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They’d changed. I simply couldn’t believe that they were the same testicles I’d carried around with me all my life, and yes, treated as my friends. They were bigger, much bigger, and completely the wrong shape.

There was only one thing for it.

There is a technique, known to practitioners of the martial arts, for relieving scrotal discomfort. It is often used in Japanesedojos, whenever your training-partner has got a little over-eager and actually landed one in the genital neighbourhood.

What you do is this: jump six inches in the air, and land on your heels with your legs as stiff as you can make them, to increase, just for an instant, the gravitational pull on the scrotum. I don’t know why it should work, but it does. Or rather it doesn’t. So I had to try it a few times, pogoing around the room as hard as my right leg would let me, until gradually, infinitesimally, the howling pain began to subside. Then I bent down to examine Richie’s body.

The label in his suit proclaimed the gifts of Falkus, The Fine Tailors, but nothing else; he had six pounds and twenty pence in his right trouser pocket, and a camouflage-patterned penknife in his left. His shirt was white nylon, and the shoes were four-hole Baxter half-brogues in oxblood leather. That was more or less it. There was nothing else to mark Richie out from the crowd and set the keen-eyed investigator’s pulse racing. No bus ticket. No library card. No page of personal ads from a local newspaper with one entry ringed in red felt-tip pen.

All I could find that was even remotely out of the ordinary was a Bianchi cross-draw holster, containing one brand new nine millimetre Glock 17 self-loading pistol.

You may have read, at one time or another, some of the nonsense that’s been written about the Glock. The fact that its body is made from a fancy polymer material got one or two journalists very excited a while back about the possibility that the gun might not register on airport X-ray machines - which happens to be so much hooey. The slide, barrel, and a fair portion of its innards are metal, and if that weren’t enough, seventeen rounds of Parabellum ammunition are pretty hard to pass off as lipstick refills. What it does have is a high magazine capacity for a low weight, great accuracy, and virtually unequalled reliability. All of which have made the Glock 17 the choice of housewives everywhere.

I worked the slide, pushing a round into the breech. There’s no safety catch on the Glock. You just point, shoot, and run like hell. My kind of gun.

I eased open the door to the corridor, and there was no space shuttle. It was a plain, white corridor, with seven other doors leading off it. All shut. At the end of the corridor was a window, looking out at a skyline that could have been any one of fifty cities. It was daylight.

Whatever the building was built for, it hadn’t been doing it for a long time. The corridor was dirty and lined with rubbish - cardboard boxes, mounds of paper, bin-liners, and half-way down, a mountain bike without wheels.

Now, clearing a hostile building is really a game for three or more players. Six is a good number. The player to the left of the dealer checks the rooms, with two more as understudies, while the other three watch the corridor. That’s how it works. If you really must play it on your own, the rules are entirely different. You open every door very slowly, checking your back as you do it, squinting through the hinges and taking about an hour to cover ten yards of corridor. That’s what it says in every manual ever written on the subject.

My feeling about manuals is that the other fellow’s probably read them too.

I zig-zagged down the corridor as fast as I could go, gun outstretched, flinging open all seven of the doors until I reached the other end where I threw myself down beneath the window, braced to empty the magazine at anyone who might pop their head out. Nobody did.

But now the doors were open, and the first one on the left led on to a staircase. I could see a few feet of banister, and above it, a mirror. I got up into a crouch and ran through the door, waving the gun up and down the stairs in as threatening a fashion as I could manage. Nothing.

I drew back my right hand and drove the butt of the Glock into the middle of the mirror, shattering the glass. I picked out a hefty-looking piece and cut my left hand on it. Which was an accident, in case you’re wondering.

I held up the broken mirror and squinted at the reflection of my chin. The wound was less than pretty.

Back in the corridor, I reverted to the slow method of clearance, creeping to the edge of each door-frame, sticking the mirror out across the doorway, turning its gaze slowly across the room. It was a clumsy method, and since the walls were no more than an inch of Gyproc plaster board, and probably couldn’t have stopped a cherry-stone squeezed from the fingers of a tired three-year-old, it was also fairly useless. But it felt better than standing in the doorway shouting ‘yoohoo?’

The first two rooms were in the same state as the corridor. Dirty, and piled with junk. Dead typewriters, telephones, three-legged chairs. I was reflecting on the fact that there is nothing in any of the world’s great museums that looks quite as ancient as a ten-year-old photocopier, when I heard a noise. A human noise. A groan.

I waited. It didn’t repeat, so I replayed the noise in my head. It was the next room down the corridor. It was male. It was someone having sex, or in a bad state. Or it was a trap

I eased back out into the corridor and along to the next doorway, and lay down along the wall. I pushed the mirror out in front of me and adjusted its position. Sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, his head slumped forward on to his chest, was a man. Short, fat, middle-aged, and tied to the chair. With leather straps.

There was blood on the front of his shirt. A lot of it.

If it was a trap, this was the moment when the opposition would expect me to leap up and say, ‘good heavens, may I be of any assistance?’. So I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor.

He didn’t make any other noise, and the corridor didn’t do anything that corridors don’t normally do. After a solid minute of watching, I tossed the mirror aside and crawled round the door-jamb into the room.

I think maybe I’d known it was Woolf, from the moment I first heard the moan. Either I’d recognised the voice, or I’d been thinking all along that if Groomed had been able to catch me, he’d have had no trouble getting hold of Woolf.

Or Sarah, come to that.

I closed the door and propped a chair on two legs under the handle. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it would give me a chance to get off three or four rounds before the door opened. I knelt down in front of Woolf, and immediately swore at a new pain in my knee. I shifted back and looked at the floor. Seven or eight oily-looking nuts and bolts lay at Woolf’s feet, and I leant down to brush them away.

But they weren’t nuts and bolts, and it wasn’t oil. I was kneeling on his teeth.

I undid the straps and tried lifting his head. Both eyes were closed, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because he was unconscious or because the tissue round his cheeks and eye sockets was horribly swollen. Bubbles of blood and saliva hung round his mouth and his breathing sounded terrible.

‘You’re going to be fine,’ I said. But I didn’t believe me, and I doubt whether he did. ‘Where’s Sarah?’

He didn’t answer, but I could see he was struggling to open his left eye. He tilted his head back and a low grunt burst some of the bubbles round his lips. I leaned forward and took hold of his hands.