He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when.

Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself – it likes the echoes its wingbeats make. It likes the smell of its own farts.

I’m from yeoman stock. Generations back, my family were farmers.’ ‘Generations back everybody’s family were farmers.

Blessed are the unforgiving, for they shall come out even. That was the lost frigging beatitude as far as Bad Sam Chapman was concerned. As for the meek: we’ll make them give it back.

When he’d finished, he produced an unbranded packet of cigarettes: stubby, filterless, lethal. A health warning would have been like subtitles on a porn film. Utterly beside the point.

Things aren’t always black and white, River. A wise man once said he wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been a radical in his youth, and Communism was the radicalism of choice back then.

As for Lamb, he’d hang River out to dry if he took another step without putting him in the picture. That was something to think about, so River thought about it as he stuffed the phone away, and took the rest of the stairs three at a time.

And no amount of Kevlar offered protection from a woman’s disappointment.

Last winter, she’d walked this path with Min, heading for the Christmas Fair – there’d been a ferris wheel and skating, mulled wine, minced pies. At an air-rifle booth, Min had missed the target five times in a row. “Cover”, he’d said. “Don’t want everyone knowing I’m a trained sharpshooter.

Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over.