I don’t even struggle at first. When I do he simply smiles. My feeble attempts to bring my hands up and to use my legs to kick myself free come to nothing. Wound amongst these sheets, even a fit man would have stood little chance of fighting his way from beneath such suffocating weight. Finally, in one last hopeless convulsion, I try to arch my back. He rides this throe easily and in a moment or two I fall back, and all movement ceases.

He is no fool; he has anticipated that I might merely be playing dead.

So he lies quite calmly on me for a while, as unmoving as I, checking his watch now and again as the minutes tick by, to make sure I am gone.

I hope you’re happy. An ending, and we have barely even begun yet! So we shall begin, first with something that in a sense has yet to happen.

It begins on a train, the highest train in the world, between China and Tibet. It begins with a man in a cheap brown business suit walking from one swaying carriage to another, his gait a little unsteady as he holds a small oxygen cylinder in one hand and an automatic handgun in the other. He steps onto the sliding metal plates that separate the carriages, the corrugated collar linking the passenger cars flexing and wheezing around him like a gigantic version of the ribbed tube connecting the oxygen cylinder and the transparent mask round his nose and mouth. Inside the mask, he finds himself smiling nervously.

The train rattles and jiggles around him, moving ponderously up and down and side to side, throwing him briefly against the ribs of the connector. Perhaps a place where the permafrost has proved less than permanent; he has heard that there have been problems. He steadies himself, rebalancing as the train straightens and resumes its smooth progress. He sticks the oxygen cylinder under one arm and uses his free hand to straighten his tie.