I couldn't look at him. The scene through the windows was hypnotic, with the lights from across the river flowing in reflection beyond the dark swinging trunks of the trees.

"What's the area?" I asked him, not wanting to know.

"Pekin." His voice had gone faint, but I still couldn't look at him. The sound of the engine had died away and we were moving in a kind of vacuum while the trunks of the trees went flickering past the flow of lights, just as I'd watched them before, somewhere before. "That's all I know."

"What?"

"That's all I know," Tilson said, and when I turned my head at last I saw he was watching me steadily. "That's all any of us knows. Don't worry, old horse, just relax."

"Those bloody drugs," I said, and looked through the windscreen past the driver's dark hair.

"Not entirely. That was the spot where you crashed last night." He told the driver to speed up again. "I just thought it might stir the old memory; we're a bit desperate for clues, because the witnesses said it was anything from a black Mercedes to a red Jaguar. Never mind."

I looked back through the rear window at the long perspective of the trees, at the area of limbo where memory had given way to shadows. "I'm getting nothing," I told Tilson.

"Maybe it'll come back to you later. No hurry."

"That Humber," I said, "was behind us when we left Whitehall."

"True. And there's another unmarked car ahead of us. We don't want any more larks."

This evening they'd smuggled me out of hospital in a dry-cleaner's van.

"What happened to Chandler?" I asked him.

"He was going to run you. Then Croder moved in."

I had to make an effort to think, to try patching some sort of future together for myself. All I knew at this moment was that they needed me badly: with Sinclair dead less than twenty-four hours ago they were dragging a half-doped executive through the night to try setting him up as a replacement.