I was never particularly keen on my job before the day I got shot and nearly lost it, along with my life. But the.38 slug of lead which made a pepper-shaker out of my intestines left me with fire in my belly in more ways than one. Otherwise I should never have met Zanna Martin, and would still be held fast in the spider-threads of departed joys, of no use to anyone, least of all myself.

It was the first step to liberation, that bullet, though I wouldn’t have said so at the time. I stopped it because I was careless. Careless because bored.

I woke up gradually in hospital, in a private room for which I got a whacking great bill a few days later. Even before I opened my eyes I began to regret I had not left the world completely. Someone had lit a bonfire under my navel.

A fierce conversation was being conducted in unhushed voices over my head. With woolly wits, the anaesthetic still drifting inside my skull like puff-ball clouds in a summer sky, I tried unenthusiastically to make sense of what was being said.

‘Can’t you give him something to wake him more quickly?’

‘No.’

‘We can’t do much until we have his story, you must see that. It’s nearly seven hours since you finished operating. Surely…’

‘And he was all of four hours on the table before that. Do you want to finish off what the shooting started?’

‘Doctor…’

‘I am sorry, but you’ll have to wait.’

There’s my pal, I thought. They’ll have to wait. Who wants to hurry back into the dreary world? Why not go to sleep for a month and take things up again after they’ve put the bonfire out? I opened my eyes reluctantly.

It was night. A globe of electric light shone in the centre of the ceiling. That figured. It had been morning when Jones-boy found me still seeping gently on to the office linoleum and went to telephone, and it appeared that about twelve hours had passed since they stuck the first blessed needle into my arm. Would a twenty-four hour start, I wondered, be enough for a panic-stricken ineffectual little crook to get himself undetectably out of the country?