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Kicking her out again would have scratched an itch, but it would have wasted ten or twenty seconds - longer if she’d fought - and I could always do it once the car was moving.

I told the driver Imelda Probert’s address and waited in an agony of impatience as he threaded his way slowly and carefully through the interlaced armies of firefighters and nurses. Once we were clear, though, he put the siren on and hit the reheat, slamming us back into the leather upholstery.

Trudie was talking to me, but the words washed over me like whale-song.

I was trying to decide which of the many appalling outcomes from this I was most afraid of.

And which I was actually hoping for.

25

The front door of Imelda’s was broken in and hanging on a single hinge.

On the second-floor landing, Rafi’s door seemed untouched, but closer inspection showed that someone had fired several bullets through the lock until the striking plate simply came away from the splintered door frame.

No sign of Rafi, but Sallis was there. He was staring at nothing.

His hands were clasped across his lower abdomen, but they hadn’t been able to halt the jack-in-the-box exuberance of bloody intestines that had spilled out through thÞds e huge hole in his lower torso. Feld was there, too: parts of him, anyway. Trudie was noisily sick in the corner of the room. I left her there, still sobbing and heaving.

A trail of bloody footprints led up the stairs from the second floor to the third. Imelda’s door had been torn loose and thrown across the landing where it lay, in two separate pieces, on the floor.

I went inside with my heart hammering a hectic, unsustainable beat like a schoolgirl’s skipping rope when she’s high on adrenalin and pushing it too far: about to fall, all tangled up in her own misjudgement; about to hit the asphalt one last and lasting time.

Imelda was in her kitchen, which had become an abattoir. Her head was in Lisa’s lap, and Lisa was in shock: exhausted and bullied by grief into some private place from which she didn’t stir when I came in.

But Imelda did stir. Amazingly, she wasn’t quite dead, though how a body could take so much damage, so much insult, and still not yield up the spirit it contained was a mystery beyond my fathoming.

She couldn’t speak. Judging from the blood that covered her lower face like a painted-on beard, Asmodeus had torn out her tongue. But she could move her right arm, just barely. She lifted it, like Atlas hefting the weight of the world.