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was trying to source a recent flood of high-quality cannabis, and by the time he returned from Ireland he was near certain that he had the makings of a sensational exposé.
    The guts of the story concerned the involvement of an MI5 agent who had the smuggling operation under surveillance and was actively helping to move the stuff into the UK. In its own right, this was startling enough, but what gave it (in Wesley’s phrase) ‘legs’ was the fact that profits from the drug runs were going, via a series of laundering operations through Kilburn betting shops, to the IRA High Command in Dublin. This, of course, was why MI5 had got involved in the first place, but this kind of logic wouldn’t, Wesley felt, be immediately obvious to the Great British Public. Instead, they’d doubtless see it as yet another example of the spooks and the criminals working hand in hand.
    When he got back from Ireland, the headache got worse. Crouched over the electric fire in his bedroom, the typewriter on a tray on his knees, he began to shiver. He wrapped himself in a dressing gown. Over the dressing gown he put on an anorak. For the best part of a day, sensing the shadow at his door, he typed and typed, checking and re-checking his notes, getting down what he could and sending it by courier to Aldridge with a brief note and a list of expenses.
    That night, for the first time ever, he began to sweat. He’d read about the sweats that often accompany HIV. They didn’t come as a surprise, but as the fever took a real grip and the pile of sodden T-shirts grew on the floor at his bedside, Wesley began to panic.
    By this time, he’d taken a lover, a quiet, gentle twenty-three-year-old called Mark. Mark was an aspiring actor, and, like Wesley, HIV positive. He features again in this story and I’ve talked to him at length about what happened next. His recall is perfect, largely because he was sure that one day the same thing would happen to him.
    Mark came looking for Wesley three days after the fever began. He found him exhausted, curled under a pile of blankets, his knees to his chin, shuddering with cold. The mattress beneath his body was soaking wet. The path to the lavatory was strewn with paper cups. There was a terrible smell. Mark did what he could, helping Wesley out of bed, propping him up on a chair, changing the sheets, turning the mattress, opening the windows, filling the place with air freshener. When the doctor came, he retreated to the kitchen, making another pot of Wesley’s favouriteherbal tea, watching through the half-open door while the doctor ran a stethoscope over Wesley’s chest. In three days, he seemed to have shrunk. Weight, in Mark’s phrase, had just fallen off him. Chalk-white, wild-eyed, still shivering with cold, he crouched in the chair, his hands pushed into his crutch, staring at the carpet while the doctor went tap-tap across his chest, up over his shoulder and down his back.
    The doctor sent him to hospital. Within an hour he was occupying a bed at St Mary’s, Paddington. By now, he’d lost all track of time. Dimly aware of the activity around him – nurses taking blood samples, Mark’s face at the foot of the bed, two visits to the X-ray department – Wesley surrendered to the fever. With his temperature nudging 103°, he was quite certain he was fighting for his life. His head was bursting. His stomach felt hot and raw. There wasn’t an inch of his body that hadn’t been scorched by this monstrous, implacable fever.
    He stayed at St Mary’s for nearly a month. After a week or so, the antibiotics began to get the upper hand. His temperature fell, he was able to keep liquids down and as the fever gradually receded he was left with a feeling of total exhaustion. He slept a great deal, sweating again when his temperature rose at night, then sinking into a kind of half-life, detached from his surroundings, monosyllabic, acknowledging visitors with a weak handshake and a glassy smile.
    One of the