to Sophie - that were offered on a Perspex tray.

The four of them mounted the stairs and entered the main gallery, which was crammed with people. Sophie's eye ran over the organdies and devores, the faux-fur and the fox, the taffeta and cashmere, the demure black cocktail dresses with a confidently simple row of pearls; the carefree pinks and golds with boucle curls and tailored waists; the knee-length slashed satin and two or three instances of carefully ripped denim. The men wore hand-finished suits - some with ties and some without, but none with the shine of chain-store cloth. The only outfits that had cost more than the Savile Row three-pieces, in Sophie's rapid tour d'horizon, were the rebel biker outfits with the pre-distressed boots. The guests were packed in so tight that it was hard to see the art. Sophie sighed happily. She felt the investment in her own dress and shoes had been not only justified but had proved essential. Over the lovely, lively throng she could make out a sort of nimbus, where the muted beams from tracked ceiling lights bounced off the gold and diamonds below to form a thin, vapid haze.

Liam Hogg and his studio had, according to the press release, been 'working round the clock' for six months to fill the august space, through which had passed the work of Rembrandt and Turner, Caravaggio and Vermeer. The walls had been stripped of their paper for the occasion and covered with a white distemper. The maroon carpet over which so many Bond Street shoes had slid since the Second World War had been prised up, rolled and stored. The revealed floorboards had been sandblasted by men in masks.

Smoking, at Liam Hogg's insistence, was encouraged by the provision of several free-standing wrought iron ashtrays, in the shape of upright male organs, stationed about the room like collateral damage from an explosion on a porn film. It had been rumoured in the gossip columns that the artist had used his own member to make the first cast from which the blacksmith had, mutatis mutandis, manufactured the rest.

'All traces of the gallery's normal atmosphere have been purged', according to the catalogue introduction. Certainly, the walls bore no reminder of the last two money-spinning sales - of brightly cleaned sixteenth-century Flemish flower paintings and of flat, shy abstracts by Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson.

Instead, there were the images that had made Liam Hogg the richest English artist of his time. Here was Anagnorisis V, his take on consumerism that was made up of repetitive patterns of bar codes, cut from the back of supermarket goods. Here, too, was his famous pink and turquoise silk-screen print of the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston photograph. And at the end of the gallery was the installation Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Not Listening, which was a pub table with an empty beer bottle, glasses and a full ashtray.

'I've yet to meet a single person not in finance,' grumbled Lance Topping. 'Half the bloody hedge-fund industry seems to have pottered over from Mayfair after work.'

'Look,' said Sophie, 'there's Nasim al-Rashid. She's not in hedge funds. She's in pickle.'

'I suppose I'd better be nice to her,' said Lance. 'Her old man did bung us fifty grand.'

'Go on, then. And don't forget they're coming to dinner on Saturday.'

Nasim had seen the Toppings and crossed the room to speak to them; she didn't know anyone else there. Knocker had refused to accompany her, so she'd had to come on her own. She wore a sari of an intense indigo that looked more Belgravia than Wembley; she also had a gold necklace of flat, concentric hoops like those in a pharaoh's tomb. It was lovely, Sophie admitted to herself, though Nasim seemed unaware of the impression she made: probably something to do with her religion.

'What does this mean?' Nasim was saying. She was pointing to a caption on a large piece behind them. It said 'Arbeit Macht Frei'.

'It's German, isn't it?' said Sophie.

There were black and white news photographs of people in a concentration camp, possibly Belsen or Auschwitz, on which Liam Hogg had drawn in some additions. One skeletal man on a bare bunk had been given a needle and thread to make him look like a tailor; another had a pickaxe over his shoulder and a miner's lamp drawn on to his skull. A third had been given a lawyer's curly wig, while a naked woman on the ground, who looked as though she might be dead, had a nurse's cap and a stethoscope over her bony ribcage.

At the far end of the room, a queue had formed and was waiting, cocktail in hand, to go behind a screen into a room with a low light, like that reserved for the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

Consulting her catalogue, Sophie saw that it contained something called Cash Cow, 2007. 'Arguably the most daring piece undertaken by a contemporary artist, Cash Cow is a mixed-media piece made from sterling banknotes and lutetium, the rarest metal in the world (symbol Lu, atomic number 71). The materials alone cost in excess of PS4 million. "I wanted to challenge people's preconceptions about art," says Liam Hogg.

'Please note. Guests may spend no more than thirty seconds each in front of this exhibit.'

Sophie Topping was determined not to miss Cash Cow. When she had queued for twenty minutes, Lance told her he was going home and she told him she'd catch a taxi later.

Eventually it was her turn in the pink half-light, and she stood alone at last before the exhibition centrepiece. It was a life-size model of a cow in a glass case. It was coloured pink and had flaky silver-coloured horns and silver eyes, which gave it an odd, blinded look. This was the lutetium, presumably. Sophie peered through the glass and could make out the Queen's face several times on the animal's barrelled flanks. The cow itself, she recognised from a semi-rural childhood, was of a shorthorn dairy breed with painfully full udders.

It didn't seem to do anything, other than stare blindly out. Sophie wondered if she should press a button and get it to moo or poo or chew the cud or something. She turned to her catalogue for help: 'The piece is made from papier mache of which the paper element consists of 60,000 PS50 notes and is coated with new notes of the same denomination.

'The horns and eyes are coated with lutetium, the world's most precious metal, the heaviest and hardest of the rare-earth metals. It is too expensive to obtain in any quantity and therefore has few, if any, commercial uses. Although non-toxic, its dust is a fire and explosion hazard.'

'Time's up, madam,' said the attendant. 'Move on now, please.'

Back in the main gallery, Sophie finished the catalogue entry. 'Cash Cow was sponsored by Allied Royal Bank, Salzar-Steinberg Securities and Park Vista Capital. It is for sale tonight at PS8 million.'

Sophie went to find Nasim. Perhaps she would be able to explain the point of Cash Cow. She understood why it was so expensive, because Liam Hogg had to cover his costs, but she wondered if she was missing something else about it. Unfortunately, Nasim had taken the limousine back to Havering-atte-Bower, leaving Sophie to go down alone into the cold of Dover Street.

As she stepped out to hail a taxi, a bicyclist with no lights on came shooting in the wrong direction up the one-way street and swore at her as she leapt back on to the pavement, her heart thumping.

At 7.45, John Veals had a chance meeting with his son on the stairs of their house in Holland Park. As each shifted from foot to foot, trying to think of something to say, one of Veals's six mobile phones let out a message bleep, and he took it into his study to read. The identity of the sender, according to Veals's personal encryption, was 'Kayad', which spelled 'Dayak' backwards - a reference to a tribe of East Indian headhunters. The number was therefore Stewart Thackeray's and the message said: 'Our Mutual Friend says yes, def.' The question had referred to the debt covenant at ARB. By the time Veals had finished his small but intense celebration, Finn, to his relief, was no longer on the landing, and the awkward moment had passed.

John Veals fired up the screens in his study and checked a variety of prices around the world. Everything was in order; everything was behaving in the way that it should, and he felt the satisfaction of an engineer who has carefully tested all the parts of a moving system. And yet, he thought, there was only one thing so mournful as a battle lost, and that was a battle won ... The planning, the precision, the sheer skill of his and Duffy's trades seemed to be bringing Veals the overwhelming victory he had craved; but when he thought about Ryman's part in it, the rumour that had been necessary to inflate the price of Allied Royal, he felt ... Not guilty, exactly; but, well ... It was, as a matter of simple fact, the first time since his days of front-running as a young futures trader that he had done anything that contravened the guidelines of the regulatory bodies. He had thought himself better than that; he had believed so much in his own superior ability that he had not deigned to do the kind of thing that others in the Bank did almost every day. It was a pity that this trade had needed a preliminary fluffing up before it could be placed; it was just a small manoeuvre necessitated by the complex nature of the quite legitimate trade he had envisaged; it was no big deal, but still when he thought about it, John Veals felt ... What was the word? he wondered. Wistful, perhaps. A little wistful.

Upstairs, Finn was watching a football match on his flat-screen television, propped in his favourite position against the end of the bed. It was between his own team, whom he'd supported since he was seven years old, and the club which, like Finn himself in Dream Team, had just signed Spike Borowski.

Open on his thighs with their skinny jeans was a laptop where the latest stats and news from Dream Team were unfolding. Three of Finn's fantasy eleven were in real-life action, so it was a big night.

'And I see the new signing Spike Borowski warming up, Frank,' said the commentator about an hour later. 'Do you think we might get a look at him in the last twenty minutes?'

'Aye, it looks like it, John. I think he'll take off the big Bulgarian. He's run his socks off but he's not had much change out of their defence. Borowski could be the man to break the deadlock.'

'Yes-s-s-s,' Finn heard himself hiss, and his fist made a piston movement in the air.

Spike, now fully stripped off, was bending down and touching his toes, jogging on the spot and getting an earful of instructions from Mehmet Kundak. The manager was wearing an ankle-length sheepskin coat that made him look like an Anatolian shepherd, and his transitional lenses had turned to black under the floodlights. Spike nodded at intervals, though Finn wondered how much he really understood. Kundak made emphatic movements with his arm, then quick rotations of the wrist. Finally he tapped his temple with his finger. It looked a complicated way, Finn thought, of telling Spike to score a bloody goal. Then the official - the man who apparently did this job at every football match, seeming to pop up at places 200 miles apart within minutes - held up the illuminated board where the bulbs formed a number 9; and off trotted Vlad the Inhaler, head down, straight past Spike without a look or a handshake. Kundak gave Spike a good-luck slap on the rump, and his English career began.

Finn was rattling between websites and television stations in order to keep abreast of the progress in the games that would affect his fantasy team's progress. What he really needed, he thought, was a third resource: double-screening didn't really give him all the information he required.

During a temporary lull for treatment to Ali al-Asraf, Finn rolled a small joint with the Aurora/Super Skunk Two mixture. He had secreted Simon Tindle's outsize stash in a suitcase deep within his fitted closets and transferred a manageable amount into a zipped sandwich bag for immediate use. There was no risk in lighting up. He'd checked his mother was watching a costume drama - Shropshire Towers by Alfred Huntley Edgerton, 'adapted' to include scenes of oral sex - on television in the sitting room, her hand clamped round a bottle of Leoville Barton 1990, and his father never came upstairs.

He sucked deeply and settled back against the bed. The smoke made his throat constrict for a moment as it rasped its way down into his lungs; but, as Tindle has predicted, the effect was almost instantaneous. His eyes watered for a moment, and a tear ran out of the corner.

There was a free kick that Danny Bective was lining up at the edge of the penalty area. Finn could see Spike being heavily marked on the far post by the centre half, who had a handful of shirt to keep his man from jumping too high.

If Spike should score and lead his team to a victory, then the result would push Finn's own club down into the relegation zone. On the other hand, given that the other three players from his fantasy team had all done well for their respective real-life clubs that night (a goal and an assist from the forwards, a clean sheet from the full back), it was possible that his fantasy eleven would go top of the league-within-a-league that he and his school friends were running.

Which meant more to him: his real team or his fantasy? The Aurora/Skunk Two made such a nice call hard to make. Then Danny Bective hit the free kick straight into the wall in any event, so the dilemma was unresolved.

Finn sucked in the remainder of the joint and lay back. His eyes took in the poster of Evelina Belle, gazing down at him in an almost caring, almost maternal way.

There were three minutes added for injuries, despite the protestations of both managers in the 'technical' area, the small white marked box in front of the dugout, so called, Ken had told him, 'because, technically, inside it you can call the opposing manager an aunt.' Ken always swore in predictive text.

Finn's mouth was dry from the skunk and he was finding reality hard to cling on to.

Then Ali al-Asraf made a run down the left flank. He was quick, you had to hand it to him. He looked up, passed and - bloody hell, Borowski was clean through the offside trap: the centre halves who'd kept Finn's team up in the Premiership for three seasons - he'd sprung them like a cheap padlock; and the assistant's flag was pointing at the ground ...

Finn stumbled to his feet. And now there was no doubt at all, no choices to be made between a lifelong loyalty and a momentary gain in an imagined world - no difficulty in choosing between the real and the fantastic ...

'Go o-o-o-n-n-n,' he yelled, as Borowski took al-Asraf's pass in his stride, steadied for a moment and buried the ball in the lower right-hand corner.

'Oh y-e-e-s-s-s-s.' Finn fell back against the bed, more than one tear now running down his smooth cheeks.

At midnight, Nasim al-Rashid knocked at her son's bedroom door.

'Come in.'

'Can I sit on the bed?'

'If you like.'

Hassan was reading a book: Milestones by Sayyid Qutb.

'You've read that before, haven't you?'

'Yes. So?'

'Hass, darling, we're worried about you. Your father and me.'

'Why?' Hassan's voice had the surly edge it had developed at the age of about fourteen - as though he was being persecuted.

'You seem so ... Angry. And we'd like you to have a job. It's not good for you to spend so much time at the mosque.'

'I thought you wanted me to be a good Muslim.'

'Of course we do. No one's more devout than your father, as you know. But sometimes young men can get too wrapped up in religion. Not just Muslims. Others too. It's not healthy to spend so much time in your room.'

Hassan said nothing.

Nasim looked down at the duvet and pinched the edge of it in her fingers. 'Where were you today?'

'I had to see some friends about a project.'

'You left the house very early. You were away all day.'

'I know. And what did you do?'

'Me?' said Nasim. 'Oh, you know, the usual. Things in the house. Then I went to the West End to see an art show. A man called Liam Hogg. Have you heard of him?'

'Everyone has.'

When Hassan was a child, Nasim believed he would do the things that had been denied to her and Knocker, because their families had been immigrants. The education both of them received had been rudimentary, and the job prospects grim for people of their background in post-industrial Bradford. But Hassan ... Born speaking English, and born beautiful, too, with his long black lashes and his bowed upper lip: the only son of a family that cared for him so deeply and had somehow stumbled on the money to provide for him - surely with his natural intelligence he was destined for greatness, or, at the very least, great happiness. He was a curious and gentle little boy, not rumbustious and aggressive, as so many others were, but not weak or retiring, either - just interested in the world, in how it worked, in stories people told about it, all of which he approached with his head on one side, ready to listen, keen to know the answers. He had something else the other boys didn't have: an ability to sympathise with others, even grown-ups. Sometimes he patted his mother's hand in consolation when he saw she was upset, and Nasim thought he had inherited his father's simple kindness.

The mother's love for her boy was intense; and if there was sometimes a trace of sentimentality in it, then that was necessary, she thought, as a kind of protection or socialising of the dangerously visceral passion that underlay it.

Nasim had found it hard to accept the changes that came over Hassan as he grew older. When he hung out with the bad boys at school she could see how artificial was the veneer of disdain he'd applied to himself, how thin the self-defence. And then the ridiculous student politics. She knew little about these things herself, and some of what he said about what America had done in the Middle East seemed quite likely to be true; but what worried Nasim was not the detail of what he proposed or the old-fashioned Communist language, but the degree of self-dislike that it suggested.

By giving Hassan all the advantages that she and Knocker hadn't had, she believed she would remove him from friction, place him in a comfortable mainstream where he could use all his energies to flourish and waste none of them, as his parents had, on the attritional business of surviving.

She was cut to the heart to see it wasn't so. The boy didn't seem to rejoice in the place that had been carved out for him by the sweat and love of his parents. He became distrustful, separated from them and from their beliefs and alienated too, in some way Nasim couldn't start to understand, even from himself. She asked advice from friends and she consulted parenting manuals. They all stressed that children were their own creatures; that while genetically they were a half each of their parents, this input was of relatively little importance because what they chiefly were was something else: themselves. And there was almost nothing you could do to influence this hard, unknowable core. One of the self-help books compared the mother to a gardener who'd lost the labels on her seed packet. When the young plant grew up you didn't know if it would turn out nasturtium or broad bean; all you could do was encourage it to be as good a flower or pulse as it could be.

Whatever Hassan was, whatever the true nature that he was growing to fulfil, Nasim thought, he wasn't happy. She had to nerve herself for these conversations because she found his abruptness so upsetting and because she feared that by interfering she would make things worse. She approached his bedroom door, therefore, only when she was certain that not to do so risked causing greater damage.

'My love, if there's anything wrong, you would tell me, wouldn't you?'

'What sort of thing?'

'If you were unhappy? People get depressed. It's not a weakness. And boys of your age. Everyone knows that puberty is hard, but in fact it was fine for you, wasn't it?'

'Yup.'

'I mean, it's quite fun, growing up, going out and so on. But for young men I think your age is harder. The early twenties. I don't know why. Anyway, all I want to say is, you'd always come to Mummy, wouldn't you? If I could help.'

'Aye. Thanks.'

Nasim stood up. She felt saddened by her inability to reach the heart of Hassan's problems and bruised by his coldness. Her offer of help if he needed it, to be 'always there' for him ... Pathetic, really, she thought, when once, when he was young, they had had this majestic intimacy ...

But what more could you do?