In a black cab en route to their first meeting Rao had wondered if he should have made more of an effort with his clothes. He'd been nervous, and nerves make Rao kick, hard. He'd decided on his oldest, shittiest jacket, threadbare, with a cigarette burn on one sleeve. Vaguely odiferous trainers and a pair of conker-coloured corduroy trousers his mother had once pronounced too short in the leg. A bag slung over his shoulder: laptop, pens, notebook, two packets of Marlboro Lights, a dog-eared 1980s spy-themed Mills and Boon novel called Cloak of Darkness he'd stolen from a B&B in Brighton and had become something of a lucky talisman.

A little heavy with the Terre d'Hermes that morning, perhaps, but it separates the men from the boys. Maybe the bump of coke before he left the house had been a bad idea -- he was expending a degree of effort in the back of the cab trying not to talk with the driver about everything, but he wasn't going to worry about it unduly. They'd seen him worse.