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That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Possibly,’ Moloch said. ‘Again, you’ll do as you see fit. I saved your life, and I gave you information you couldn’t have obtained by any other means. I consider that, at the moment, you’re heavily in my debt. So whatever you do on your own account, don’t include me as a factor in your plans. All that’s between us is the bargain, as we’ve already agreed it. When you’re ready to make the journey to Mount Grace, just say my name – out in the open air, with silence all around, and preferably in darkness.

I’ll hear you.’

I thought he was just going to walk out of the window into the night, but the night came to him instead. Blackness spilled into the room like a solid wave, washing over Moloch and swallowing him up. An instant later it cleared, and he was gone.

There was a soft thump as the skull fell onto the carpet and rolled a few inches before rocking back and settling on its apex. The upside-down sockets stared vacantly at me, inviting me into the well within that used to be full to the brim with cat-thoughts and now was full of nothing.

Normal service had been resumed.

Almost in the same instant, the TV set gave an unsettlingly organic shudder and the screen lit up like an eye opening in the dark corner of the room.

‘- Don’t even know where she came from,’ a man’s voice said, sounding strained and almost tearful. The man on the screen was burly, middle-aged, dressed in what I took at first to be a police uniform. He didn’t look prone to tears.

‘She just walked right past the guard post, and we all – three of us – we all ran out after her. I was just thinking how did she get in, because there’s a wall. It’s twenty feet high, and then – there’s an overhang, with razor wire. You can’t climb it. Nobody could climb it.’

The image switched abruptly to an external shot of one of the five wings of Pentonville, and I realised that he wasn’t a cop: he was a prison guard.

‘Nobody else had any clearer explanations to give,’ said a news presenter’s voice in public-solemnity mode, ‘for how a prisoner on remand for murder was able to walk out of one of London’s highest-security prisons, in what was evidently a highly planned and meticulously executed raid.

The mystery woman entered here . . .’

I shook my head to clear it, which turned out to be a mistake: the various dull aches in my neck and in the muscles of my face connected up suddenly into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia extravaganza.