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time. The medicine had done its job. He only wished he'd realised sooner what else it was capable of besides keeping his employees' minds normal or at least in check. The little girl hadn't struggled at all once he'd given her the pills he'd said were sweets: there had been no clenched fists, no mouth grimacing for air, no toothmarks on the underside of the pillow, just a trace of saliva that had faded as he'd watched. As he'd wheeled her in the pushchair to the van, the pillow behind her head, an old couple out for a stroll had smiled at the sight of a child peacefully asleep. That was the image he'd brought away with him—that and the memory of the concrete, white and smooth as a sheet drawn over a slumbering face.
    Even if she'd wakened before the sheet had covered her, he was sure she hadn't panicked. Though she'd managed to poke a finger out of the earth, there had been no sign of a struggle, no upheaval of soil. It must have felt like a dream to her, he thought, if she had even been aware of groping through more than darkness. He'd spread earth over the finger with the side of his boot and trodden it down, promising himself that next time, if there had to be a next time, he would double the number of pills.
    "Angels come your soul to keep,
Close your eyes good night..."
    He was having to sing more loudly, because the sounds of the park had started to get to him. A little girl was being dragged away from the lake where her toy boat had lodged on litter in the middle, and screaming louder as her older sister swiped at her head with the back of a hand. He bit into his raw gums so as not to imagine the kind of home the girls came from, the lives they led. The world was full of children who deserved to be given some peace, but there was nothing he could do about that now. If Terence and Hughie hadn't seen the flaw in his workmanship before he'd had time to put it right—if he'd found a way to deal with them before they'd told anyone else... He hid the lullaby under his breath while he used his longest fingernail to cut out the photograph, which he slipped into his shirt pocket. He dumped the papers in an overflowing concrete bin as he made himself only stroll out of the park.
    Having just felt helpless in the case of one child, he was anxious to avoid them. He mustn't risk intervening, not yet, not until he didn't know when. Whenever he heard a child in distress, any number of them in the increasingly uncared-for streets, he sang to himself. In less than an hour he was free of the city and tramping along a devious road toward distant woods that were hauling the sun down, and the only squeals he heard weren't of children but of pigs. Very infrequently he met people out for an evening walk, and ranted at them well after they were past him. "How's your feet? Don't want to swap them for mine, do you? Any idea where I can get some new ones? Maybe some doctor would give me a transplant. They can do anything these days, the doctors. It's a good old world, never been a better...." There was nothing like pestering strangers to make them want to forget you, nothing like playing the madman to conceal how sane you were—no trick like drawing attention to yourself to convince people you had nothing to hide. But he was going to have to hide while he finished changing his appearance, and when he came to the edge of the woods he left the road.
    At least he was certain nobody was looking for him. He'd swum underwater to the pier while all the attention had been on Terence in the boat; he'd moved toward the shore when nobody was watching, so that by the time the coast guard began searching for him, he'd been able to stand on the ocean bottom and cling to one of the pier's supports, only his head above water, disguised by a clump of seaweed. Once it was dark he'd made his way along the water's edge until there were only screaming birds to see him emerge. On an otherwise deserted stretch of promenade, he'd found a drunken tramp asleep on a