No lights shone anywhere.

Round the corner, the driver said: “Stay here, Jay. Watch Ed. We’ll have to do something about Ed.” From the sound of his voice, the darkness hid a smile no one would want to see. “Stay right here.”

“Okay. But Mac —”

“Not you,” Mac said. “Not you, as well as Ed.”

“You don’t have to worry about me. But are you sure the kid won’t wake up?”

“The kid won’t wake up,” Mac said “None of them will wake up. They’ll still be asleep, two hours from now, when we reach the airport Everything’s fixed.”

“That’s fine.”

“You watch Ed.”

Mac gripped the other’s forearm, then moved away, rubber-soled shoes making little sound. He could make out the shape of the iron gate of the house which stood squat and dark against the cloudy sky. Wind soughed down, rustling the leaves on trees and bushes. It was the middle of September, neither cold nor warm.

He reached the gate and opened it, then slowly pushed it back. He bent down and hooked it to a stumpy post in the ground, so that it couldn’t swing to. He stepped on to grass and walked on this as far as the garage. Inside there was a ladder. He did not stop at the garage, but followed a gravel path leading to the rear of the house, and paused by the back door. Behind him was a square of lawn, tennis-court size, around it flower-beds, beyond the lawn a vegetable-garden hidden by ramblers proliferating about a rustic wooden fence.

It would take only a minute to force the catch, and there was a chance that the door wasn’t even locked. The people here, overwhelmed with the opiate they had been given, should be asleep in their chairs; unless they had staggered up to their bedroom.

The child would have had his dinner much earlier than the parents, for the Shawns had strict ideas about bringing up children.

Mac had telephoned the house at midnight and again at one o’clock, and there had been no answer; evidence that everything had gone according to plan.