'Interrupted, did I?' He turned and shut the fog out, pushing his face into his handkerchief again. He'd come up to Norfolk for a routine dose of what they call Refresher 5 and then caught a streaming cold before they could start work on him. He was better off anyway because Refresher 5 is the course where the instructors break every bone in your body unless you can giggle them out of it.

'It was only the wall,' Kimura told me. He knew I was worried. 'I heard you go into it, and assumed you would make use of it, you see.' He nodded his reassuring smiles at me, towelling the sweat off his small ivory-coloured body; under the wire-meshed lamps the sword-scar looked deep mauve, running from one shoulder to the top of his shorts like a zip-fastener. 'You can not execute such a rebound, you see, without leaving the abdomen unprotected. But of course you would have extricated yourself from my yoshida if this gentleman had not appeared.'

I didn't think so.

'London, old boy.' Stevens stood like a forlorn penguin, mopping at his beak.

Kim was pretending to kick one of the coconut mats straight where we'd been milling about. I said: 'Don't worry, you made your point. The next time I get near a wall I shan't leave myself open to a yoshida. That do you?'

He nodded quickly, pleased. He took his job seriously and if a report came in that somebody'd been found with their neck at the wrong angle, in the chain-locker of a Reykjavik-bound banana-boat he liked to feel it wasn't his fault. He went across to the showers, walking like an independently sprung tiger.

'What?' I asked Stevens. A bruise was developing on the upper right arm and I'd taken care Kimura shouldn't notice it because his chief conceit is that whatever he does to you he never leaves a mark; the other instructors aren't so proud and we always look like a bunch of bitten-eared alley-cats while we're at Norfolk.