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breasts in the low-cut red gown, the delicate luxury of her perfume; but when they got out of the taxi, the pavement was broken and uneven under a litter of glass and soiled rubbish . ‘I thought you were in a hurry’, she had said. Under the
    expensive perfume, there was the sudden tang of sweat. In the cold night she smelled of fear.
     
    'I wasn't that interesting – not for a woman as beautiful as that,' he told Kujavia. 'It was too easy. I know I don't look rich.'
     
    And then, too, if from the taxi he had not glimpsed the street sign: Moirhill Road; or if she had taken him to a better district or if they had stopped outside a hotel . . . Desire and suspicion had pulled opposite ways. If she could have found a familiar phrase to say to him, something he recognised out of his own background, he would have gone with her like one of those toys that march down an incline at the touch of a finger.
    ‘ -You won't regret it,’ she had said. Anything you want.
     
    Kujavia leaned forward and banged on the glass with the edge of his fist. The driver looked round and at a peremptory chopping gesture from his passenger brought the car to a stop by the kerb.
    'I want to see the girl,' Malcolm said.
    Over his shoulder, as he got out, Kujavia said, 'You don't know what you want.'
    But he did. It was as if the policeman's feet had beaten fear out of him and left only the taste of her lips, when she had kissed him in the taxi, and the length of her tongue in his mouth. Next morning, aching and bruised, he wakened with a swollen erection.
    'Wait here?' The driver made a sour sceptical movement with his mouth. 'The kids'll have the wheels off the motor if I sit here.'
    Jackal children, however, gathering for a fresh kill angled away, ostentatiously unconcerned, as they caught sight of Kujavia. None of them would touch the car.
    He registered the poverty of the street as he hurried after Kujavia, but it was different in daylight. What harm could come to him in daylight? As Kujavia turned into a close, however, and he followed and climbed the stairs in pursuit, his legs began to shake under him. Somewhere above, he heard a door close. The noise echoed in the stone box of the stair.
    There were three doors on the landing, two with brass nameplates beside the old-fashioned bell pulls. He did not recognise the names and so it was on the third bare door that he knocked. Almost instantly, it was opened but only for a few inches. Across the gap he saw the dull line of a chain. From inside, a woman's voice, thin and piping like a girl's, asked, 'Who's there? What do you want?'
    'Mr Kujavia?' he wondered hesitantly. 'Is this where Mr Kujavia lives?'
    In the silence, he could hear her breathing, odd little gasping sounds.
    'If he's there, would you tell him I'm willing to pay for the information - where she is - the person I mentioned to him?'
    A man's voice muffled from inside shouted something, the chain rattled coming off and the door swung wide. From the woman and the passage beyond her, there came the same smell, oily, sweet, and unmistakable, of human dirt. Her bare forearms shone like larded sides of bacon. She was enormously, obscenely fat.
    In the lobby the outer door closing made the worst sound in the world. He understood that he had tricked himself. There was no way that the elegant black girl from Heathers' party could be in this place. Soiled light spilled from a door at the end of the passage and as he went towards it he was startled by a hellish outburst at his back.
    'It's just the dog in the back room,' the woman wheezed. 'He can't get out.'
    The room was small, a kitchen of sorts with a sink under the window and a cooker loaded with dirty pots. The shape of it put into Malcolm's head a memory of his brother's flat, his brother's poverty – This is my only chance, he would tell Murray. Don't spoil it for me.
    When he turned his head, the bed was in the recess where he might have expected to see it, and the black girl Rafaella