He dreamed of boundaries and rippling applause. He dreamed of the days before he went away to the college in Europe and university in Egypt.

The sun shone in the brilliant day of his dream.

He did not wake as the door of the hotel room opened, nor stir at the sudden flash of light from the corridor, broken by the rapid movement of two men, and then extinguished.

The girl had no place in his dreams. He was dreaming of his father standing by the pavilion steps…

He twisted on the hard mattress as the men crossed the room towards the bed, moving silently on the balls of their feet.

The dreams of childhood were always abbreviated, cut away at moments of ecstasy. He had half woken.

A drab room in a small and drab hotel on a drab street behind the railway station. A pitiful place for a man to die. In the moments before he died, the man reached across the wide space of the bed as if he expected that his arm would come to rest against the bare white shoulder of the girl with the blond hair.

They closed on him fast.

There was a hand across his mouth.

The scream stayed stifled in his throat.

There was a hand pulling the sheet over his body.

His legs thrashed and made a pyramid of the blanket above his knees.

There was a knife-blade on a short arc hard down into the sheet.

A pathetic place for a man to die.

There was the effort grunt from the man who used his strength to drive the knife down through the sheet, through the splintering rib cage. The narrow-bladed knife pierced the heart.

The man died with a chokc in his throat. The sheet over his body soaked up the blood spurt of his last life-spasm as the knife was withdrawn. The man who had won distinction in his degree course at the University of Berne and fulsome praise for his doctorate at Imperial College in London and admiration for his teaching at the University of Cairo's Department of Nuclear Engineering, lay dead.