Your phone will ring three times, then stop. A minute later it rings three more times then stops. After 30 minutes be in the parking area under Block 9, bay 286.

He shivered. Far out over the estate he could hear music played loud and shouts of argument, but around him was silence. He crumpled the paper, then let it drop. He turned to go to the table where the food waited for him, then hesitated and retrieved the note.

This time he ripped it into fragments, carried them to the toilet and flushed them – as if that might help him forget the demand made of him.

An intruder had broken into his world.

He sat at the table and ate his meal. The telephone was on a low table of stained wood. The room's furnishing was basic, battered: a table and two upright chairs, of which only one would safely take his weight, a two-seater settee whose coarse covering was worn on the arms by age and previous tenants, a bookcase with empty shelves. A single picture hung on one wall, a fading print of flowers beside a river; the glass was cracked at the upper left corner. A light with a plastic shade hung from the centre of the ceiling. And there was the low table with the telephone. It was the same as the day on which Ivanhoe Manners had brought him to the Amersham. He had done nothing in those months to stamp his character on the room. In fact, it mirrored Malachy Kitchen. It was as if he had determined to show nothing of himself, as if he were frightened to display himself. What there was he kept clean, but did not add to it.

As the hours passed, Malachy sensed his life had changed again, but he did not know whose hand controlled him. Maybe he should pack his clothes into a black bin-bag, go out through the door, close it behind him and walk away. Go down the stairs from level three, turn his back on block nine and head off into the night… But he sat on the carpet where he could see the telephone. The demons came again, and what had been said to him and of him, the squirming sense of shame. There was no one he could have turned to.