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manhood and whom he had so disastrously let down – no, not let down. Betrayed. That was the word, the only word. He shook his head, trying to free himself from his overwhelming sense of guilt, but still she was there, her face twisted in horror, pleading for him to save her, her soft lips frozen in a silent, endless scream.
    He tried to hide still deeper within himself but they pursued him without respite – Casey, Mattias, Cosmin, de Vries, the other guards, all screaming, pounding away at him. They wouldn’t let him go. He curled himself into a foetal ball and in the recesses of his mind he caught distant glimpses of his mother, flitting between the shadows. He shouted at her, calling for her to come closer, but she didn’t seem to hear him so he raised his voice, louder and still louder, until he found himself whimpering upon his rank, stinking mattress, crying out for her. ‘Mummy, Mummy . . .’
    Whatever chance Ruari might have, he knew there was none to be had in crawling back to his childhood. He blamed himself for what had happened, but he blamed his captors more. As the furies in his mind drew closer, chasing him down in every hiding place, suddenly he turned on them and gave a roar of inner defiance that caused him to bite deeply into his lacerated lip. The pain jolted him back to the real world as once more blood began smothering his tongue and trickling from the corner of his mouth. And when he looked out once more he saw not Casey or Mattias or his mother, but a guard with stone-dead eyes watching him from the other side of the room, sneering, and for the first time in his life Ruari knew what it was to hate.

    The searchers from the mountain rescue service spotted Casey first. She was lying spread-eagled on a rocky outcrop, her pink and sky-blue jacket vivid against the sunlit snow. Access by land was impossible; the rescue helicopter was forced to hover while a crewman was lowered. He found Casey’s head resting on a pillow of snow, her face turned to the heavens, her eyes open, utterly lifeless.
    There was no sign of catastrophe in the immediate area, no broken machine, no further bodies, and this caused much confusion at rescue control. How – and why – a sixteen-year-old girl could have fallen from a helicopter didn’t bear thinking about. What sort of calamity was this?
    They intensified their search in the surrounding area and a couple of hours later found their answer. Mattias’s body was poking at an unnatural angle from a pile of freshly disturbed snow at the bottom of a ravine. The injuries were pitiful, he had bounced and tumbled down a rock face for many hundreds of feet, but this had clearly been no accident. The small, circular and ferociously angry hole in the centre of his chest told its own story.
    In the circumstances, and in the snow, it was a stroke of fair fortune for the Swiss authorities to have found and recovered both bodies. It was the only luck they were going to have as they searched ever wider, and found nothing.

    Harry sat in a chair, towel around his neck, facing the mirror. A frown of indecision was beginning to worm its way across his forehead.
    ‘So what’s it to be, Harry?’ the tall, middle-aged woman enquired, running exploratory fingers through his hair.
    ‘I dunno, Tessara. What do you think?’
    Harry’s hairdresser stepped back and stared at his reflection in the mirror. ‘Let’s find a cuppa something warm first, then we’ll decide.’
    Tessara ran a modest but remarkably popular unisex salon on a backstreet of his constituency, from which she dispensed good cheer and endless cups of tea. Like all good listeners she was remarkably well informed about what was going on in the neighbourhood, and Harry would have been happy enough simply to drop by for the local updates, but she also cut his hair more skilfully than any place he’d found in the West End at five times the price. His hairstyle during his army days had inevitably been unadventurous and