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time.’ Charlton bit into a slice of buttered toast. Crumbs tumbled down the front of his black silk dressing-gown.
    â€˜You’re a slob,’ Barker said, ‘you know that?’
    Charlton was chewing noisily, mouth open, toast revolving on his tongue. He reached for the paper; he was always reading the financial section and quoting from it afterwards, using words like
merger
and
foreclose
.
    Barker shook his head. ‘Who’s going to clean up when I’m gone?’
    By late September Barker’s life had taken on a whole new shape. Six days a week he worked in the barber’s shop just off Petticoat Lane. The old man’s name was Harold Higgs, and he ran the place along traditional lines – the smell of Brylcreem and hair tonic, copies of the
Radio Times
to read while you were waiting; it was hairdressing the way it used to be, which suited Barker perfectly. He’d found temporary lodgings – a bedsit on Commercial Road. He had a miniature gas-ring, and a wash-basin with no hot tap (if he wanted to shave, he had to boil water in a saucepan). He had a wardrobe filled with multi-coloured hangers. All mod cons, as his landlady put it. A widow in her fifties, she wore slippers trimmed with bright-pink fur that looked like candy-floss. Whenever she saw him, she talked about her microwave – she wasfrightened it might give her cancer – but she didn’t bother him, not unless he fell behind with the rent.
    Almost two months passed with no violence, no arrests. He was living on a small scale, within himself, his routine simple and unvarying. On weekday nights, when he returned from work, he lifted weights for half an hour. Afterwards, he showered in the communal bathroom, which was on the landing, one floor up. Later, he would cook himself a meal – something sealed in plastic, beans out of a tin. Most evenings he went to look at flats which he had circled in the paper during the day; he was always surprised by how run-down they were, and how expensive. By midnight he would be in his room again, easing the ring back on a can of beer. Through his window he could see a petrol station. The neon stained his white net curtains yellow, and, now and then, if it was quiet, he could hear a fierce, abbreviated hiss as somebody put air into their tyres. Before he switched the light off, he would read a few pages of medieval history – either a textbook or, more frequently these days, an original source like Bede or Fredegar or Paul the Deacon. He had stopped dreaming, which he interpreted as a sign of health.
    Then, one evening in November, Charlton took him to a night-club in Mile End, and he was reminded of everything in his life that he had chosen to leave behind. At a quarter to eleven on a Friday Charlton called round in the Sierra, windswept aerial, no hubcaps, and they drove east with Billy Joel on the stereo. Charlton was wearing a new jacket that glinted every time a light passed over it. ‘I feel lucky tonight,’ he said, and patted his breast pocket, which was where he kept his fruit-flavoured condoms.
    They left the car on a patch of wasteground near a roundabout and then walked back, picking their way gingerly through thistles, coils of wire, bricks. From a distance Barker could see the club – a low square building with a scribble of electric blue above the entrance. There was a BMW outside,there was a jeep with tyres like a tractor’s. A chauffeured Daimler dawdled by the kerb, its engine idling. On the top step two doormen stood in a deluge of ultraviolet, their faces looking tanned, their teeth freshly enamelled. Charlton stopped for a word on his way in. Barker nodded, but didn’t give his name.
    They had only been inside the club for half an hour when Charlton started talking to a girl in a strapless silver dress.
I feel lucky
. Barker thought she was trouble – he had worked on doors for long enough to recognise the type – but this was